This place (Lemmy) reminds me a lot of when I used to post on SA back before Reddit was popular. I wouldn’t call it “small” per se, but you actually knew who the moderators were. And since there was no upvote/downvote system, it was a lot more casual and people didn’t feel the need to try to tailor their posts to get upvoted.
Of course, it was also a dumpster fire sometimes too, and just like Reddit, the guy running it was a jerk. But I do miss it sometimes.
SA was a huge part of my adolescence. It still wasn’t great but it was probably the only system i know that had a true community feel to it