I think voting based on quality of content (and NOT whether you agree with it) is the best approach for healthy discussions. If somebody is a low effort troll, then for sure downvote (and maybe even consider reporting).
OTOH, if somebody makes a well written and thoughtful post about why Totoro is the best Ghibli movie ever, and meanwhile you think Totoro is not even in their top 3, then I would still recommend NOT downvoting 😃
What I would do in this situation would be a 4-day fast. It's not for everybody, but you might want to at least consider it, because it's definitely doable, and some people even claim it's healthy (disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, don't take medical advice from random people on the internet).
To prepare, I would suggest switching to OMAD (one meal a day - effectively you will be fasting 23h every day) up until the trip. OMAD will help your body adjust to long periods of not eating. To be successful with OMAD, you need to ensure that your single meal will cover your daily calorie and nutrient needs. There's a bunch of resources about it online if you search.
Eat your last meal 48h before the trip - this will give you a chance to empty your bowels before you leave. Every day, make sure you drink enough electrolytes + take multivitamins. On the final day of your trip, it should be safe to have a SMALL meal (do not overdo it, you can hurt yourself by eating too much after a fast) - it should take your body over a full day before you'll need to poop.
How long do you have to prepare? Personally, when I first started doing OMAD, it took me over a month before my body became adjusted to fasting. But now, it just feels completely natural.
I kind of get where you’re coming from, but to me it sounds like you’re looking for a different experience than what Lemmy is designed for. It seems you are more interested in aggergating all posts about specific topics (like “books”), and strongly limiting the effect of moderation (as nobody would have final say about how to moderate an entire topic). If I correctly understood the experience you’re interested in, then for sure the design of Lemmy will not match that.
I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as a fatal flaw, though. Lemmy is not built around the idea of generic, “ownerless” topics, instead, it’s built around communities with clear owners. We have decentralization at the admin and infrastructure level (as in, a single admin does not control the entire network), but this does not really mean we also need to have it at individual community level.
IMO it’s totally fine that different people create different communities with extremely similar purposes. The entire internet as a whole also works like this - the internet itself is decentralized, but at the same time people can create different websites with very similar purposes (and even domains!), and it works out fine. For example, it’s totally possible for there to exist a news.com, news.co.uk, news.ee, news.fi, etc. Imagine if whenever you navigated to news.fi with your browser, it would also automatically insert content from all the other news websites of all possible domains - it doesn’t really seem like a useful feature, but that’s kind of analogous to what you’re suggesting for Lemmy at the moment.
Nowadays it’s allowed only for users with >4 week old accounts. It’s not perfect, but having this barrier to entry will hopefully prevent at least some problems.