PSA: Alternatives for the most popular lemmy.ml communities
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.
- [email protected] and [email protected]. Or of course communities that rule.
- [email protected]
- [email protected]. Quite small, plenty of more specific ones available. Also linux is inescapable on lemmy anyway :)
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected] and maybe [email protected], lemmy.one itself seems to be up in the air. [email protected] says [email protected]. They really seem to be hiding even from another, those tinfoil hats :)
- [email protected]
- Seems like [email protected] and [email protected], various smaller comic-specifc communities as well as [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
(Out of the loop? Here's a thread on lemmy.ml mods and their questionable behaviour)
Didn't we do this yesterday?
I think it's good to have regular outreach. I just subscribed to the linux community from this one.
The other post also has me considering moving my account to a different instance. There were some compelling arguments against centralizing on lemmy.world. (I don't strongly disagree with the moderation here but I do somewhat disagree with centralizing admin power like on reddit.)
I wouldn't mind seeing these regularly. But maybe it would be nice to have someone make specific accounts for that purpose so you can easily block them out of your feed.
I wouldn’t mind seeing these regularly.
Feel free to join us on [email protected]
I like to think of .world as a introduction point for the fediverse. I think it should be trigger happy with defederation to keep the instance approachable by the mainstream then let people choose other instances based on what they offer.
I moved to lemm.ee cos they d9nt defederate from many people and that aligns with my whole ideology on free speach.
I guess this more a top 10 list than our extensive thread
Yeah this is post 65534 on how lemmy.ml is bad, centralizing on lemmy.world is best. Two more and we'll get a nice round number!
OpenMW's official Lemmy community has been on lemmy.ml since 2021, way before lemmy.world existed (and most other instances, too), and way before there was any inter-instance drama. It's becoming increasingly likely that it's not going to be a suitable long-term home, but we'd be much happier if we could migrate the existing community rather than start from scratch with a new one. Is there any way to do that yet?
IMO organizations should self-host their official communities. If you're going to move, it ought to be to something like [email protected].
In addition to the obvious benefits of having admin control/being able to avoid moderation drama imposed by others, it also means you could have more than one community: maybe !openmw for general discussion, plus !modding, !development, etc.
+1, larger community projects really should try to spin up their own Lemmy hosting on whatever infra they already have for message boards
Rather [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], … etc.
So much more flexibility for organizations to build structured communities!
I had a look at your community, do you want to save post and comments?
If not, the easiest way is to announce on the current community where you are going to move, then lock it, so that people indeed move to the new one.
I did it from [email protected] to [email protected], it worked quite well.
but we’d be much happier if we could migrate the existing community rather than start from scratch with a new one. Is there any way to do that yet?
Migrating content over should be doable by a sufficiently tech-savvy admin, subscribers, I don't think so.
We love to be the home of smaller communities, but for sure, any larger ones should look into running on their own setup. If you need help, drop us a line!
[email protected] has less than 150 subscribers, so it's definitely not large. We're already swamped with infrastructure work for the stuff we already self-host, so I don't think we'll be running our own Lemmy instance any time soon.
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:
- The admins are political extremists
- lemmy.ml has a very prominent position in the lemmyverse, because they were first and got a headstart
- 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 [email protected] post on the !privacy community: https://lemm.ee/post/34088759?scrollToComments=true
Long story short, [email protected] 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.
Ah yes Lemmy.world should be a giant monolith. Great defederation plan.
Subbed to them all, thanks for this outreach.
The onslaught of fediverse karen posts about lemmy.ml continues.
I mean it’s obviously run by Russia so anything that makes people realise you can’t trust anything that comes out of it is good.
"Everything I don't like is Russian or Chinese."
"Here you see one of the prime examples of a lemmy.world liberal turned xenophobe. Swallowing up the hate towards current enemy of the USA and projecting it onto everything they don't like"
Like I don't think the .ml admins are remotely in the right, but politically illiterate libs seeing ghosts everywhere is funny af
(or at least it would be if they didn't generalize everything evil in this world on Russians or Chinese and dominate one of the largest Lemmy instances)- Yours truly, an actually Russian person with a migration background <3
cs-rin-ru
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.
I hear you. When I first joined .ml, they were pressing for people NOT to join it. To create their own instances so that .ml didn't become a central entity, and get overwhelmed with users. The latter did occur during the reddit exodus.
I also agree that they can curate and manipulate the instance to their ideals, which will limit casual users and their reach.
