Like some of the top-ranking comments here are saying, that place has a very large proportion of people who were coming from the banned subreddits like The Donald, various straight-up hate communities, and typical alt-right groups. So naturally, alternatives that were founded by anarchists and socialists (raddle, lemmy.ml) were almost always disregarded there, possibly with the exception of the Wolfballs admin (I can’t remember too well if they got much attention with the ‘they’re not all like that’ line)
It’s always funny to me to see newer users complain about a lot of political (incl. FOSS) users in an inherently political project, which was picked by many precisely because its political values prevent the for-profit shittery that reddit.com has been doing for 15 years, and that alt-right social media alternatives frequently do whenever they get enough users. Yes, we’re going to voice our concerns when people show up at the door and want this to be just like reddit was, or bring over the uncritical mainstream ignorance we came over here to avoid.
The left-right spectrum isn’t a helpful model (Piped link) on an international forum. As you’ve seen in all the replies, people have very different ideas on what is left and what isn’t… there is actually no true definition. Many people will, for example, argue that liberalism is the status quo and therefore centrist since the advent of socialism/anti-capitalism and fascism. This is especially true outside of the Five Eyes countries (US, UK, AUS, etc.) where the political atmosphere is clearly different for historical and cultural reasons. On top of that, reddit is so huge that different communities have noticeably different leanings, so naturally someone will object when any generalization is made.
they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking
Congratulations, you just pissed off all the anarchists lol
I want it to succeed and become what reddit used to be.
I want it to exceed what reddit ever was. It’s tempting to look back at those days and want to remake it, but really, we can and should go further in making good communities. And with federation, in theory, it’s so much easier to have a small town booted up without it constantly feeling an inch from death, the death-struggle of almost all comfy communities that haven’t become popular.
If one can get past the 20 most invasive, tactless, eternally-online members of Hexbear and Lemmygrad, they’re generally great places. Unfortunately, those people are the main ones getting attention and alienating people on other instances.
It’s disheartening whenever I see a legitimate chance to teach someone something and a Hex account just makes an absolute malicious shitpost that isn’t even worth calling a dunk. That, and a couple of highly-active users in particular who will consistently take the worst possible interpretation of a post and insist anyone who disagrees is a bad actor. Sankara would roll in his grave if he could see those post histories.
The unfortunate thing is that these show up as small emotes on hexbear.net, so the users generally don’t realize they’re huge disruptive images to others.
Politics is such a complex topic and any simple representation of it will lead to what would appear to be contradictions in a person’s beliefs.
Absolutely. And certainly with this kind of geometric modelling, with a spectrum or plane where these broad and complex concepts are ordered more-than or less-than others.
The political compass is a better representation
I disagree with even this. It’s not better, it’s equally inappropriate.
The political compass is adding an extra idealist axis to an undefined axis (the linked video explains this in more proper detail). It’s just digging further into a hole in an attempt to make it work, when the whole paradigm is wrong. And this is bad, because the compass model has rationalized that undefined, subjective linear spectrum. It helps delude people.
Following the spirit of spreading across the Fediverse (and because my main instance is down so many times, because diverse reasons) I’m intrigued about the joining instance process, because I honestly don’t know what criteria to have in order to join another one if I ever want to do it....
I made this account a long time ago, the landscape was different. The three biggest (federated) instances were this, lemmygrad.ml and Wolfballs (alt-right, run by a right-libertarian but dominated by shameless racists and neo-nazis, most instances defederated from them).
Since Lemmygrad was often preemptively defederated from other instances, I wanted a stable well-connected instance that wouldn’t die after a few months (learned that lesson the hard way on PeerTube) and am a socialist tech-expert. So the choice was simple. No regrets, and I wouldn’t change it now.
I did have an alt on the former GTIO instance (civil debate only, no political-oriented bans) because I did want to see the garbage being posted by Wolfballs losers on there and practice deconstructing the flaws and refuting. I also had an alt on an instance that wasn’t federated at the time. They were all appropriate choices given the landscape then and now, and I’ve had the foresight and fortune to almost never have an instance I use block one I wish to interact with. But unfortunately many so-called general instances have made dubious defederation choices which do make me worry that I may need to start making alts just to continue interacting with some communities in the future.
