This is not just a Lemmy problem, as the same thing exists in Reddit, too, but crowd-sourced news sites like these are so problematic at their core that it got me to buy a news subscription to NYT. No, it is not news that JD Vance told his kid to “shut the hell up”.
It’s still funded by ads and governed by algorithm recommendations, right? Even if they had perfect moderation, which is difficult to decide on anyway, it’s still got the same incentives as Twitter, which means it will inevitably become Twitter. They want you to spend more time on it to make more money, so they show you things most likely to get a reaction out of you, which means they’re showing you things designed to get you angry and respond. Mastodon is much nicer for giving everyone equal billing and allowing you to modify that by following people you want to hear from most.
It’s also got great VOIP functionality. And it’s been a hot minute since I’ve used IRC, but you can automate tons of things in Discord around things like user roles. I play an old fighting game that has no ranked system, and all of that functionality, including running weekly tournaments, is handled by a Discord bot that runs on a Raspberri Pi.