Thanks! We’re trying to do something that isn’t just open source reddit clone by making it about the things we are interested and our own content instead of just spamming vegan blog links and filling the instance with fluff articles like a glorified RSS feed. I’m glad you like the posts!

Yeah I like some of the hexbear comms and sometimes participate. Vegan Theory Club is an offshoot of Hexbear after the great vegan struggle sessions of 2021 when my account there got banned. We’re mainly a two discord servers called Vegan Theory Club and Vegan Home Cooks and we launched the lemmy more recently.

I think your premise is flawed tbh and lemmy is still beta. Every lemmy server has the potential to be its own community. I don’t actually care much about the federation, vegantheoryclub.org is its own thing with its own users we’re small but we have a matrix chat and a discord too. With the new version we’re probably going to turn off the votes. Hexbear existed longer as a stand alone site than it did with federation and has one of the most active communities. So really big picture is that lemmy is the software that can bring back the distributed forums of all and federation is just a side benefit.

Who cares about mods and mod powers, seriously. If you don’t like a community, launch your own server and pay it forward you can run it however you want and attract your own users.