Following the other thread (550 upvotes and 366 comments at the moment: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417), one of the complaints that people had what that some communities only exist on lemmy.ml and don’t have alternatives on other instances.
Let’s discuss this and see if we can organize together.
I suggest to have one topic per comment so that is is easier to discuss.
Possible alternatives?
- [email protected] (fragile instance?)
- [email protected] (broader than crows)
@[email protected] (prolific poster) and @[email protected] (mod)
Thoughts?
That said, I would like to say that despite the issues with the ML administration, I feel the centralization of communities on WORLD is a far greater and thus more urgent issue for me.
I feel the centralization of communities on WORLD is a far greater and thus more urgent issue for me.
It’s definitely a big issue too and why it is a good idea to suggest people start alternatives somewhere other than l.w, as is being done in this discussion.
I feel the centralization of communities on WORLD is a far greater and thus more urgent issue for me.
Is it? Is there any level of power tripping similar to lemmy.ml?
Also
I suggest to have one topic per comment so that is is easier to discuss.
It’s not about power tripping, it’s about philosophy. When I left mainstream social media and decided upon the Fediverse, decentralization was very much at the top of the list. I was happy to be part of a world where one corporation wasn’t in control of our lives. I’m just uncomfortable with the way that people are so eager to foster that in world. We shouldn’t have to see them misbehave before we apply what we learned from previous mistakes.
I’m just uncomfortable with the way that people are so eager to foster that in world. We shouldn’t have to see them misbehave before we apply what we learned from previous mistakes.
You’re preaching to the choir, but “for now” it’s acceptable to me.
We are always able to move communities to other instances should they misbehave, and that’s good enough to me.
Could be improved, of course, but not critical.
I’m a little late on this thread/issue, but I agree with @[email protected] .
I’m also inclined to push back on the anti-lemmy.ml stance being pushed here. And to be clear, While I’m on lemmy.ml, I joined before “the migration” when it made sense to join the “main” instance as it then was and I have no particular affiliation with them or their politics.
Inline with what sabre is saying, I think there’s a certain degree of political entitlement and “defederation-fever” creeping into this general sentiment. I think the communists/tankies should be allowed to do their thing without it being an issue, just like any other niche interest/viewpoint that can build a space here.
I suspect there’s some dangerously presumptive politics at play here … where moderation action is presumed to be “power tripping” mainly because the moderator’s politics is presumed to be completely wrong. How about, “yea, that’s their thing, it’s unlikely something productive will come out of speaking flatly critically about china on lemmy.ml … their moderation can go overboard sometimes, but their defensive about all of that … if you want to do that, you’ll need to go to a more western instance/community”
Building different spaces with different rules, vibes and beliefs, while simultaneously committing to inter-connectivity as much as possible … is basically the idea of the fediverse. It allows us to talk to each other without being stuck in one group’s (or corporation’s) policies and world-view … and more idealistically, allows us to see different world-views more clearly as we contrast the different spaces we can be connected to. If everything were on lemmy.world, it’d be hard to see the world-view (ha) that the mods/admins and even majority there impose on the rest.
That’s the idealism, and I think it’s very real.
But the pointy end of the stick is disagreements which lead to downvotes and moderation. That’s what enables the creation of a particular space, and needs to just kinda be accepted a bit more.
That’s the part not stated enough IMO … at some point, if you’re going to be committed to the inter-connectivity part, you need to be respectful of the fact that another space exists and can be antagonistic to some of your views. That’s fine. On reddit, we’d just steer clear of a particular sub-reddit and maybe disparage them elsewhere. De-federation or targeting an instance as plain bad or wrong is a useful tool that the fediverse provides but which, IME, can easily become over zealously embraced in a sort of dog-pile behaviour. A more useful behaviour, IMO, is to try to work out ways that the fediverse can persist with such antagonism and disagreements.
Not being surprised that communists are hard on criticism of communist countries seems like a start to me (where, TBF, such criticism is pretty wide spread in the west to the point that I don’t blame them for being cranky about it). Being open to the idea that you can get along with same communists on just about any other issue is a good next step. It’d be the same with criticising tech workers on programming.dev or trans/gender/queer issues on blahaj.zone or criticising western imperialism and capitalism on lemmy.world. Though I suspect the lemmy.ml admins could do a better job at sign-posting their politics/policies here.
These are spaces with particular sensitivities. Antagonising them indifferently is kinda rude at some point. Demanding that they not have their sensitivities is kinda against the fediverse at some point. Interestingly, the admin of lemmy.ml, dessalines, basically said the same thing recently.
