Welcome to Ask Burggit, wanted to get it off the ground and make an initial post, and I was kind of curious to see what people would answer.
How did you hear about Burggit?
People keep praising federation and decentralization and yadda yadda yadda without noticing the elephant in the room: The owner of an instance can block other instances, therefore denying its users from contents solely because they choose to do so.
This is extremely problematic for me because an instance is not only a community by itself, but also supposed to be a window into the Fediverse for its users. For those who came from Reddit, can you imagine using a reddit third party client only to find out they don’t allow you to view certain subreddits for whatever reason?
Huge respect to Burggit for having the ball to run a truly “safe and diverse” space for the Fediverse dwellers.
You’re welcome. I fully expect them to pull a Tusky for their Jerboa app if we show up more on their radar. What a crock of shit, the Tusky app hardcodes a blacklist of Pleroma and Mastodon instances so that the end user can’t connect to them. Hence the need for the Husky fork.
Honestly, it’s why I’m trying to jumpstart more diverse but “safe” communities. If it’s nothing but lolis and cubs, the target is clear, but with decent discussion based communities, it becomes a bit more difficult and there’s an argument to be made that they’re not just blocking one type of content, they’re blocking entirely unrelated communities because they don’t like part of what they’re hosting. That bolsters the free speech argument even more when speech they like is inherently intertwined with speech they don’t like.
I want this place to thrive. It doesn’t need to be the biggest, and inevitably zero tolerance types will block it regardless, but I want the decision to censor it to be painful for as many people as possible.
I am also 100% in favor of general communities, and I fully support your goal and reasoning for it. However, I do have my suspicions as to if it will work or not. A lot of the lemmy instances out there, at least the ones I have seen currently, are exceptionally restrictive as far as their content is concerned. A lot of people won’t look very deep, and will make decisions entirely based on very small bits of information. I think even now, if people bothered to look deeper, they’d see we’re more than just a “right-winger” instance. I don’t know if much if any political stuff has really been posted here at all. And as far as loli is concerned, they can’t see any of the NSFW posts/communities unless they log in or look deeper. So bans on that are entirely based on assumptions and the bit of text that is in the sidebar.
It really does entirely depend on how open others are to take a look at what’s actually on the instance, as opposed to just what they think is on the instance.
Sorry if this is a bit disjointed. It’s very late/early here, so probably not the most cohesive post i’ve made sofar.
While I think more general purpose communities would be awesome, we honestly should not care what these people think of us. They’ve already got the narrative in their heads that we’re a skinhead nazi instance when that’s far from the case. It does not matter how much we try to prove to them we aren’t one. The guys on r/RedditAlternatives painted me as a right winger, then a fascist, then settled on libertarian.
They did the thing that average redditors do and dug through my profile and found one little meme of me making fun of the WEF and painted me as a horrible person based on that. It was quite funny to watch them short circuit and try to pidgeonhole me into an ideology, though. I personally hate both political parties with a passion and think libertarians are the vegetarians of politics who refuse to shut the hell up. So they got it all completely wrong.
Yep, 100%. Federation is great, but it usually ends up kind of split between the more free speech/expression/thought instances and the “safe spaces” which refuse to interact with anyone who does not fit inside a very specific ideological box. Lemmy is in a weird position currently, due to the massive reddit exodus, so right now most Lemmy instances are more leaning towards the “safe space” type instances which rule with a Golden Hammer & Sickle.
As more instances which are accepting of varying forms of speech open up, Lemmy will have the actual benefits of the fediverse, which can be seen better on platforms like Mastodon/Pleroma/Akkoma.
As for us, we won’t be blocking/defederating with instances unless they actively post like IRL CP or Terrorism content. So, we’re as open, federation wise, as other instances allow us to be.
We’re happy to provide you with that kind of space. It’s not our job to decide what you can/cant do/say/see. That sort of thing should be your sole decision.