this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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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; and I think that this wall of text that I wrote about how lemmy dot ml handled ani.social shows it well, as the dispute in question was not political in nature. (I can abridge it at request.)
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, it defeats the point of a federation. That instance is already 40% of the MAUs, and hosts the largest comms using Lemmy.
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:
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.
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.
It's where big replacement communities happen to be, that's all there is to it. Avoiding centralisation is a good thing in general but "tired of .ml mods? Here's alternatives" isn't the right time to go for it I think. Maybe the admins can come up with a scheme to round-robin disable community creation or something, to spread things out. Also, community migration is in the pipeline software-wise that would help a lot.
I'm thinking that perhaps the community could/should go a step further, and create another instance to talk about open source and privacy. That would be IMO the best scenario - it would be a great counterpoint to .ml, and it would avoid centralising Lemmy around .world even further.
(I also feel like this might be better even for the devs. Administrative work isn't exactly pleasing, and if I had to take a guess they mostly maintain that instance because they need it for the software. But that's just a guess, don't trust me on that.)
inb4: yes, I know - easier said than done. But I feel like it could be a good option.
FYI, a post on [email protected] about a !privacy community: https://mander.xyz/post/13928027
Lots of good suggestions there. It would be great if @[email protected] mentioned at least [email protected] and [email protected] in the OP.
FYI, an update on the [email protected] post on the !privacy community: https://lemm.ee/post/34088759?scrollToComments=true
Long story short, [email protected] is a nice option, it even has more active users per week than the LW equivalent (376 vs 346)
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Thanks!
It defeats some of the points of federation, but there are still a lot of reasons why federation is still worth doing even if there's essentially one dominant provider. Not least of which is that sometimes the dominant provider does get displaced over time. We've seen it happen with email a few times, where the dominant provider loses market share to upstarts, one of whom becomes the new dominant provider in some specific use case (enterprise vs consumer, mobile vs desktop vs automation/scripting, differences by nation or language), and where the federation between those still allows the systems to communicate with each other.
Applied to Lemmy/kbin/mbin and other forum-like social link aggregators, I could see LW being dominant in the English-speaking, American side of things, but with robust options outside of English language or communities physically located outside of North America. And we'll all still be able to interact.