Lemmy.ml has long had some political conflict among the userbase, especially in communities like worldnews. This is because the instance is composed of both leftists (anarchist/communist) and liberals (those who agree with the mainstream political views in western countries). Additionally, the instance admins all belong to the former group.
Recently we made an announcement offering free Lemmy instance hosting for one year, for non-politics instances. We are hereby making a similar offer to host a liberal or mainstream political instance, which can accomodate those who are unhappy with lemmy.ml moderation.
This has many advantages. Instance admins have full power to set the rules, block federated instances (like lemmygrad.ml), or remove unwanted content. An administration team that is closer aligned politically would certainly be an improvement for some of the users here.
So if you are interested to host such an instance, send an email to contact@join-lemmy.org some relevant details about yourself. You will also have to buy a domain. We will only host one such instance, so if multiple people are interested, you should coordinate among yourselves. As in the original offer, the hosting will be limited to one year.
On a side note, we would also like to help with the creation of a general-purpose instance that is less focused on politics than most of the existing instances. This is fully within the terms of the initial “free instance hosting” announcement, so if you are interested, send us an email!
Up until about a month ago, I thought lemmy.ml was plenty welcoming to people on the left that weren’t tankies. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that’s changed. The anarkiddie jokes get old really, really fast.
Yeah I’m not even anarchist or anarchist-leaning but it got old ages ago
On a side note, we would also like to help with the creation of a general-purpose instance that is less focused on politics than most of the existing instances.
My intention with sopuli.xyz was to create a general-purpose instance with no specific political leaning.
I see, you make a good point. Your instance has been running for a year, but received very few users compared to lemmy.ml. My guess is that you receive new users mainly via join-lemmy.org/instances, is that correct? The problem is that most people only look at the top 2-4 instances, as you can see in the stats (removed everything thats not a Lemmy instance).
Problem is, that list is sorted by most popular and strongly favors established instances. I think it would help a lot of we put 2-4 “recommended instances” at the top of that page, particularly small or general-purpose instances like yours. It would also be pretty simple to have different recommendations for each language, which should help regional instances. There could be a sort of tag system as well, but thats a bit more effort to implement. What do you think?
Eventually I can add a tag / filtering type thing like joinmastodon does… especially for different language instances. But I think just sorting that page by popularity is pry fine for now tho. Joinlemmy is not the bottleneck IMO.
The main issue is that communities are already on reddit or elsewhere, and they need to actively choose to migrate to lemmy. That often takes the moderators / admins of those communities doing that work, and bringing over a large chunk of users. That’s how the largest lemmy instances got to where they are, and there’s no way around that.
Based on that screenshot, there are about 400 users per week who visit a Lemmy instance via join-lemmy.org. Thats a pretty significant number, and it likely contributes a large part of the new signups on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
My guess is that you receive new users mainly via join-lemmy.org/instances, is that correct?
I haven’t really done promotion for my instance so that is correct.
I think it would help a lot of we put 2-4 “recommended instances” at the top of that page, particularly small or general-purpose instances like yours. It would also be pretty simple to have different recommendations for each language, which should help regional instances. There could be a sort of tag system as well, but thats a bit more effort to implement. What do you think?
That would be magnificent!
I think in the mean time, one could by default randomly sort the instances.
I dont think that would work well, because there is a large number of tiny instances with 1-2 monthly users that would show up at the top. Those are probably not the best place for new users.
Maybe randomly sort the instances with more than x users?
That could work, but it seems hard to figure out a good value for x. Plus it is likely that there would still be low-quality instances at the top sometimes. A hardcoded list of recommended instances gives much more control.
I applied for the political instance, but given that sopuli.xyz is already established I would prefer that. I would be happy to help out in any way possible if wanted.
what about an instance for porn or sex-workers?
I feel like hosting that is a lot more risky legally especially on such a small platform compared to say reddit or pornhub. Probably best for them to not have anything to do with people hosting porn, I’m not sure on the details of the law though.
