They can do whatever shit they want with their instance and believe whatever they want. The software they make provably doesn't have any more biases than any other software. As long as that's the case, I'm fine.
Yeah, but it’s guilt by association. Think about how X is now. Its owner is an asshole, and that hurts the platform regardless of how many cool people use it.
X is under total control of that person. As long as the lemmy source adheres to fediverse principles, this developer can believe whatever they want and run their instance however they want, and no one else has to care. If his beliefs starts affecting the lemmy source, it's always an option to fork.
If you exclude a branch of the fediverse because of one bad instance, you're missing the point of the fediverse.
Keep in mind that software is by no means "neutral". The people who make it make decisions about how it works based on their beliefs and goals. That's why, for example, you can't quote posts on Mastodon (at least for now), but you can do so on other fediverse platforms.
The reasoning they give is ludicrous. That's idiotic as saying because someone put up a pedophile website, Apache is the devil. Even if Apache were built by NAMBLA, if it's opensource and doesn't randomly insert pictures of naked kids into your website, how does the developer matter to the product?
how the developers handle certain types of content
Doesn't matter if you stay away from .ml.
the behavior of its creator
Kind of valid, but open source and open license negates a lot of that.
how the sotware itself handles users’ privacy.
You think anything else on the Fediverse is better? When you post something publicly, it's public. Doesn't really matter what the software does. If you don't have End to End encryption, it's not private.
I hate it when people try to gatekeep like this. I don't need to be handheld. If there's a Fediverse alternative to something and it mostly works, it should be on the website. Anything less is not useful at best.
Edit: I say this as someone who has historically criticized the behavior of the devs as well as multiple Lemmy communities BTW.
I agree 100% with this. The developers or the operators of lemmy.ml may be assholes, but the beauty of decentralization is I can simply not use their instance. I do not.
Thus, while a warning label is necessary, I think more good is done by making people aware of the alternative to Reddit than by sweeping the whole thing under the rug.
As for user privacy, I'm not sure Lemmy is any worse than any other Fediverse app. There were a couple of bad things like being unable to delete a hosted image, but that has been fixed.
Once again, warning label, not rug sweep.
I mean the person maintaining this site just chose to not recommend it themself based on valid concerns. Nothing is stopping you from looking into lemmy and using it anyways.
Well, since you've vocally criticised the developers and they haven't bothered changing their ways, wouldn't you agree they deserve to be gatekept?
On the other hand, it's not for you to decide the criteria for what is included on jointhefediverse's curated list. I personally think it is a perfectly reasonable judgement call they've made.
To me the first one is an instance problem (ml, hexbear?), and not a lemmy problem. It has looked like they've been trying to separate the two as much as possible.
This is all quite old drama, and the issue itself is fixed now, but at one point someone kicked off about how if you uploaded a picture to Lemmy, there was no easy way to delete it (you could delete your post, but the image would still be there at whatever URL was created for it, and it wasn't even that easy for admins to find and remove it) - so I'm guessing that it stems from that.
it's federated. It's the only way it can work. Everything still on that ist must suffer from the same thing. Federation means handing stuff to someone else. Once that's done, it's out of your hands forever.
The linked post given on the second point is a bit flimsy. It's basically saying that if you use evidence published by a person with shitty views, you must have them too. To me, that's absurd as claiming that referencing FBI statistics makes someone a federal agent.
First link is completely unviewable for me on mobile, the entire thread is a chain of posts that say “Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression” with a show more button that doesn’t work, and the original thread is gone. Could you(/someone) paste what it says? I’d try on desktop but our internet has been out since the fires started in LA
These concerns, and more, are why just today, during a conversation with some friends looking to get off traditional social media, I advised them to join pixelfed, peer tube, mastodon, and loops, but suggested they strictly avoid Lemmy.
The communities aren’t right for anyone who isn’t seeking something exactly like Lemmy or leftie-Reddit-lite. I don’t even really like it here all that much anymore. Not the content; the interactions… across all my accounts.. even joining “nicer” spaces is not a particularly nice or pleasant experience, plus the more interested is a woman, and Lemmy is a horrible sausagefest echo chamber not at all suited to a normal average woman person who isn’t techie. I’m techie, so I’m used to the vibe, but for your average cis-woman, Lemmy is a very very bad fit.
Bring on the downvotes if you like (the echo-chamber anti-voice sentiment is part of why people shouldn’t be recommended this platform, after all) but these are legit concerns for people who may want to join, and those of us already here can and do steer people elsewhere as a result.
Lemmy is a horrible sausagefest echo chamber not at all suited to a normal average woman person who isn’t techie.
Far be it from me to point out this is exactly how reddit started.
The foundational promise of lemmy and the fediverse writ large is freedom from proprietary software and closed-protocols; the kind of people who are going to be interested in seeking out those types of alternatives are going to gravitate toward techy men.
It takes time for new social media sites to fan outward from their initial adopters, that's just how it goes.
Same honestly. I never discussed politics on Reddit, but it's all the content that's here. Partly why I don't recommend it to anyone i know who uses Reddit. Most content just isn't normie-friendly here.