I don't feel like I'm being secluded, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening. I have seen hate for .ml users and hexbear users, and I really don't get it. The fediverse shouldn't be segregating users based on what instance they're in. That's like saying all US citizens are awful because they live there.
OOTL on this one, what happened on lemmy.ml?
Criticizing China on lemmy.ml goes about as well as evangelizing crypto on awful.systems. Join an instance that shares your values or roll your own. Know your audience or get the hammer.
It's like a huge chunk of the population out here has never experienced a forum before.
Thanks!
This weeks drama.
Some people got really butt hurt because of some mods in lemmy.ml
to me it was more the straw that broke the camel's back. every rude and unreasonable interaction i have in here is with someone from .ml. it's not even about their politics or beliefs, they're just not pleasant to have around.
the second you try to engage them they throw the real arguments out for pedantry about definitions and using that to call people dumb instead of actually having meaningful discussion about ideas. they're the worst kind of "it's not my job to explain it to you, Google it" people too. like, i get the mindset, but it's just not going to change anyone's heart or mind. it's not how you actually win an argument.
every person on Lemmy.ml argues like an annoying 14 year old atheist that just discovered Internet arguments and the think whole Internet is Christian. they're just shitty to be around and basically never add anything meaningful to a discussion other than "you're wrong and dumb"
To be fair I did have a decent run in with some mods on .ml as well and I am not a fan of their practices.
I do however think the public shaming and calling for boycott is so wrong its not even funny. We‘re still talking about the people who made this here possible. Especially the derogatory use of the word „tankie“ is unacceptable imo.
I‘d prefer if people started debates and tried to find common ground instead. For the reason of decentralization I would like less popular „versions“ of the communities to thrive.
Interesting list
For another thread on this topic: https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
About [email protected], I posted on [email protected]: https://lemmy.world/post/16273266, the instance and community might be a bit abandoned.
For comics, isn't [email protected] an option?
privacyguides does seem to have a decent number of active users, comicstrips seems to be more specialised than comics.
privacyguides does seem to have a decent number of active users,
I agree, that's what I mentioned in that thread. But still, we might want to see if the instance is still managed, or if it will go bust like lemmy.film or iusearch.fyi
[email protected] content is very similar to [email protected].
The more specific one is [email protected]
- JOIN US! Comicbooks is slow, I'd like it to grow so I can discuss less popular creator owned comics, at the moment it's mostly some news posts, my list posts, some super hero discussion, and some dude who thinks internet comic strips are "comic books" (but nobody has corrected them because they seem nice enough lol).
some dude who thinks internet comic strips are “comic books
Is that me? Ha ha
Naw lol the one you posted is at least a nightwing/starfire thing, it's related. But you're cool too!
I meant whoever posted the one about the comet passing earth a little while back haha.
You've never seen superfans print out and bind a webnovel, huh 😛
Lol technically correct, the best kind of correct!
Naw for real though I just think personally that stuff belongs in comicstrips or one of the more apt communities for it, and comicbooks is specifically for Comic Books proper (not just Marvel/DC but also Image, IDW, DSTLRY, Massive, etc, the more creator owned and independent side.) I think this because quite frankly "Comic Books proper" doesn't really fit in those communities dedicated to strips, and I'd like a space for it specifically when I'm looking for that stuff specifically. My opinions on the matter are far from "the rules" though, it is certainly allowed to post them.
This is also not to say I don't like strips, I do very much and am in most of those communities as well! It really just boils down to organization for me lol, may be slightly OCD.
Also, did you check [email protected] ? As a regular poster, that might interest you
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.
I'm completely lost. Can someone fill me on what the hell is going on?
Read this thread: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
@[email protected] might be interesting to mention the thread above in the OP, as people might be out of the loop
Thanks. Clear up a few things.
New users to Lemmy.world are surprised Lemmy.ml has Marxists, so they are saber rattling yet again. This time they may actually go the full length and defederate, but that remains to be seen.
Just a disclaimer for normal ppl:
What op is referring to as "Marxists" are (what the irl leftists call) revisionists who think that Marxism is somehow compatible with bourgeois counter revolution (PRC after Deng, under whom the crackdowns in Tiananmen happened btw) and "anti-american" imperialism (what Russia and modern-day China are doing militarily (mostly Russia) and financially (mostly China))
So, I’ve been on lemmy.world since I joined last year and everyone’s saying it’s too big. Lemmy.ml is the next-largest so I’m conflicted. What do?
Join literally any other server.