Yeah, my impression is that platforms for mature content have been running into that problem time and time again. The potential for child abuse content and revenge porn is high, and much of the remaining content is pirated. Policing all of that is expensive and sometimes scarring. Having volunteers do that sounds unlikely.
We’re not going to host anything like that for you.
And also lemmy.ml wouldn’t federate with any instance like that due to the high legal risks involved.
That explains a lot. I thought all of lemmy was communist but it seems like that only applies to lemmygrad. Dunno who would want a lib lemmy instance when Reddit exists tho
Maybe because the liberals are still people who deserve some rights as the promoted ones by Free Software?
Some other people could also have fell in an ending loop towards Reddit interaction and common nonFLOSS media because of some people they follow.
Edit:
Clarifying to avoid any misunderstanding with the first parragraph: I disagree with them and I don’t tolerate what they do and what they promote but that doesn’t mean that I am going to remove their rights as individuals.
Fair enough
I can also argue that they can adapt or fuck off, since basically all the internet is their own echo chamber, for fuck’s sake. It’s like when a bunch of religious go to an antitheist or religion traumatic syndrome recovery group and complain that “it has too much aggression towards beliefs that have harmed them!” when the majority of people is a believer in some spiritual sect, wtf.
Reddit has had some issues with moderation lately. They have this unit, “Anti-Evil Operations”, that has been going over moderators’ heads to delete comments. They’ve been taking sides in some hot button political issues in the US, which has left the political debate sub I moderate in the uncomfortable spot of just banning those issues entirely. Their actions and decisions have been mostly opaque to moderators.
That’s in addition to the top 30 or 50 or some huge number (I forget) of reddits being moderated by the same people.
I wonder how much of that is just because they got to Reddit early. A friend of mine is moderator over a smattering of enormous subreddits mostly because he started on Reddit when it was only a year old.
Probably. The why doesn’t stop it from being a problem though…
Is it a problem, though?
Echo chambers, centralization of power, etc. Pretty sure a lot of people consider that a problem 😉
Most of the internet is a liberal echo chamber. Libs can adapt to a place where their own believe set isn’t the mainstream for once, they wouldn’t care about us and would like to beat us, why should we be better to them and give them all they want everyplace, even ours, insteaf of them being like the guests they are and show some minimum politeness?
Really? Liberals have enough soap boxes, they can surely pay for another if they want it.
I do dig the idea of more general purpose instances tho, as long as they keep up on spam mitigation.
One of the criticisms that has sometimes been brought up against Lemmy is that it is just for “tankies” (which is not true, but they see the biggest instance described as “a community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts”, that contrary to all other social networks doesn’t label communists and other people as being part of a dangerous violent extremist movement; and the second biggest instance whose icon is the picture of a literal tank with red background, and a title that is a play on Leningrad and Lemmy). I therefore think that promoting diversity among instances in actions like these is a good idea.
This is merely a product of people not being aware of / understanding federation.
And the fact that the software and flagship instance have the same name adds to it.
Yeah true, but I think we should also take into account the people that lack understanding of the concept of federation (maybe some kind of tag system on join-lemmy in the future like PeerTube has? And maybe randomized instances by default?)
a title that is a play on Leningrad and Lemmy
Technically, they just use the same Slavic suffix, -grad, for a town, city, or fortified settlement.
Yeah, you are probably right, but I thought of leningrad, because both also begin in le.
- Less work for the Lemmy.ml admins (which leaves more room for development)
- Increases the size of the Lemmy federation
- Brings new leaders who will independently work towards Lemmy moving forward
Oh, that’s why world news was so lib. I’ll be honest I don’t understand how federation works, it seems complicated. Like multiple websites are latched on to one Reddit like service?
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federation works like emails do
Think on email as suggested by @FaygoOfficial@midwest.social and @axeltherabbit@lemmy.wiredentrypoint.xyz
Idk, I’d rather have an open platform that welcomes all good faith argument makers from all the side. But this is lemmy and it’s open for everyone, so do whatever anyone would like to do.
I second this. As long they’re not right wing, I don’t think we should be overly concerned with ideological purity.