I haven’t checked it out since before the reddit API influx so things may be different now, but from memory they were explicitly centred around being super friendly and pleasant, to the point where normal disagreements by people on other instances were banworthy there. So they were very quick to defederate from many other instances, especially anything liberal (as in, libre; freedoms) or political.
Mander gets my seal of approval. Since the start, it’s been what a federated community should be. It has a clear scope and is open for basically everyone to use, not trying to be a redundant general-purpose instance creating the tenth community named ‘196’ and banning half the instances from using it.
I want to say pirate culture has a strong history is deplatforming, so it’s almost instinct to have a migration fallback plan. But I know they used to have a fallback on raddle.me (anarchist reddit clone) when reddit started forcing them not to host or supply links to content. They had good reason to be prepared and it paid off.
Back in the day, there was an instance called GTIO where 80% of the posts were from two instances that had later defederated from each other (lemmy.ml and Wolfballs). That one was a pain, you just had to make an alt to really use it.
Swearing to protect is vapid symbolism that anyone can feign with ease, and the laws are rarely decided by the people subject to them. The fact that so many people trust state police is amazing once we take a step back and analyse it.
This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today....
If anyone considers themselves a historian and thinks anything is unbiased, their experience and insight will be dubious at best. Understanding that everyone has a distinct worldview and therefore bias is literally high-school history class, years before History 101. Do they think reddit.com, or any reddit alternative for that matter, is unbiased or neutral??
Not only is it irrelevant in context (FOSS, forkable, the devs in question only moderate this single instance), it’s especially unreasonable coming from /r/AskHistorians. They of all people should be able to understand bias, context and causation. If anything, this bias is just a guarantee that they won’t sell out and extort the userbase.
It could be possible for a third-party site to aggregate the posts from each instance’s AMA communities. I wouldn’t be too hard to code, just checking the API of each site and adding links to the new posts.
The devs have far bigger priorities but this can (and should) be made by someone else.
If this was a specific-purpose non-politics instance like many are, I’d say power to you. But for an general-purpose instance that advertises itself as being:
A generic Lemmy server for everyone to use.
Lemmy.world is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use.
…then there’s a need for some serious self-examination. Preemptively blocking thousands of users, and talking about blocking another long-lasting substantial community because some other community made comments about them? This is disappointing, this does not sound properly thought-out.
You’re right, defederation should only be considered as a last resort. Not as a broad-spectrum discriminatory first action.
Large, explicitly general-purpose communities shouldn’t be defederating with such trigger-happiness. It’s damaging to its own users ability to join communities they like, and for other instances’ users to constructively post and support their own communities. The point of federation isn’t to form cliques.
Also, it’s in pretty bad faith to assert that most of the people complaining must be from Hexbear. Most of the posts I’ve seen so far pointing out the contradictions in this announcement are from long-time active accounts from all around the place. (Your account, on the other hand, is literally one post old…)
Beehaw is a community of individuals and therefore does not have any specific political affiliation. At this point in time, we do not know what the political leanings of most of our users are. I would suspect that many of them would identify as progressive because we are explicitly a safe space for minorities. What we stand for...
The authors ideals and beliefs are relevant, because those guided their decision to make a Free and Open Source, federated alternative to reddit, and avoid capitalist modes of funding (like integrating ads or other exploitative methods). That's why this existed long before reddit was extorting through their API.
r/RedditAlternatives doesn't like a Reddit Alternative (lemmy.ml)
What made you choose your instance?
Following the spirit of spreading across the Fediverse (and because my main instance is down so many times, because diverse reasons) I’m intrigued about the joining instance process, because I honestly don’t know what criteria to have in order to join another one if I ever want to do it....
Nazi symbols and child pornography found in German police chats (www.euronews.com)
We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. *Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST*
This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today....
Lemmy.world Hexbear Statement
Update:...
On Politics and Forking
Beehaw is a community of individuals and therefore does not have any specific political affiliation. At this point in time, we do not know what the political leanings of most of our users are. I would suspect that many of them would identify as progressive because we are explicitly a safe space for minorities. What we stand for...
important rulepost (lemmy.world)