That's the point of distributed networks they're supposed to be distributed if 80% of the content is on two servers that's not distributed. People should move off ml and world regardless of their politics simply because it's not a good idea to have everything all in one place.
lemm.ee has been great, very level-headed administration.
Praise the sunaurus!
Join a smaller instance. You can still see posts on lemmy.world, and you might find a niche you're interested in in the process
Smaller instances are also less likely to get defederated by other instances, so unless your admins or mods are quick on the defederation, you get to see everything the fediverse has to offer. Not everyone likes that, of course, but it can be a good perk depending on the user and their admins and mods.
I also really like the idea of interest based instances. I hope we see those grow bigger rather than everything being put on .World and .ml. I need to post and comment on instances like programming.dev or ttrpg.network more.
Join a server that fits your geographic location. That would lead to a better balance than what we have today.
People say lots of stuff, i am happy on world. As long as we don't only take part in local communities i don't think there's much of a problem really.
Please dont use lemmy.world alternatives. World is a much bigger problem in terms of centralization.
Are you on [email protected]? That’s a topic we discuss quite often there
I don't care how big .world gets because it's the same thing with mastodon.social or pixelfed.social. Coming from primarily centralized services, people will always be looking for a "main" instance because that's what their brains are used to and that's what will help adoption. The ones who care will use another instance. As long as fedi has the users and not the proprietary alternatives, it's fine. We can manage.
You're partially right, but it would be better if users were evenly spread on many instances.
Imagine if one instance becomes so big and then they de-federate. For normal users, nothing would change, but then we would have created the new R*ddit
Haha, soviet union at its finest I suppose.
This may sound cheesy but this list is the healthy way to solve the issue people had with Lemmy.ml moderation. Thank you for compiling it, I didn't reliaze there were instances for programming and anime. Glad to see a solution where we didn't have to go through the adults (admins and mods in this case).
Also, it's healthy for the fediverse to see communities spread on to many instances but it does make Lemmy harder for your average redditor to understand (but long term goal of a healthy fediverse is more important).
Also [email protected] is a bit more active than [email protected]
[email protected] for Anime community
Has too much lemmy.world. Downvoted.
(Half kidding. I hope it's obvious which half.)
[email protected] for more
There's also all of these communities on Reddit if you're truly unhappy that the volunteer owned and run social media you signed up for isn't being astroturfed with US-Israeli state press releases.
I’d like not too see lemmy.ml people denying tianmen square or russian war crimes
Avoiding Lemmy.ml communities should achieve that
As I said, feel free to log into Reddit dot com if your goal is to experience the internet fed to you by the US state department. Spamming muh tiannamen or muh russia when you're clearly fine with SOME war crime denialism is the sign of a mind that clearly isn't ready to graduate from the funko pop subreddit.
How brave…
Everyone should defederate from lemmy.world, the Reddit of Lemmy.
I like to think that a lot of the more "Reddity" Reddit refugees from .world, those who tend toward pearl clutching theatrics like these posts, will eventually head back to Reddit. Maybe they'll find their perfect alternative, where there are no dev or admin issues and everyone has a comforting (for them) center-left to center-right, Western ideology driven political stance that never challenges their preconceptions.
Feel free to create an elaborate post on [email protected] or [email protected]
I'm sure people would read it with great attention
Elaborate?
Love seeing this happen. That shithole needs to be defederated. The mod logs are FULL of butthurt mods banning people over and o Ver again for violating the Don’t Post Shit We Don’t Like rule, or… “Rule 1” to everyone else.
We getting one of these a day now?
If you don't like it, petition your admins (via posts on your own instance) to defed.
If they don't want to, find a new instance that does, or stay and block their instance so you don't see their subs.
If you want to build up alternatives, post and comment so they're more active.
I just don't see the point of these posts when most Lemmy users have been around for a while and know what lemmy.ml is like by now.
Be the change you want to see, post in those communities yourself instead of these daily announcements threads on an instance that's already defederating apparently
Lemm.ee will not defederate over tankie mods, there's a specific policy. As to the change I want to see: Guess what I did just before I posted the list, go through all my subscription and clean it of lemmy.ml.
I very much doubt there's going to be one a day, these kinds of things tend to ebb and flow. Also it would've been much faster to ignore this thread than to reply.
Ok?
So if you disagree with their policy enough, you can change instances.
Or you can stay, and build up those alternative communities instead of asking people to do it for you.
Like, the logic behind this isn't difficult, and I thought you'd be able to grasp it.
