Instance admins can't "just let it be", they're responsible for whatever they let users publish on the instance.

Akismet is a centralized system with price tiers depending on API call volume... kind of unfit for a decentralized platform, and too similar to why people ran away from Reddit.

Yet those platform thrive and grow

Yes because they've focused more on quantity than quality.

including Reddit

I rest my case

until you’ve to go into Reddit because there’s no content and/or people here

Idk if we're talking about the same platform, but the reddit I was on for years had 2 major kinds of communities:

1. Loud shouting matches with tons of no-effort content drowning out the quality discussions, where people with the worst opinion or stalest jokes struggle to be top comment

2. Small communities that get a handful of new posts per week, where the community is engaging but relatively inactive.

Now these two aren't exactly mutually exclusive, so there were small dogshit subs and >100k subs that were enjoyable (as long as you avoided the comments).

What I realized was that the smaller communities weren't generally better because the people were a different breed, but—because of the slow pace and small size—people didn't feel driven to treat it like a popularity contest; those who did would get frustrated and act out until they were kicked or blocked by the majority. It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, but it was still better than the large communities.

I've blocked !memes@lemmy.ml, which means I'm limited to the second kind of communities here.