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barsoap @lemm.ee

PSA: Alternatives for the most popular lemmy.ml communities

For all your boycotting needs. I'm sure there's some mods caught in lemmy.ml's top 10 that are perfectly upstanding and reasonable people, my condolences for the cross-fire.

  1. !memes@lemmy.world and !memes@sopuli.xyz. Or of course communities that rule.
  2. !asklemmy@lemmy.world
  3. !linux@programming.dev. Quite small, plenty of more specific ones available. Also linux is inescapable on lemmy anyway :)
  4. !programmer_humor@programming.dev
  5. !world@lemmy.world
  6. !privacy@lemmy.world and maybe !privacyguides@lemmy.one, lemmy.one itself seems to be up in the air. !fedigrow@lemm.ee says !privacy@lemmy.ca. They really seem to be hiding even from another, those tinfoil hats :)
  7. !technology@lemmy.world
  8. Seems like !comicstrips@lemmy.world and !comicbooks@lemmy.world, various smaller comic-specifc communities as well as !eurographicnovels@lemm.ee
  9. !opensource@programming.dev
  10. !fuckcars@lemmy.world

(Out of the loop? Here's a thread on lemmy.ml mods and their questionable behaviour)

329 comments

  • The way that I see it, the issue with lemmy ml's administration and moderation is not quite political in origin. It's about transparency; and I think that this wall of text that I wrote about how lemmy dot ml handled ani.social shows it well, as the dispute in question was not political in nature. (I can abridge it at request.)

    With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to "use lemmy.world instead". I don't have anything against LW's administration, but I think that it's foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation. That instance is already 40% of the MAUs, and hosts the largest comms using Lemmy.

    • The way that I see it, the issue with lemmy ml’s administration and moderation is not quite political in origin. It’s about transparency

      Well it's really both. The issue is the combination of a number of factors which on their own would be fairly easy to deal with, but put together they are very problematic:

      1. The admins are political extremists
      2. lemmy.ml has a very prominent position in the lemmyverse, because they were first and got a headstart
      3. The admins are actively using their position to heavily police discussion according to their extremist political views. The fact that they're not being transparent about it is aggravating, but not the root problem.

      This prominent position of lemmy.ml is the fundamental difference with the hexbear or lemmygrad situation. Those instances can easily be contained at the user level: most people can just block and ignore them entirely because nothing interesting happens on those instances for non-extremists. Not so with lemmy.ml, which hosts a number of large bona-fide communities.

      So I think it's necessary to make a concerted effort to reduce lemmy.ml's prominence in the fediverse, so that political extremists can't put their thumb on the scale to nudge discussion in a certain direction. Part of that effort is raising awareness about lemmy.ml's nature, which is what this PSA does, but that likely won't be enough due to network effect. It will take more to get people to move their communities to other instances. If other large instances, like lemmy.world, would block lemmy.ml that would provide a real stimulus for a large amount of people to move away from lemmy.ml.

      With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to “use lemmy.world instead”. I don’t have anything against LW’s administration, but I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further

      I agree that spreading out more would be desirable, but on the other hand "just use lemmy.world instead of lemmy.ml" is a very simple and practical suggestion to move away from ml.

    • With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to “use lemmy.world instead”.

      It's where big replacement communities happen to be, that's all there is to it. Avoiding centralisation is a good thing in general but "tired of .ml mods? Here's alternatives" isn't the right time to go for it I think. Maybe the admins can come up with a scheme to round-robin disable community creation or something, to spread things out. Also, community migration is in the pipeline software-wise that would help a lot.

      • I'm thinking that perhaps the community could/should go a step further, and create another instance to talk about open source and privacy. That would be IMO the best scenario - it would be a great counterpoint to .ml, and it would avoid centralising Lemmy around .world even further.

        (I also feel like this might be better even for the devs. Administrative work isn't exactly pleasing, and if I had to take a guess they mostly maintain that instance because they need it for the software. But that's just a guess, don't trust me on that.)

        inb4: yes, I know - easier said than done. But I feel like it could be a good option.

      • FYI, an update on the !fedigrow@lemm.ee post on the !privacy community: https://lemm.ee/post/34088759?scrollToComments=true

        Long story short, !privacy@lemmy.ca is a nice option, it even has more active users per week than the LW equivalent (376 vs 346)

    • I think that it's foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation.

      It defeats some of the points of federation, but there are still a lot of reasons why federation is still worth doing even if there's essentially one dominant provider. Not least of which is that sometimes the dominant provider does get displaced over time. We've seen it happen with email a few times, where the dominant provider loses market share to upstarts, one of whom becomes the new dominant provider in some specific use case (enterprise vs consumer, mobile vs desktop vs automation/scripting, differences by nation or language), and where the federation between those still allows the systems to communicate with each other.

      Applied to Lemmy/kbin/mbin and other forum-like social link aggregators, I could see LW being dominant in the English-speaking, American side of things, but with robust options outside of English language or communities physically located outside of North America. And we'll all still be able to interact.

  • The views of .ml mods have not affected me. I don't really check my subscription feed, only /all or /top->day, therefor im still exposed to all those other communities.

    The only instances that I've noticed are missing are porn related, and as an asexual, I don't have an interest in them. If I did, I could just visit a different site, like pornhub or w/e

    Not all .ml users are tankies, or communist, or foss enthusiasts. I'm just a guy who likes memes and tech

    • It affects people who think that Lemmy.ml is the default instance, as it says itself and people say that any instance is fine to join.

      It also affects people in the batshit insane comments that come from people on that instance, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, that occur with noticeably higher frequency than from other places.

      It also affects people on that instance who talk as if into a void with many people blocking their instance but they don't even know that. And that effect will increase over time.

      It lowers traffic on the Fediverse, decreasing overall engagement, and drives people away from it altogether. It also lowers the likelihood that you can recommend to people irl to check out the Fediverse - when THAT stuff (e.g. defense of genocide) is seen it tends to turn people off who aren't used to it or who are tech or culture savvy enough to know how to handle it.

      So it does affect you, I promise, even if not directly, and over the next few months will do so increasingly as your instance turns into more of an echo chamber than it has been in the past, as more people block it either individually or at an instance level.

      Agreed that many of the users are regular people who are just innocently getting swept up in all of this due to the actions of the admins. Just like users of Reddit were when spez did his power flex moves.

      You might want to at least make an alt somewhere else so that you get some experiences that your .ml account increasingly will start to lack.

  • Is it possible to migrate my account to another Lemmy instance? Or would I have to start over?

    • You can migrate your subscriptions in the settings (import / export as a JSON file, easier to do on a computer).

      You would lose your comments and posts history, but you can refer to the old account on your new account so that people curious would know it's you. Also, if you keep the same name and avatar, most of the people wouldn't notice.

329 comments