When talking about a business doing business, the concept of "evil" is non-sensical.
A business will do everything to stay profitable. That is the purpose of a business.
Any alternative to Reddit that gain some popularity is doomed to meet the same problems of scalability, infrastructure costs, and content moderation. Those things are not free, they cost money, therefore will be run by a business, doing business, trying to stay profitable, and will become "user hostile" once it is not profitable anymore.
This is the fate of any successful centralized social network.
I could do without the voting, and without many of the other features of Reddit, I think. I think that NNTP is much better. Different people can set up their own servers with their own newsgroups, and can also be linked together that others can then copy the messages too that can be send/received using multiple servers.
I am looking at launching very soon - next week. It will be a brand new platform so it might not be something you're look for. Can I DM/email you when I launch? Even if you end up not using it, I'd appreciate any feedback I can get.
Their is quite a political bent to it. In essence, anything against their ideology will get censored and get users banned. Any anti China or anti Russian state sentiment is enough and is categorised as racism/orientalism. See the below posts for further explanation and examples.
lemmy.ml might choose to censor or ban anti-China sentiment but other servers don't have to. They can do whatever they want. There are hundreds of servers to choose from - that's the whole point of a federated system!
Besides, Reddit has an extremely strong anti-China sentiment because its readers are too stupid to have nuanced opinions deeper than "CHINA BAD". It was getting kind of scary how much it felt like propaganda. So lemmy.ml decided to ban xenophobic discussion of any kind to avoid that kind of influence.
A business will do everything to stay profitable. That is the purpose of a business.
Any alternative to Reddit that gain some popularity is doomed to meet the same problems of scalability, infrastructure costs, and content moderation. Those things are not free, they cost money, therefore will be run by a business, doing business, trying to stay profitable, and will become "user hostile" once it is not profitable anymore.
This is the fate of any successful centralized social network.