Skavau

It was overall, less active than the Fediverse.

I think you can reasonably blame the lack of features here, honestly. I’m not saying if they had them they would have challenged Reddit, but they’d have been much more active. Community moderators almost certainly lost interest when they realised they had no real control over their community, and the longer the time elapsed with no tools to do so - the more drifted away leaving abandoned communities where AI and bots and trolls move in - compounding it even further.

They also, on day 1 of their community launch, allowed day 1 old accounts to make communities. Even if each account could only moderate 2 communities, that wasn’t smart at all.

A Reddit-styled site where AI handles community moderator decisions isn’t reddit. Communities aren’t communities, they’re just hashtags.

Indeed, but zero mod tools other than “delete post” 2 months in was genuinely laughable. To be frank, it should’ve launched with proper moderation: delete posts, ban users, sticky posts, filters for post-types etc. This is standard stuff that users shouldn’t even have to haggle for.

If they gave community moderators proper tools to help them here and put up walls - they could’ve mitigated a lot of this.