The write-up they link is also insightful. Notably, they “explicitly reject these accusations” of being Zionists and insist it’s a legal precaution required by their countries.

I’ve bought servers for hosting some small communities and I sometimes thought maybe I was paranoid for retaining anonymity and carefully picking the country and company to allow muh freedoms as far as speech goes, but it’s interesting seeing .world and feddit pull out the “just following legislation” card (which is understandable, given that staff imprisonment is obviously bad for their community, but also irresponsible and complicit to simply accept the situation instead of resolving it, and because this is an internet community there are safe ways to resolve it).

Great work, that release page lists plenty of neat upgrades.

and got Peertube federation working again

Good to hear! I tried to like/upvote a PeerTube video a few weeks ago and couldn’t view the channel.

Anonymity relies on other people using the same name. Otherwise you’ve just got pseudonymity, like me right now.

You can get the same end result with throwaways, but it’s a bit more time-taking on most instances since spammers have abused most of the instances without a signup manual approval.

awards that cosmetically work like upvotes in a sense.

Upvotes are mechanical, maybe there’s a better comparison. I left reddit before they added awards, but I assume the idea is that someone donates and is then able to add a decorative award to their favorite posts they see, maybe limited to giving one award per day?

It’s fun, but on the other hand when I occasionally visit reddit, some posts look like a slot machine with a hundred awards, and even if they don’t mechanically push a post higher, it feels a bit pay-to-win for me, because someone with lots of money can put attention-grabbing awards on posts they like. So I’m not sure where I sit on on those kinds of features, because I do believe that it’s helpful to reward people who have donated, so long as they don’t get an advantage in the community for it.

It’s sad to say, but merely jumping ship from reddit doesn’t ensure that comrades will be safe online. .world and .ee users seem to be reddit-esque but just in a different ilk.

It’s no secret that most people on Lemmy came from reddit at some point, and people left reddit for different reasons. The first big waves of users were from piracy subreddits, /r/GenZedong’s quarantine (went to Lemmygrad, which became the biggest federated instance at the time) and /r/ChapoTrapHouse (succeeded by Hexbear, the largest instance at the time). So because these groups were large, whole and somewhat outliers to reddit overall, there was only some broader reddit culture carried across.

The next big waves were with the API fiasco and Luigi censorship, which largely went to general-purpose instances like .world and .ee for various reasons. Their move was most likely about disdain with the admins’ choices or being forced off the platform, not any opposition to reddit culture in general, so the shift toward reddit-esque community was immediately clear. And while Lemmy has a few design decisions that materially disincentive things like karma-farming, it will take a while, and most likely effort, if we want to counter or improve that culture.

Why do LGTBQ+xyz10 always have to make a fuss about everything…

Because the group (collectively) have a history of being systematically killed and lynched for their sexuality, not to mention the rest of the suppression and oppression. So politics and attacks are taken seriously.

It also reminds me all the fuss about THEIR safe game space only THEM are allowed to use…

It’s pretty reasonable to create a community where they feel comfortable and kick out all the unconstructive trolling and arguments that people can find in a million other places. Lemmy.ml kicks out racists and other reactionary wastes, so you’re in a comparable safe space right now. Do you enjoy the lack of Nazi scum and rabid anti-socialist trolls? I do!

What ever, my point is, if you want to keep Lemmy alive, help out and donate to the creators.

Many of those comrades have already done this, judging by their comments on various instances.

On the other hand, open-source software enables one to disable or edit those blocklists with a simple patch. It’s just an extreme way of making it the default behavior, and therefore making their political statement stronger.

There might be a better way, but I’m not really concerned with this implementation.

But that’s just it - it’s not a useful heuristic, it’s a delusional framework, even more than the geocentric model was. We were mapping the planets onto that, but that didn’t make it useful.

2. There appears to be a lack of “centrist”, non-political, or right-wing voices (and I don’t mean extreme MAGA-type views, but rather more moderate conservative positions).

I see plenty of them. They’re just mostly on other instances to me (like your home instance).

Furthermore, while it’s tempting to see the so-called ‘left’ and ‘right’ as equivalent mirrors needing to be balanced for diversity, the reality is far from it. After seeing Wolfballs in action (that instance died before the reddit API fiasco), I can tell you we don’t need to be balanced out by ‘white genocide’ discussions and more open anti-semitism. I know that’s not what you proposed, but it’s to illustrate that sometimes there isn’t value in arbitrary balancing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ on these websites.

is it a natural result of Lemmy’s community-driven nature?

