I was just reading this post https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1gmv76n/is_reddit_going_to_remain_the_primary_space_for/ and many barely see the fediverse as an alternative and they seem to have a negative bias towards it. Super ironic when it comes to the self-hosting community. Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views. But it doesn’t really matter when it’s federated and FOSS. I think it’s clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit. Why is there such a negative bias?
What is the default sort on Lemmy.World btw - is it Local, or All?
For me without an account, it is All. Which means that they’ll see all the tankie stuff, and most will immediately want to nope out (I’m currently sitting at 100% of every person I’ve ever told about Lemmy irl).
On the bright side, PieFed adds a warning label to messages on communities located on Beehaw (about their differences in moderation policies), and surely could do the same for lemmy.ml - in fact I saw such a message this morning (sth sth warning do not criticize China or Russia or you are likely to be banned - quite neutrally yet helpfully worded, very much to the point), though now can’t seem to reproduce, so perhaps it’s in testing.
I am not certain I can explain it, but for one thing they have defederated from two of the largest instances including Lemmy.World, bc they wanted a narrower range of experiences yet the mod tools would not allow them to keep up with vetting the flood of content from them and thus their userbase would have been “exposed” to it.
The mantra is “be nice”, but I also saw people discussing literally murder of “others” who they disagreed with, like they voted the wrong way, or didn’t vote despite being in a deep blue USA state or something. So I have no idea of what the criteria really is.
In any case, people report being banned from there at the drop of a hat, bc their mods are quite zealous. Which can be quite shocking to someone coming from a place that has significantly looser moderation practices.
So anyway the label I see for a post hosted on a Beehaw community says:
This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.
And then that link goes to Beehaw’s own description of their own policies. I love this approach! It’s quite friendly - it allows Beehaw to speak for itself, and rather than penalize the instance for being different, yet it addresses the interface between it vs. the wider Fediverse that is more used to content such as appears on Lemmy.World, which again has significantly looser standards (due in large part to severe lack of moderation efforts, which in turn relates to lack of development of tools that mods seem to consider sufficient).
