There are other communities that are suitable to lemmy as well that exist in a weird legal zone, places that I’m sure reddit used to love because they bring in audiences that are usually not the typical reddit audience but then eventually felt pressure to close. /r/shoplifting was one such place. It was exactly what you think, a shoplifting community. The content there was discussion about the topic, it was populated by both shoplifters and by “loss prevention officers” as they liked to call themselves. Both sides would discuss the topic while shoplifters would post images of their successfully pulled off hordes.

This kind of thing is the kind of thing that can not exist anywhere else online but is also not going to attract fascists. Another person here rightfully criticises the danger of becoming “free speech reddit” which is what Voat became, I agree with them. It attracts the wrong crowd and that crowd is not a platform for growth.

The platform should focus on targeting the kinds of communities that genuinely can’t exist anywhere else online, use these as the “early adopter” crowd, then start hitting network-effect where this crowd of people can actually start being the population of more mainstream communities simply because they also want to share and discuss that content with each other. At that point the platform will be past the danger zone and into one where it takes on a life of its own.

I genuinely think that “edgy” is a necessary component of this early strategy. The kinds of topics and communities that have been edged out of the mainstream are fundamentally going to be edgy and making sure that the platform has the right tolerance level for that. Officially and vocally support and encourage it initially then phase out that support at a later date.

Once a decent community has built up all kinds of federation-wide things become possible. Large community events, secret santa used to be wildly popular on reddit until it got too big to run it anymore, they used to take official part in promoting protests and activist causes too. Not saying anything needs to be directly copied but building a proper picture of the growth model that was used is a good idea. There are many phases to growth and each phase is quite different by necessity.