I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A
lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml]. It’s
been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s
say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, t...
Lemmy.ml, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, has consistently been accused of improper Federation practices and many instances have decided to ban one or both of the latter by default, with many individual users having already gone further to block the former as well. However, many individual users on lemmy.ml seem unaware of the accusations of the practices of their admins, and some people go so far as to see lemmy.ml as a sort of default instance on the Fediverse.
This discussion promotes wider knowledge of the situation and what might be done about it in the future, in order to e.g. not turn away new potential Federation members (Fedizens?:-) that could otherwise associate what happens on that instance as something relating to the Fediverse as a whole.
if you are based in North America, lemmy.ca is nice
That's pretty much it.
For the transfer of communities, there is a tab in the user settings to export your settings (including subscriptions) to a JSON file. You can then import it to your new account.
For people that want an instance-level block for the Big 3 Axis powers - hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and Lemmy.ml - are you aware of anything that could be recommended?
I also went through all the top ones at https://lemmyverse.net/ and very few to nothing is defederated from lemmy.ml (though yffit is defederated byLemmy.ml...:-P).
Kbin.social might have been, but I'm not certain and it's been down for several days. Possibly an Mbin one could be but that also has enormous implications for apps chosen and the interface in general.
So what I'm trying to think of is a Lemmy instance to recommend to people, even irl to consider joining the Fediverse, bc otherwise I'm hesitant to recommend us at this point, given all the absolute shit that I would be exposing them too by default, until they learn how to block stuff. It's similar to Linux then in that unless I walk them through setting up an account and curating their experience, it's too overwhelming and they will just give up. For whatever reason, we collectively have decided that we are okay with this really terrible situation that heavy curation is mandatory... even as we also claim that we want the Fediverse to grow.
your home instance doesnt necessarily need to be a behemoth as you can subscribe to all the same stuff. ive got a dozen or so users at moist.catsweat.com who primarily consume lemmy content
The one issue smaller instances have is that the All feed is much less populated as communities only show up if at least one user of the instance is subscribed to it.
Not a dealbreaker of course, but something to be aware of.
yeah i kinda did something silly by have a bot user subscribe to populated communities in popular instances to resolve that exact issue. it misses the brand new ones though.
for general-purpose ones - arguably the best approach - visit a site like https://lemmyverse.net/ to see those that have the most activity on them and might be closest to you.
Do NOT get mislead though by the community / instance descriptions, e.g. midwest.social says that it is for "leftists in the Midwest USA", but what it means by "leftists" is not the common usage (especially for people in the Midwestern USA, who would interpret it like "progressive liberal" or some such) and rather more extreme forms such as full-on communism. Similarly, hexbear.net never bothers to enforce their own Code of Conduct (the only time they remember the human is when you say something they agree with - any other time the human is fair game to be dunked on!). But it is like watching Fox News: regardless of what they say, pretty quickly you get a sense that something is a bit "off" when you visit these places:-).
lemmy.ml is much harder to get a read on though, hence the linked discussion. It does not say that it is leftist, or even has any instance description that I can see - they just call themselves "Lemmy" as if that is sufficient, with no disambiguation between it and the software that runs on it or any acknowledgement that the rest of the Fediverse exists. Ironically lemmygrad.ml is doing better these days at more accurately portraying what it is about, with a communist flag and manifesto - that honesty is appreciated, by me at least, as it shows an intellectual capacity to realize that other viewpoints exist and thus to distinguish self vs. nonself, unlike what lemmy.ml does (not).
I think there are some tools to transfer accounts but I have never used them so I don't know where to find them - sorry, but I hope knowing that at least helps you find them:-).
My comment above is pretty much my recommendation.
I think there are some tools to transfer accounts but I have never used them so I don’t know where to find them - sorry, but I hope knowing that at least helps you find them:-).
For the transfer of communities, there is a tab in the user settings to export your settings (including subscriptions) to a JSON file. You can then import it to your new account.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works