Totally fair point, but I also think you are highlighting something really important - Lemmy is absolutely not ready to “replace” reddit, from a pure scale and number of users perspective…not even close. This is not at all an admonishment or knock on anyone working their butts off (as devs, as instance owners, as admins, as mods - almost all as volunteers!), just a statement of fact. I will admit, as a user of that platform for ~15 years, at some point, I kind of stopped paying attention to just how many people were there. This technology community within Beehaw, for example, is currently ~20k strong and there are a few other communities across the lemmiverse of similar size - in contrast /r/technology has, after an exodus, ~14 million subscribers and is not even considered among the most popular subreddits. So yes, it may feel like a shit show, and honestly, I won’t say it isn’t, but that’s how new, emergent technology usually goes, generally, and we (collective we, not just beehaw, all of us looking for our new home) should be mindful of that, which I know is easier said than done.
The sliding scale is a really interesting idea that would strike a nice balance. Even something as simple (conceptually, probably quite the opposite infra and code wise) would be allowing an opt-in at the user level to see “unfiltered, unmoderated content from defederated instances”, similar to opting into nsfw content.