I think the big difference here is that to the average user they see archive.org or Wikipedia as being a onesided transaction. An Archive where folks store information for you, an encyclopedia where information is stored by folks for you. There is no expectation of engagement of the average user. It is rare for someone to wake up and think “Man I gotta put something up on Wikipedia today or people are going to think I’m not the person I act like I am”.
People go to social events to keep up appearances. People participate on social media to keep up appearances. Maintaining these types of things require you to effectively help people balance their ability to participate in society with their ability to communicate. A Wikipedia contributor is a scholar. A community moderator is a bartender and a bouncer rolled into one. It doesn’t have the stability because the work required to keep things going is high stress for the majority of the people doing the work.
Lemmy’s solution is nice because the smaller instances can just ban whole cloth the larger ones and everyone gets to move forward. It means you never are burdened by having a ton of users, but that then also defies the goal of some of the larger social media platforms.
Linus shouldn’t have to get involved at all. Each part of the Kernel should be handled independently by the maintainers. Linus responding publicly to outside forces is fine but once he has to step in to handle public fights between individuals who are supposed to work together it is a problem.
Linux staying C focused is a valid thing to do. It is very hard to get folks to contribute to the kernel and if you cut out anyone who doesn’t know Rust, a language with at best 5% the adoption rate of C, you will run into spots where sections of the kernel are unmaintained due to no willing and qualified person covering it.
Adding Rust based functionality and support is great. Changing APIs to require maintainers to learn Rust to continue to maintain the code they are experts in is unacceptable.