Please don’t put any hate comments against the developers of lemmy or against the person who posted this.
I am also unhappy about what the main lemmy instance is doing.
What are your thoughts?
Please don’t put any hate comments against the developers of lemmy or against the person who posted this.
I am also unhappy about what the main lemmy instance is doing.
What are your thoughts?
Frankly, I’m just not accustomed to what Lemmy (lemmy.ml) is. When you look at most of the services in the fediverse, the “main” instance (usually the biggest one maintained by the developers) is not explicitly political in the way that Lemmy (lemmy.ml) is. For example, in Mastodon, that would be mastodon.social and its successor mastodon.online.
mastodon.online has rules restricting the discussion of egregious topics such as discrimination of protected classes, Nazi symbolism, holocaust denial, etc., but does not declare a broad political position for its entire community. In general, it tries to be a “big tent” and only limits what is necessary to keep the environment non-toxic.
I or someone else could create a libertarian instance of Lemmy, but what I’d really love to see is a “big tent” instance of Lemmy that doesn’t restrict political discussion reasonably close to the center of the Overton window.
(And to clarify, I understand that alt-right groups have tried to appropriate the term libertarian and misuse it to describe things that are not libertarian at all. I strongly disagree with them. The alt-right is not libertarian, but very much the opposite in most cases.)
I think a lot of Fediverse developers agree that it was a (early & forgivable) mistake to let the main mastodon instance grow so big. Having a “big tent” instance is directly detrimental to the very idea of the Fediverse.
I totally agree that it’s healthier for the fediverse to stay decentralized. But instances don’t have to restrict participation to a certain section of the political spectrum to achieve that. I think there’s space for multiple general-interest instances in the fediverse without needing any one of them to dominate the community.
Sure, but the Lemmy developers decided that they would not run such an instance themselves. I can’t read their minds, but I personally would have done the same to keep sane. A non-political instance has to by definition be relatively open to the alt-right, but those are trying to actively infiltrate a lot of online communities to spread their hate. So far the only moderation policy that seem to work against them is to pull out the ban-hammer early and quickly, which would not be possible on a non-political instance.
Having no moderation is definitely a non-starter, since the community would eventually devolve to something like 4chan. I’m just wishing for a Lemmy instance where center-left and center-right folks could interact and discuss general topics, some of which may be political. Politics intersects with so many areas, so having strong political restrictions would really limit the type of discussions that the instance could have.
The Lemmy developers have no obligation to create such a space, you’re right about that. But the Lemmy software is pretty great, and it would be nice to be able to point interested newcomers to an active Lemmy instance where they can talk about a variety of common topics, without alienating a large chunk of these people.
What is stopping people to interact cross instance? That is the very idea of the Fediverse to allow to interact with people from other instances.
I understand that the current opt-in federation model of Lemmy somewhat limits this, but I think a reasonably well moderated libertarian instance would be allowed to federate with lemmy.ml.
But making separate instances is very helpful in moderation and “pruning” the network to prevent an alt-right take-over as has happened with so many other non-mainstream social media.
In addition to what @poVoq@lemmy.ml said, also read the thread What is Lemmy.ml which discusses this topic.
Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate this paragraph:
One of the concerns that FediTips raised was that they weren’t sure whether Lemmy developers/admins would condone a “mainstream” Lemmy instance. This is a relief to read.