I am exploring Lemmy right now and what I see is very worrying to me, but I also don’t understand wth is going on with some instances here. I don’t know if it’s smart to post this, but here we go.
I am partial to Marxist and anarchist ideology, but lemmygrad looks completely unhinged to me. Is it a parody? Some content is fine and some of it is insane.
On the other hand, beehaw looked super inviting from the outside and I even applied to join them. Then, I looked closer and that instance’s moderation looks totalitarian and rigid in the other way. (I understand why they blocked lemmygrad though…)
I’m seeing this impact other communities in different ways and there’s some kind of witch hunt happening on both sides…
I want to interact with people that can respect each-other and that can hold open-minded discussions about any topics without devolving into some tribal war.
Edit:
I realize my post is not a simple question… Let me clarify some thoughs:
-I do not mean beehaw is far-right. The just seem strict and that’s their right.
-I worry profiles can “inherit” the bad reputation of instances they interacted with and get pre-emptively banned.
-People are used to reddit and tend to centralize. Is the “just switch community” really an option?
-English is far from my first language and I might’ve judged things too quickly/harshly so take my criticism with a grain of salt.
Lemmygrad is full of unhinged tankies. I just automatically assume anyone posting there is a child, either physically or mentally.
Beehaw have their own rules, and that’s fine. While not my cup of tea, I won’t tell them how to run their instance. I respect those rules when I post to their communities. I particularly enjoy their technology and gaming communities.
Other instances are pretty alright. The vibe on lemmy.world is pretty great, which is why it’s my home instance.
Edit: inb4 this comment also gets brigaded by tankies chomping at the bit to call me a “liberal”
This comment is basically just reaffirming my choice to make world my home instance too, although I am probably gonna explore some of Beehaw’s communities especially if they have more engagement. Any you’d recommend?
lemmygrad looks completely unhinged to me
…
[Beehaw’s] moderation looks totalitarian and rigid
Yes. They’re not on the opposite sides politically, but are on opposite ends of the spectrum for tolerating wack-a-do nonsense.
and how exactly is beehaw totalitarian? ive been very explicit in my language while using beehaw since it was a tiny miny server. is it perfect? oh hell no ive got a lot to say but totalitarian?
I can share the perspective of why I joined beehaw instead of the other services.
I used to be on the side of free-speech maximalists, but after seeing communities crumble because of toxicity driving out people, I also came to see the same problems with social media that the beehaw folks see.
On anon/pseudo anon places, the social structure to correct anti-social behavior does not exist like in real life. So to create an environment that’s tolerable to the majority of people, you have to isolate and punish the bad actors.
I’m past the age where i want to be spending time on things and places where people are hateful and mean all the time.
Freedom of speech is never freedom of consequence. And if that consequence is that nobody wants to listen to you, well that’s on you.
Freedom of speech is by definition freedom from consequence for speech.
“Yeah you can criticize glorious leader, you have free speech. You’ll just spend the rest of your life unemployable and die/in a gulag”
Nobody is implying that a lack of freedom of speech means they put a gag on your face preventing you from speaking. A lack of freedom of speech means harsh consequences for speech.
Freedom of speech is from consequences from the government. That means you cannot be prosecuted for insulting politicians for example. But you can certainly be sued in civil court for the same thing.
This is something that I’ve found really nice about the Fediverse. It seems like both instances don’t really work for you; in that case, you can always find another that might fit your interests! Even if you have the ability to see the communities from each instance, you don’t have to participate. Like another poster said, I’ve made lemmy.world my main instance because I enjoyed the rules and vibe stated there.
So we at rblind.com blocked lemmygrad pretty much right away, for the reasons stated above. But I’m starting to wonder if the future of Lemmy instances might not be organized around topics. I’m not sure that, if Lemmy takes off, moderating a “general interest” style instance is sustainable. I’m also not sure everyone centralizing onto one or two general instances is a good idea. Once we get out of alpha, the intent is for us to be an instance focused on posts and topics of interest to the blind community. We disabled community creation for that reason; I don’t want someone signing up with us and creating the FunnyAnimalPictures community, because as a blind person, I just don’t want to be their admin, not because that content is bad in any way. Parcially sighted folks who want that content can federate with whatever instance has it, and I can trust those people to moderate and admin that community. Federation seems to be as useful for better distributing administration and moderation workloads as anything else. My real worry is that beehaw is too general and open. From the description, I don’t really understand what it’s for, or who should be there. At least I know the purpose of lemmygrad, and what kind of people I might find on it, making the “block” decision super easy.
Beehaw is for some general communitys like technology, news and other big stuff. They didn’t create anything specific. So it is only for these basic communitys and everything else is federated.
I think that it is for people that don’t know where to create account - you start with these basic communitys everything else you can find throughout Feddiverse.
I hope that in future there will be some breaking of instances to smaller more specific instances.
I’m so excited for the possibilities of the accessible custom interfaces and improvements to the platform your instance’s users will likely create. I totally agree that we’ll likely have more topical instances as things stabilize, there will be lots of alt accounts, and those local feeds will be fun!
