All true.
Why don’t communities on Lemmy require “karma” minimums? Because admins remove bots and trolls. If reddit were not a completely toxic site, they could have done so as well.
Reddit uses karma as an underlying status symbol and reinforces it because it is driven by profit and “engagement.” It’s the same with likes on Meta platforms, subscribers/followers on other platforms… the gamification of social interaction. It’s one part of social media that causes the kinds of harms we’ve been talking about here.
Welcome! Lemmy is organized into topics called “communities” which have different moderators and rules, but overall share a lot of culture and the same users.
Within communities, people can create topical posts and comment on posts or other comments. You can also vote up good content and down poor content, and higher rated content will be shown more prominently. If you’re familiar with Reddit, it’s a similar organizing principle.
There are lots of great apps that are quite diverse, and on multiple platforms. Be sure to check them out here!