That's why I bothered to reply, instead of just blocking you. Same chance I gave some of the lemmy.ml subs before blocking their instance.
You're handling it about as well
You should read the sidebar's at least, they're heavily biased, but upfront about it.
It's been their safe space longer than most other instances have been around. It's also a good idea to look at modlogs when coming across a new sub/instance.
Not everything shows up there though. Like if someone is banned and has all their content removed, it won't all show up in the log. But when individual comments are removed, it'll show you what was said.
Don't just assume everyone online will be upfront about their biases
these daily announcements threads on an instance that’s already defederating apparently
Where has LW announced that they would be defederating?
If you want to build up alternatives, post and comment so they’re more active.
Which is what they are trying to achieve by promoting those communities in this post?
Where has LW announced that they would be defederating?
People kept saying it one of the recent daily threads people have been making.
Which is what they are trying to achieve by promoting those communities in this post?
You think posting repetitively here is the same as:
If you want to build up alternatives, post and comment so they’re more active.
How does that make sense?
But if you want to move discussion off their communities make posts in those alternatives. That would actually do something.
These posts are Susan G Kommen levels of difference making...
Feel free to be the change you want to see. You are telling OP to stfu about their issues and simply move on rather than complain, yet you seem to be doing the opposite of that yourself, hrm...
If you meant something otherwise, it was not explained well imho.
I see the same article posted about 15 times for three days, maybe that’s the same thing going on here.
I just block the users who need blocking.
Enjoy segregating all the communities...I guess
Enjoy segregating all the communities...I guess
I do not know what you think is going on here, but that's literally the fucking point of all the Lemmys.
I disagree. The decentralization is thought through at an instance level, not community level. If it was thought through at a community level we'd have tools to aggregate different communities. The current solution is the equivalent of having multiple steering wheels on a car, nobody thought how you'd actually steer the car so you were given the option to steer each wheel separately. It might make sense on a superficial level but if you thought about how users actually use the thing you'd know it's not the best way to do things.
I'm with you, although I'm coming close to booting .ml, and I did block hexbear because that shit is insane.
It feels like .world is going to defederate soon, which will likely result in a multipolar Lemmy. Leftists and Leftist-aligned communities, and Liberals and Liberal-aligned communities, with hands-off communities like Lemm.ee being visible on either.
At this point, without any active Marxist communities, and defederating from almost all overtly Marxist instances, it is pretty obvious .world is anti-Marxist, so I doubt Marxists will stay with .world accounts.
Considering .world has a far less leniant defed policy it might just collapse on itself and the user base go back to Reddit, but that won't be a rapid process.
Nobody in the replies mentioned it, but you could easily sign up to an instance that federates with both .ml and .world.
Will automated account migration be the next big feature?
Could be.
Either way if .world defeds, I will probably stick with .ml, I'd rather not deal with what will become of .world if they succeed in becoming both the largest instance and one of the least federated with other large instances among the major instances.
It feels like .world is going to defederate soon,
Are they? The only post I found is https://lemmy.world/post/16233963, and there is clearly no consensus nor communication from the LW admins.
implying all leftism is marxist
Also this isn't even about Marxism or Leninism as-such. This is about the good ole attempt to expand democratic centralism to a population which is actually revisionist in itself because it either ignores that Lenin conceptualised democratic centralism as a discipline for a party, or because it wants to forego with the vanguard position of the party and expand it to the populace, take your pick.
Plenty of anarchists on those instances you call "liberal", tankies won't be missed.
I didn't imply all Leftism is Marxist, .world doesn't much care for Anarchists either. Hexbear is largely Anarchist and was blocked before they even had a chance to federate, and dbzer0 is largely on strained terms over "piracy concerns."
Not really sure what you mean by spreading "Democratic Centralism" by saber rattling about Lemmy.ml, but that's your right.
It is nice that you admit that all Marxism is tankie, that's refreshing. Most pretend to draw a distinction, but ultimately decide only Marx himself is somehow not a tankie and everyone got his words wrong.
Surely the problem is that people are bringing politics into forums which clearly don't require it. Like, why would the political stance of someone matter in a technology forum?
It's a tech forum run by Marxists, there are other Tech forums run by Anarchists or Liberals or even conservatives.
“Asklemmy.ml” just asked about if anyone had been at any important event televised events.
Mmmm. Guess what.
I mentioned Tiananmen Square 1989: INSTA-BAN!!!!
It would be funny if it wasn’t such a horrible thing.