"I'm gonna stop using GNU/Linux because I don't like Richard Stallman"
It's valid to dislike the devs (I disagree, I've found them nothing but courteous, and have read their posts with interest), but it's ridiculous to exclude their software from this list.
It's almost certainly because of the tankie factory that is .ml and the fact that it's admins are all hard core tankies (including the main dev! And ofc the whole infamous Nutomic transphobe incident)
Coupled with the fact that a few of the biggest communities are on .ml does not bode well.
That's why I keep calling for a general boycott against posting content or comments on .ml communities.
.ml doesn't want growth, they want a tankie echo chamber, if anybody wants to actually see Lemmy grow at a healthy pace it starts with shuning the hostile tankies and their instances.
Well I was going by subscriber count, but good to know that it's not as bleak going by (probably more accurate metric to go by) MAUs, but still [email protected] is #10 in the top 10
Generally, those who praise authoritarian regimes who mask, or attempt to, themselves in the cloak of communism/socialism e.g. China or Russia and are SUPER anti-West (Parroting views of the China Russian regime)
Which comes with a whole host of shit takes, like Russia being justified in their invasion or even denying Tiennamen Square and definitely denying the China Uyghur genocide
Basically, they've gone so far left they've circled back into Right-wing authoritarianism
I've said it before, but I joined this instance when Reddit closed the api and the only time I see "tankie" stuff is when someone mentions how rampant it is on this instance, but not on the instance itself. I guess I subscribe to non-tankie content (all across the fediverse and not only this instance).
And I post from time to time about it, enough that some of the more prominent .ml users have started to take notice lmao
I've also been consistently for weeks now cross-posting a ton of fresh (non-tankie anyways) content to the relevant non-.ml communities, it's like the bulk of my posts rn lol
It has mbin and piefed on the list, so it’s not harming the network at all. If anything it’s more healthy with more platforms rather than just ml and world. It’s one site directing people to the fedi, I’m not butthurt about it
Yes, that's quite old, not sure why OP is bringing this up now.
Most of the people here know about the Lemmy devs political stances. Quite a few people are waiting for Piefed and Mbin to catch up. Nothing new to see here.
ty for this post. Looks like a well-trod ground for most people here, but for newcomers like me the whole conversation was really enlightening and TIL.
They posted a Radio Free Asia article and banned anyone who pointed out it's a government run CIA propaganda op. Even redditors know that's propaganda lol.
It's everywhere, you can't avoid it, you just have to learn to be discerning, media critical, and look into sources.
to anyone looking for somewhere other than Lemmy I'd like to suggest mbin. I'll admit it's not perfect (especially on mobile, interstellar is decent but it's the only app and has some bugs) but it handles reddit-style content pretty much the same as Lemmy except for the lack of read-marking on posts. as a bonus, it handles microblogs so you can see those without an account on mastodon or something similar.
I ran a kbin instance, which kbin forked, and man it was so resource heavy compared to lemmy. Quite expensive to run at scale. Has mbin fork helped with that?
What bugs/issues does Interstellar have that you would like to see fixed? I'm Interstellar's developer btw. I tried to get the majority of the know bugs fixed in the last big update. If there's anything specific you're running into, I can try to focus on that.
the main one I'm still having repeatably right now is that sometimes when I go to post something, especially a comment, the button does not seem to work, so I press it again thinking I missed and it gets posted twice.
I also sometimes have an issue where up/downvoting makes a thing pop up saying "null check operator used on null value". it also happened when trying to unfollow a community from an instance I had recently blocked.
Sounds simple right? But unfortunately several users seem to have difficulty in blocking .ml and continue to complain about us.
Don't worry yall, I got your backs.
Welcome to a tutorial on how to block .ml on your personal account.
In the top right corner of the top of the page, there are 3 horizontal white bars. Click it.
This will open up a drop down menu. At the bottom of that menu, you will see your username. Click it.
This will open another drop down menu with 3 options. Click "Settings".
At the top of your screen you will see 2 tabs. Click the one that says "Blocks".
Here you will see "Block user" "Block community" and "Block instance". Click the down arrow below "Block instance".
This will open up a search bar. Type "lemmy.ml" and click it after it shows up.
That's it! You've blocked .ml and will never see content from the instance. Now you don't need to make a feud post every day complaining about .ml and other instances you disapprove of. Think of all the time you will save!
But wait, we aren't done yet in this menu. Click the down arrow under "Block user". Now type "UltraGiGaGigantic" Make sure you select my .ml account as the other ones I no longer use. Thanks, appreciate it.
Is there some feature comparison of lemmy vs mbin vs other reddit-like platforms? There was some major reason why I didn't like kbin, but I forgot why.
Their claims regarding privacy are really not surprising, it's very on-brand for the developer's ideology to eliminate transparency for users in the platform while keeping everything stored and federated in the back end for the ruling elite, which if and when they decide to, become the arbiters of who can and won't see it. They haven't even bothered to provide any form of recourse to contest it, you basically have to go looking for people yourself. At least until mod member lists are made private too.
I fully agree with their decision, Lemmy is transient at best. They could still include Mbin, but why include a loaded deck? Actually, decided to check, yep, they did, kudos to them, they really did think it through.
Downvote all you want, still ain't gonna change that jointhefediverse.net decision (based as fuck) 😂