DefederateLemmyMl

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • People have choices. If they want to keep using the Lemmy.ml community, that’s their freedom. The alternatives exist, if they want to switch, they can.

    Because network effect is a thing, it’s really the illusion of choice. When a lemmy.ml community has 50k subscribers and the equivalent lemmy.world or programming.dev community has just a tenth of that, it’s not really a choice. People will always gravitate towards ml and the smaller community will never gain critical mass unless some strong enough outside force influences that decision.

    Which brings me to …

    Intrigued by your name change, you are really pushing for this.

    I think defederation from lemmy.ml together with raising awareness about ml should be the outside force to move communities off lemmy.ml.




  • The way that I see it, the issue with lemmy ml’s administration and moderation is not quite political in origin. It’s about transparency

    Well it’s really both. The issue is the combination of a number of factors which on their own would be fairly easy to deal with, but put together they are very problematic:

    1. The admins are political extremists
    2. lemmy.ml has a very prominent position in the lemmyverse, because they were first and got a headstart
    3. The admins are actively using their position to heavily police discussion according to their extremist political views. The fact that they’re not being transparent about it is aggravating, but not the root problem.

    This prominent position of lemmy.ml is the fundamental difference with the hexbear or lemmygrad situation. Those instances can easily be contained at the user level: most people can just block and ignore them entirely because nothing interesting happens on those instances for non-extremists. Not so with lemmy.ml, which hosts a number of large bona-fide communities.

    So I think it’s necessary to make a concerted effort to reduce lemmy.ml’s prominence in the fediverse, so that political extremists can’t put their thumb on the scale to nudge discussion in a certain direction. Part of that effort is raising awareness about lemmy.ml’s nature, which is what this PSA does, but that likely won’t be enough due to network effect. It will take more to get people to move their communities to other instances. If other large instances, like lemmy.world, would block lemmy.ml that would provide a real stimulus for a large amount of people to move away from lemmy.ml.

    With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to “use lemmy.world instead”. I don’t have anything against LW’s administration, but I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further

    I agree that spreading out more would be desirable, but on the other hand “just use lemmy.world instead of lemmy.ml” is a very simple and practical suggestion to move away from ml.





  • This is the best solution - the answers are in our hands

    There is the problem of network effect though. People who frequent communities on lemmy.ml are often blissfully unaware of how problematic that instance is, like I was until a few days ago, and so they’re unlikely to just move as they have no immediate reason to.

    It’s easy to say just pack up and move … but I’ve been really struggling to find an alternative for [email protected], to name one example. The equivalent communities [email protected] and [email protected] are rather stale with days old posts without comments.

    So I think it’s not just something an individual user can solve for themselves, and I think that the larger instances also have a role to play here. If they would defederate from lemmy.ml, it would urge users along to move away from lemmy.ml communities towards communities on other, more suitable instances.

    Next to that, we should also spread awareness about the lemmy.ml problem, and that was my intent when I originally made this post.