Now, to be fair, I haven’t looked into the moderation stuff that seems to have precipitated this conversation and I’m certainly open to the idea that the lemmy.ml mods overstepped (mods tend to do that IME). But my general view is that, as communists living in the west, they’ve probably come against a good amount superficial criticism and frankly prejudice that us general westerners wouldn’t really notice, and so have pretty sharply guarded boundaries around that sort of dialogue. So they’ve built their own space (well platform actually), that is generally geared toward FOSS and privacy about which many of us have shared interests … but they also have some pretty clear policies around communism that are clearly very personal to the admins that are better respected than exiled or antagonised.
Also, none of this is to say everything should be on lemmy.ml. Quite the opposite. Diversify! That’s part of my point. But away from lemmy.world too, and with the understanding that part of diversification is enabling niche spaces that can cause friction and said friction isn’t, in itself, a problem. Instead, IMO, we tend to get a bit feverish whenever these sorts of things spark up. Anyway … rant over!
This is a tremendous post and I’m saddened by the fact that it’s buried in this thread where many won’t see it. I agree with it wholeheartedly.
I find the term tankies to be egregious. It feels like it targets minorities and is incredibly dismissive. I’m not authoritarian in the slightest and so I will have certain friction in my thought processes with authoritarians, but my views are incredibly left leaning,. I’ve spent my life learning from my experience and reaching and the only thing I can say for sure is that the right wing elite that rule over us, don’t give a fuck about us.
We all saw how communists were villainised around the second world war and that the confirmation bias as a result, lead to what we have now, which is again the right wing elite that rule over us, don’t give a fuck about us.
While I definitely want the administration of Lemmy.ML to be better in the way they conduct themselves, I feel that we need their presence for the greatest Fediverse we can create. It’s because of that, I feel someone from that team should’ve come forward and spoken on what happened in an official capacity. If an any time administration take action, send a message and be vocal and open about it. If you don’t have the time to do that, I question whether you have the time to making administrative actions.
That said, there’s a bunch of communities being created and I’m grateful for that. I want to see all communities move away from the bigger instances and I’ll say it again, moving communities away from LW is far more urgent and important. We need different flavours and different ideas and implementations. The best isn’t always the biggest.
Cheers for the response! Interesting to see that we generally align pretty accurately over this. I wasn’t clear we would and half expected you to come in and say “fuck that, I just don’t like lemmy world”.
I did think of making a separate post of my rant, but figured it’d just get downvoted and there wouldn’t be any point. After this, I’d be happy to put it up.
Also, I’ve just posted in the meta community about this, generally poking around the issue and what happened and how better administration might be possible.
Very nice comment above.
Also, I’ve just posted in the meta community about this, generally poking around the issue and what happened and how better administration might be possible.
https://lemmy.ml/post/16565387?scrollToComments=true. The community is local, you need a lemmy.ml account to see it.
Ha, no. All the dealings I’ve had with the LW admins have been overwhelmingly positive. The members, not always so positive but that’s more about the thoughtfulness of the people I’ve come across on smaller instances. It would appear the people that don’t just join the biggest instance are more measured in their approach to things and are generally just less entitled acting. It makes them a joy to interact with and the conversations are more thought provoking, which is always a joy.
You absolutely nailed it with that comment, 5/7, perfect score.
Honestly it probably would get downvoted if you made it as a separate post, but that’s just because kvetching about lemmy.ml is the flavor of the week and most people are sheep.
[email protected] and [email protected]
Mods: @[email protected] and @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Could not find any current alternatives.
Any instance recommendations? Maybe mander.xyz? (@[email protected])
Privacy: [email protected]
[email protected] is a good one. The instance admin comes and go, but the instance is still up-to-date
Other active options:
I like [email protected] because the project is behind it
Whenever friends ask about resources, I always link them to the privacyguides website. I should use their community more as well
[email protected] also
Interesting, doesn’t seem that active unfortunately, I guess the privacyguides one takes most of the posts besides the lemmy.ml one
Perhaps it’s not as active as I’d assumed. I only semi-recently subscribed so mostly have the initial fetch.
Some more options for those looking.
Just had a look:
- [email protected]: site seems down? http://monero.house/
- [email protected]: last posts 4 hours and 9 days ago
- [email protected]: last post 4 days ago
- [email protected]: last post 11 days ago
- [email protected]: last post 3 hours and 8 hours ago
- [email protected]: site is down: https://community.nicfab.it/c/privacy
Added lemmy.ca and LW to the top comment
Sorry, I wasn’t checking them. Just found them under my subscriptions and shared.
Thanks for checking them out though.
[email protected], currently moderated by @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected].