It’s also a result of Lemmy’s history and appeal. When reddit went on sprees of deleting subreddits, the right-wing hate groups made their own reddit clones, anarchists typically went to Raddle, and when GenZedong and ChapoTrapHouse went down, they went to Lemmygrad.ml (as a result, it became the largest instance) and created Hexbear respectively. So there is a long history of larger communist communities from day one which was the status quo until the reddit API fiasco.

The Fediverse also tends to attract anarchists and other socialists by the appeal of its decentralized nature, along with a few right-libertarians who see it as an anti-censorship tool. So one could say there’s a bias there.

How might we encourage more diverse political perspectives while still maintaining a respectful and inclusive environment?

That’s tough, because you inherently limit which political perspectives you can encourage.

I’m not seeing the chart, did it not attach?

Hah, just a technicality. I like Matrix, but we won’t be seeing any Matrix<->Mastodon interaction any time soon ;)

Huh, that’s interesting that a chart included it, do you happen to remember which one?

PeerTube. I was getting really sick of Youtube, heard about it and went exploring.

By the way, Matrix, while it is a federated protocol, isn’t part of the “Fediverse” (a word for federated software using the ActivityPub protocol [edit: and some others, see reply] , which are aimed towards social media rather than instant messaging)

Definitely, especially last year where some persistent obsessed kiddo would keep finding each federated instance with open registration and making low-tier troll accounts on them.

haha, the paradoxical answer is to make your own personal instance for you to federate and post on all the other communities freely.

(yes, I know ‘just make ur own instance’ isn’t helpful advice because not everyone has the time/money/tech-familiarity to do so, I’m more just pointing out that’s how some people approach the issue of having to pick a community)

I’ve seen a lot of websites (not so much in the Fediverse, but small forums and spin-off forums) and the kinds of basis they have does affect whether people want to post there, and how the place grows. (I’ll just call them instances, because they technically are but I’m not just talking about Fediverse instances, so the dynamics of cross-visibility between sites aren’t really being considered)

Topic-based instances and goal-oriented instances seems like the best bet for a high-quality discussion community. I mean broad topics as well, consider mander.xyz or the former gtio.io, not just more specific ones like slrpnk.net. It can be limiting, but so long as you’re secure enough with your ego that you don’t need to chase high numbers to know you’re stable and active, then I’d recommend it. The tough part is that you may not get as much casual exposure to start off with, by being on the same site as larger communities, you might need to be active (without being annoying) in crossposting good topics to make people aware your community exists.

National-based instances are also popular, probably because of shared language, cultural elements and local issues. But they are otherwise pretty compatible to general instances. They do have a place, I’ve enjoyed a couple on occasion, they have a place, but I do prefer the topic-based communities. There’s no point limiting every topic arbitrarily by nation or state.

General instances (either topicless copy-cats or freely user-defined communities) are hit-or-miss, I personally don’t like them in a federated space unless they are specifically solving an issue.

lemmy.ml is somewhere between topic-based and general. It is explicitly “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers” (I notice that broadened a bit, surprising although no complaints), and you can see that bias in the communities list, but the mods aren’t aggressive with enforcing the topic. There are random sports, country and interest communities here. Whether that’s out of inactivity (volunteer time and effort is limited!) or lax policy (the more the merrier!), it makes this feel more like a general site despite the tagline. I remember last time I checked (admittedly a year ago) the staff were explicit and purposeful that this is not an official instance and was not trying to cater to everyone as a general instance, encouraging people to make more granular instances for things which weren’t meant to go here.

If that is the case (again, policy could be different) then maybe some extra messaging on the Create Community and Register pages could help prevent the regular issue we had when someone fundamentally against the community (like someone kicked from reddit because of racist comments) would show up and be surprised when they were herded out of here too.

In that (rare) situation, you can just say ‘picture of the bird’ to avoid being redundant!

When I ask the strident twits this, I generally get vague homilies and blocks.

Unfortunately, I believe you. Some people take counterpoints very badly, it’s notorious with twitter (and therefore ex-twitter) users.

My response is that demand, in that redundant situation, is insulting to people with visually-imparement and can be disregarded.

I’m not a Mastodon/etc. users but I can sympathize with some other sites. Even here has its own Ongoing September from redditors.

I would recommend reaching out to moderation teams and raising awareness, because they probably have far more ability to put global notifications or sign-up messages, and to give warnings to uncomfortable behaviour.

Make sure to call out twitter carryover, in a constructive way, so that people are aware that Mastodon isn’t ‘twitter but here’.

Reminds me of Solid (wiki)

Interestingly, there have been some people interested in implementing ActivityPub in Solid servers, but I haven’t seen any demos or success stories yet.

I really don’t want to see this place become ‘reddit again’ with unproductive people shouting opinions when they didn’t even read the content.

Sure but one has far more means to exploit far more people, whose employees I would assume are far less motivated to catch shoplifters.