New tagline just dropped.
We’re getting on well with Lemmygrad and I think we’re doing okay with Lemmy.ml
There’s a profound difference in world view between what we’re doing and most of the rest of the world. There aren’t a lot of hard line left anglophones running around, and the ones who are usually aren’t extradordinarily online assholes. Our culture was going to class enormously with the average liberal Democrat voter and most of their ideological fellow travellers.
I think federation is a good idea, but you need each instance to be very roughly speaking similar languages and having similar views about the world, at least to to the point where you can have discussions without immediately flame wars breaking out. That’s a hard sell between hard line leftists and libs right now because we’ve got a pretty solid theory for why things suck, whereas libs can’t understand why most things suck while still being libs. They have to continue to believe in the institutions and the constitution and the democrats and all that shit, or their woldview collapses. We know that their worldview is bullshit. So it’s hard to have any kind of conversation about any concrete topics before a leftist says “Actually things suck because neoliberalism and democrat leadership” and then a liberal’s head explodes.
It’s been a disorienting couple of weeks for me as a casual user. I seem to miss a lot of what is going on, but the results of federation seem to have largely resulted in a lot of fighting with other instances before one side gives up and cuts ties. I know the intent is to bring in users who are either already on board or are otherwise open to our politics, but is the way forward to just test against any other version of Lemmy until we have burned through all of them?
I don’t know that I’m making much sense, but it just seems like a lot of turbulence and all of our collective focus has been towards that and I suppose my concern is what the overall effect on the site’s culture will be. Dunking on libs is fun, but if that’s all it becomes with the collateral of our trans comrades, for example, getting caught in the crossfire, I don’t know if all of this is worth it. Hexbear has been a touchstone to make sure I’m not completely insane in the midst of the most brainwormed shit in the Internet and I would hate for that to get lost somewhere along the way.
As a less-casual I’d say that got shouldn’t be too concerned. One thing that federation has made obvious is that we have far more posting power than any of the other instances. They usually have bigger problems with us influencing their culture (to the point of paranoia) than the inverse.
Nonetheless it’s a big moment in site history, and the drama is probably going to continue for a few more weeks till the dust settles. I don’t think we’ll be hearing about it indefinitely.
Also, be sure to set your feed to “local” instead of “all” most of the time, and you’ll only see our posts. I only switch over to “all” if I’m bored but I’ve already caught up on Hexbear.
One thing that federation has made obvious is that we have far more posting power than any of the other instances.
Until the reddit boycott we were the largest and most active Lemmy so the only people this comes as a shock to are those new to Lemmy in the last couple months.
