If we're to have any chance at convincing more Reddit users to join the Fediverse, the main Lemmy and Kbin instances need to stick together. While the piracy community being among the biggest arguably doesn't make for great optics (having a greater variety of communities above the 50k user mark would help bring more users to Lemmy), a fragmented federation only helps Reddit. Beyond that, this community has rules in place to ensure that posts stick to the discussion of piracy, and not piracy itself.
While the piracy community being among the biggest arguably doesn't make for great optics
I'd argue otherwise. It is great optics to have a thriving piracy community. It keeps the corporate boot lickers out, and attracts the kind of crowd that we should want on Lemmy.
While it's great to have a thriving piracy community, it being one of the only thriving ones inevitably makes potential users associate the platform with it and convinces them to either choose another Reddit alternative or simply avoid the inconvenience of switching platforms. While we may disagree with them, the failure of the Reddit blackout demonstrated that they make up the lion's share of users from large communities that have yet to materialize here. Better to have many communities with a diversity of opinions than only a handful of echo chambers.
For me it's about all the subreddits that didn't migrate to Lemmy, and the ghost town feeling caused by only having 55,000 monthly users versus Reddit's 850 million. With Lemmy's active user count slowly dropping instead of rising, everything needs to be done to bring more redditors to Lemmy, whether they are supporters of piracy or not.
before there was reddit there were message boards and these message boards tended to be pretty small and niche. They would have low thousands of users, if that. I don't think having low user counts is something to be afraid of - especially for sites run and paid for by volunteers.
Message boards like that have dedicated userbases for their subject matter though, something that is missing on Lemmy for most subject matters. Since I'd like to be on Lemmy for more than just, for my interests at least, a piracy message board, more users are needed to build interest in communities that weren't promoted by a subreddit.
Yeah. Lemmy's entire population is about as large as some of the smaller gaming subreddits. Even /r/mildyinteresting has over 200k subscribers (4x as big as Lemmy), and that subreddit is a misspelling of /r/mildlyinteresting.
Nah I wouldn't want Lemmy to attract anti-piracy bootlickers (specially considering why we left Reddit for Lemmy in the first place). This being the largest community is a good filter imo.
The vast majority of those (on the dbzer0 list) are obviously just copied from someone's medium-sized mastodon blocklist, which in this case mostly includes instances that definitely deserve it. I recognize only a few dubious choices in there, and none that are completely indefensible.
The current fediseer censured list seems much larger and correspondingly more problematic in places. You've started out with a good list, hope you exercise due caution in adding to it.
Yeah, sorry, I've never really looked at it before. But its web UI just shows them all as one big list. I wouldn't mind seeing a list of those censured by more than 10 instances, or all of a selected group of instances... is that in the API?
But a federation is fragmentation. If the only thing that doesn't help reddit is another centralized system, then that's really just a claim that private ownership of the internet is good, actually, so long as we like the owners.
I assume they mean more like what's happening on Mastodon, where instances mass defederate other instances for not having the same instances defederated