Right, but we had the opportunity to be better here.

While Lemmy and the Threadiverse existed before the Reddit API exodus, it really took off around then with dedicated, passionate people working together to build something new, something better. I was one of them and was in real-time communication with admins of many of the popular instances today. There was passion, drive, and determination to make something great. And for a while, we did.

Somewhere along the line, though, the old toxicity started creeping back in, it was left largely unaddressed, and eventually metastasizing to where we are today.

So while there can be debate as to whether that means Lemmy ultimately succeeded or failed, in my view, still holding on to the original desire to make something better than what we crawled out of, I see it as a failure.