Ehh, don't interpret me as being in favor of HOAs, but like, if $3 helped me connect with a huge userbase over the hobbies I enjoy, I'm willing to pay it to live in a gated online community.
My hobbies are not tech related. I have not found a new home or sense of community on kbin. That's just the reality of what I've lost by boycotting reddit on principle. In my offline world, I have paid to be a member of hobby communities just to offset the costs of organizing events and reserving group spaces. Arguably, I'm paying for the privilege to go there and "share content" through my presence. This isn't a big deal to me if I'm engaging the platform.
$3 would be a steal if I were a power user. $3 might be not worth it if I'm just a lurker.
I am hoping that the new users are coming here with the intent to learn how this community works, before we try to remake the community we just left.
I counter this part of your post by throwing in there that for me and my time on reddit, the worst parts of the broader experience were the fact that communities of neo-nazis (r/conservative, r/conspiracy), Donald Trump cultists (r/the Donald), incels (numerous subreddits including r/incels and r/theredpill), and pedophiles (r/just18 among other porn based subreddits that were quarantined and banned several years ago) were allowed their own communities on the platform for as long as they were. This gave these horrible ideas time to draw attention and build a userbase that then degraded the quality of reddit across multiple other communities.
If kbin or lemmyworld immediately start banning or defederating these instances or communities/magazines, then to me that is how this larger community works and it is inherently not former redditors migrating here to shape the Fediverse in the image of reddit.