Could not find any current alternatives.
Any instance recommendations? Maybe programming.dev? Or a maker/craft-oriented instance?
[email protected] would be perfect! @[email protected] can we make that happen?
[email protected] and [email protected]
The respective moderators (@[email protected], @[email protected]) have been AWOL for 4 years.
Possible alternative:
- [email protected] (kbin development is fragile?)
Any instance recommendations?
@[email protected], were you able to find any RSS news sources?
I’ve figured it out @[email protected] . The thing that was bugging me was where we should host the autonomous and self driving technology community and the whole time it was bloody obvious. @[email protected] can we host it on your instance?
where we should host the autonomous and self driving technology community and the whole time it was bloody obvious. @[email protected] can we host it on your instance?
I asked the futurology admins about adding additional communities that fit the futurology theme, but they seem uninterested. I’m not sure why, as having what is essentially a single-community instance seems a bit strange to me, but it’s ultimately their call.
@[email protected] and @[email protected], would you reconsider increasing the number of communities on your instance, provided they fit the futurology theme?
We are not against it, but it needs careful consideration due to limited server resources as well as limited user attention (we are a very small instance compared to others)
We’re not sure how much additional traction we would drive to your server, but we don’t expect too much. It would mostly just be me and @[email protected] posting news stories and videos (hosted on YouTube) about self-driving technology with the occasional news story and video about robot chefs. So very much in line with Futurology.
I’ll have a chat with the other mods and come back to you
Thank you so much
We’ve decided to go ahead with this, fire over a DM and we’ll get the community set up
I found a couple. I’m saddened that https://selfdrivenews.com doesn’t have an RSS feed though
Linux: [email protected]
[email protected] seems quite active, I guess if any people move to it it will become even more active.
[email protected] could probably be a nice one too if people want to avoid hypercentralization on LW
If you know any other, comment below and we can see which one we decide to select as “the one” to avoid fragmentation.
- [email protected] - no posts that I can see
Maybe [email protected] ?
Having everything on LW isn’t the same problem?
Centralization is still a problem, but LW doesn’t have as much propaganda and aggressive moderation
The definition of propaganda is subjective.
There is a lot westerns do not perceive as propaganda. As someone from the global south I can tell you.
Can you give an example? Are you talking about propaganda from a government or something else?
Too general.
Based on the activity on both [email protected] and [email protected], seems enough for now.
- [email protected] - which isn’t much of an alternative
- One for lemmy.zip perhaps?
Jellyfin: [email protected]
Maybe something for https://lemmy.dbzer0.com ?
Wouldn’t https://lemmy.film or https://selfhosted.forum be better? Even https://libretechni.ca
Sorry to bring it to you, but https://lemmy.film/ has been down for probably six months.
What is the issue with dbzer0? It’s literally an instance with the largest piracy community of all of Lemmy
When I think of db0 I think of piracy or AI, Jellyfin is a media manager, when I think of it, I think of TV, film and self hosting.
Well, I’m pretty sure none of the Jellyfin users stream their vacation movies
https://libretechni.ca/ is also down on my site, is the site supposed to be up?
It’s back up! 🎉
Oh nice! Only one admin though
Is one admin bad?
Single admin instances are fragile instances. One person is a single point of failure.
But if the primary admin buggers off with the hosting and/or domain, doesn’t that kill all instances?
If he decides to shut down the project, or something happens to him, the server will probably go down with him.
See vlemmy.net, lemmy.film, iusearch.fyi, and so on
Aha, makes sense. Though my beloved tf went down and that had multiple admins at one point.
Yep, I guess its having an outage. It’s been fine for weeks.
Who downvoted this? Why? 😵💫
I just created [email protected]
Creating the community isn’t the issue, usually it’s finding moderators
Don’t worry about it for now. I will do it until someone steps up for it. Also, don’t forget that I am actually working on tooling to make this job easier, so having any type of growing community would be an excellent way to find out the real pain point for moderators and work on the solutions.
When I said moderator, I meant someone to bring people to the community as well 😅
For that, I really have no answer other than “help with fediverser, stick with one community, and post as much as possible in the promoted communities”.
No but I mean practically now, is anyone going to promote that new community to [email protected]? Or do we expect people to hear about it by another mean?
Or do we expect people to hear about it by another mean?
Yes. Fediverser will help newcomers. Posting content in the “new communities” will help those already here. Everyone browses by all anyway, so the best way to promote new communities is by putting content there.
I mean, if your qualification for moderator includes “Not abusing powers to defend garbage extremist politics” then we currently have two communities that each have zero moderators.