But that’s already an ideological purity test. One which excludes a huge chunk of the population of most countries.
Yes but Lemmy.ml is explicitly leftist. I accepted that some level of gate-keeping was to be expected. I just don’t see the removal of “libs” to be a necessary part of that.
Simply because this Instance is for leftists doesn’t mean “leftist” needs to be defined narrowly.
That’s my two-cents anyways.
Libs are as right winged as Cons, mind you.
Allowing liberals and leftists to coexist would kill all nuance. Letting in conservatives would kill all dialogue.
I would even support creating a centrist or right-leaning (non-extremist) instance to help de-radicalize the conservative sphere
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they’re basically isolated (as they should be) so there would be no de-radicalization at all for them
Yeah, I remember when their content started to flood through the federation channels. As much as I find the recent burst of genzedong content to be annoying, that was outright horrifying.
Yeah, there is already a radicalized instance lol
Just giving my opinion for the other offering.
It would be great to see a Furry instance. :3c
Updated: a vegan one for organization, teaching and learning would be great too.
I too would like a vegan one, especially run by the ppl who run /r/vegancirclejerk. If you want to reach out to them I’d be glad to set one up for them.
I think some people don’t like Fur community ;-;.
rip /r/dogdiet
never forget o7
enough reddit censorship 😎
Do you think you can contact with them?
However, I am mostly interested in teaching and educational activism.
Oh man, I would like to, but I don’t have the technical knowledge
There is no technical knowledge necessary. After one year for the hosting yes, but by then there should be some users with the knowledge and willingness to help.
Why don’t liberals just spin up their own instance? Wasn’t that the point of making the code base open?
That’s the idea, I think this is just an offer to temporarily host it to see if it attracts sufficient users to transfer to dedicated hosting funded by the users later on.
Unfortunately they still just prefer to stay on reddit, and none have wanted to do the very small amount of work to set up their own instance.
That makes sense. And it confirms the complaints i heard about lemmy.ml being run by communists, even though it not looking like so. But have you thought about just talking to the admins and negotiate a plan for the mods to gradually be replaced by ones not tied to left wing movements? To avoid disrupting the user base and content?
We dont have any plans to change lemmy.ml administration.
This guy is the admin and dev of lemmy
Thanks fellow peach, for pointing this out to me. So i hope he reads my comment.
Why would one do that? There’s no problem with lemmy.ml being run by communists, since you can always switch to an instance that isn’t, if it bothers you. This is the federation. https://lemmymap.feddit.de/
It’s not a problem, and they should be able to do what they want with lemmy.ml for the reasons you mentioned. But if they thought my suggestion would work into making lemmy as a whole more accessible for those that are “bothered” by such leadership and just want a popular instance earlier rather than later, then that could be an option too. But it’s ultimately for them to decide this and we should respect their decisions.
For a more open instance, i only see beehaw.org as the option, which is the one I’m using for the very reason that it feels more open.
Are you going to finally make it the “original main” instance? lemmy.org as I already suggested on matrix should do the job. and for the hosting cost I’m sure the community will help and it would be quite low anyway.
Its better if someone else hosts such an instance, we are already quite busy with development.
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When even i’ve been on sopuli.xyz, i would usually see finnish (?) posts so didn’t even know they catered towards english users too.
It looks like I haven’t been vocal enough with my messaging regarding Sopuli. Yes, the instance has a Finnish name and we have wooed in some Finnish users but it is intended to be general-purpose. Making a purely Finnish instance wouldn’t be feasible.
We try to be a service for the majority, taking sides in politics can drive away a lot of otherwise good users. Here’s a link to our ToS if anyone is curious: https://gitlab.com/perthchat.org/legal/-/blob/main/terms-of-service.md
Big thanks for to the lemmy team for helping us get started easily! <3
What happens after the first year if the hosting is not renewed? Will you help facilitate migration to another hosting option?
I’m not interested in admining or joining it, just asking in case others had similar concerns.
This post is over a year old…
Peak lemmy algorithm strikes again.
