I think Hackernews (sans the occasional edgy political take) and Tildes might be worth learning from. Let’s make it a goal to contribute content that others may learn from and do away with the copy-paste doom-and-gloom comments.

So HN is quite heavily moderated (just turn on showdead if you want to see the graveyard), and Tildes tries to keep the community cohesive with their invite-only policy (limiting growth).

Lemmy, on the other hand, allows open sign-ups and does not have a strong (HN-like) moderation culture. If anything, it has more of a Reddit-like moderation style, with a bunch of separate communities ruled by their own mods.

Therefore, it remains to be seen whether appeals to the userbase will prove effective as Lemmy grows. Note that as Reddits userbase grew, the quality of the discourse went down, Eternal September-style.

There are, though, still a couple of big differences between Reddit and Lemmy. The latter probably won’t try to attract users by running big campaigns in mainstream media, like Reddit did in later years. On the other hand, there’s the risk that Meta’s Threads or other (future) big tech platforms might end up federating with Lemmy.