Not sure if I got your comment correctly, are you implying that @[email protected] is going to power trip on the newly created [email protected], or do you mean something else?
No, just an implication towards the old lemmy.ml version of the community.
What I mean is, moving from a bad situation to an equally bad but improvable situation is still a good move. It might be better to have a small, unmoderated community than one governed by “pretend” moderators.
That said, if the above comment was pointing out a need to fulfill, as opposed to decrying the attempts at community replacement, then you could disregard my snide remark.
Got it!
- sffa.community?
- literature.cafe?
- wait for a Marvel instance?
Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I wanted to say that I see you going to such great efforts to help people all across the entire Fediverse, and to say thank you - we appreciate you!:-)
Yeah, Blaze definitely deserves some kind of “threadiverse citizen’s volunteer of the year” award or something.
They are always on r/RedditAlternatives steering people towards the Fediverse too, along with a few others. Unfortunately most people there are resistant, and the heavily leftist-leaning nature of the content here turns a lot of people away (many instances including reddthat.com do not block either hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml by default for new users, so all those posts promoting literal violence against e.g. landlords show up immediately in their All feeds), but it is still awesome to see them trying!:-)
Personally I think the technology will need to be improved first - e.g. adding content labels such as Mastodon already has (and everything else these days except Lemmy) - before we will see wider acceptance, especially since there are a lot of centrists who nonetheless contribute niche content that otherwise will not feel comfortable here and thus remain on Reddit, or a lot of people simply swear off social media altogether. But damn, if we do succeed it will in no small part be due to their constant efforts!:-) 🥰
They are always on r/RedditAlternatives steering people towards the Fediverse too, along with a few others. Unfortunately most people there are resistant, and the heavily leftist-leaning nature of the content here turns a lot of people away (many instances including reddthat.com do not block either hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml by default for new users, so all those posts promoting literal violence against e.g. landlords show up immediately in their All feeds), but it is still awesome to see them trying!:-)
Yeah, some people there have the worst bad faith I’ve ever seen. Anyway, at least some other people can read the comments and learn about Lemmy.
There could literally be some Reddit shills there, or “useful” people who somehow are still holding on tooth & nail to the Reddit name - some people are just like that - and actually I am glad that those have not migrated over to here, even purely to do trolling:-).
But there are a lot of centrist, middle-of-the-road people, as well as right-leaning people too, who could add their voices here and contribute to the ongoing conversation - b/c not everything is about politics (even if so many people try to turn the conversation towards that here, and I am guilty of that as well; yet gardening, woodworking, knitting, etc. - not everything needs to bring it up consistently).
There is so much that we could do to make this place more “welcoming” for others. And I see you doing that tirelessly, so thanks!:-)
Thanks!
And happy cake day to you!
Thanks! It seems like a bunch of us have our cake days around this time… what an interesting coincidence! :)
Thanks, trying to help!
I think the problem is not so much that “communities don’t exist”, but that they are far less popular and active than the lemmy.ml ones, and when presented with a choice new users will typically choose the community that is more active and has the most subs. You can’t simply solve that by creating another community on another instance. A concerted effort would be needed to get people to move and to get them to pick the alternative community over the lemmy.ml one. Raising awareness and defederation by bigger instances (like lemmy.world) would help immensely.
For me the big ones are [email protected] and [email protected] btw, which do exist elsewhere but the alternatives are stale.
https://programming.dev/c/programmer_humor seems pretty active? Edit: nice link [email protected]
Indeed, it is.
I posted to [email protected] and [email protected] about [email protected]
Someone else and I cross posted all of the content from [email protected] to [email protected] this morning.
I went to Reddit and HN to get content to that community too.
Is it really that stale?
On the other hand, I don’t think defederation is necessary nor useful. Build rather than break.
Hey I applaud your effort, yesterday the top post was several days old and top day was empty on one of the subs, so this is already better.
I’m a bit skeptical if that will be enough though. Active discussion is the meat and the potatoes for me when I go to a tech community, and for that you need more subscribers.
Subscribers come to active communities. Feel free to post there too.
When presented with a choice, people usually pick the community that is the most active and already has the most subs.
But I am definitely giving it a shot.
Right, but when one of the communities has a reputation for authoritarian admins and mods dedicated to spreading propaganda it’s a bit different.
This is it.
The games community in lemmy.world is a bunch of folks advertising their indie game or YouTube stream. Usually a few comments here and there.
The games community on lemmy.ml is a bunch of folks sharing gaming journalism. Pretty active.
I always thought the real gaming community was [email protected]
That’s a way better community! Thanks for the recommendation!
You’re welcome!