I think Lemmy being decentralized and not having user karma by design already gets a pretty good base. With the concerns of censorship, admin drama, and protecting marginalized groups, the rest has to come from your instance admins and moderators of communities you follow. With the nature of the platform, you can create toxic places but those are easily defederated and/or blocked.
Lemmy
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We are definitely off to a good start :D Still there are starting to show problematic signs
In some news communities people are obviously upvoting news article based on nothing more than the headline. This creates an environment where only articles with polarizing headlines succeed, and a real discussion becomes impossible
How do you prevent that? I think that might simply be inherent of unrestricted news communities, not necessarily the platform itself. You can have a more restricted news community that disallows click bait or polarizing titles or only allow posts by approved users (or go further and lock to instance like beehaw).
I'm not really sure if that'll work, but maybe the OP can post a description/summary of the keypoints in the news as an alt-text?
That's a good idea that I'd really like that to be a norm in news communities.