cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/70156 since it wasn’t allowed and I got banned. Worth checking the original post for comments.
For a long time I’ve been grappling with the project lemmy. As a person never really been interested in reddit I’ve found it fills the role of a decentralized forum platform, which is something I’ve been looking for for a long time.
Unfortunately a lot of it’s user, and even more concernedly It’s developers are of a certain political mindset. Believing and spreading propaganda denying current and genocides of the past, posting things like “defeat israel”, defending russia and china, pushing misnifnormation and propaganda in the dictatorship of Belarus’s favour and even supporting north korea.
It’s all pretty crazy.
In the beginning I believed Lemmy could grow to be more than it is now. But I’ve come to realize that Lemmy is just the gab of the left, but as an alternative to reddit so they can spread their stuff.
So I’ve decided that I am not vouching for Lemmy as a viable platform anymore. I don’t think Lemmy is going to have much of a future in the fediverse anymore either. I’ll actively work against Lemmy and it’s developers and there isn’t much projects or organizations that are going to want to associate with Lemmy either.
You could consider this a kind of goodbye, but I am just here on the fediverse doing my usual stuff. But you can consider it an end to ‘better’ world news and lemmy drama of the century. Now there will be 99% tankies on the platform instead of just 98.9%.
Another better desentralized forum will come, and when it comes I’ll be ready for it.
Peace and love, Chris from Norway
would you be willing to host some sort of an event on lemmy, where admins and users come and discuss and effectively shape its future? I understand that part of why you passionatly work on lemmy is your personal beliefs and I respect that, and honestly it’s way too cruel to tell an open source developer that maybe their platform needs to change :(
but I think lemmy.ml, in its current state is flawed. it’s targeted at a very niche audience, and the existing community isn’t even welcoming or friendly to anyone who’s not at least a leftist. it makes it unable to present itself to a broader audience who could really benefit from it, it even prevents its existing culture from spreading (some of its aspects we all agree should be more publicized). so if you make a post, and discussion happens, and it turns out that there could be a better path for lemmy, would you consider a reform?
as an example would you go ahead and have a friendly and honest AMA about what you want Lemmy and lemmy.ml to be, as one of their developers and admins? I think it will help the community to know where we’re headed. maybe you yourself see a point you hadn’t noticed before.
I don’t mean to pressure you or to be annoying. I appreciate you as the develper of the software and platform I use on a daily basis, just trying to help lemmy become better.
I also want to re-iterate what nutomic said below: we’re not really interested in gaining a mass following of users. That takes away time from us being able to do dev work, and forces us to focus on moderation.
Also, pretty much any reddit alternative selling itself as a “free speech” platform, will get hundreds of the racist rejects begging for a platform after being kicked off many others. We do not want them. We’d much rather have a small, friendly, non-toxic community.
There’s only 4 sidebar rules, but the one against bigotry ( that we actually enforce ) is more than enough for lemmy to be called a “for-leftists-only” reddit alt, and all the baggaged names that go along with that: tankie, authoritarian, etc.
I’ve kinda come to the conclusion that the thing really blocking adoption isn’t really lemmy’s current features ( we’ve added so many, and have far surpassed most other reddit alts both by performance and feature set ), or our moderation policies of this instance. I realized this a few months ago after I added like 10 features at once, and our numbers didn’t increase, nor did we get cross-posted online too much. Its the lack of mobile apps and a diverse app ecosystem that’s the main reason people still use reddit over other link aggregators.
Nutomic will do a post within the next few days on !meta@lemmy.ml where we can discuss this too.
I’m not a fan of making lemmy mainstream to become a second reddit either. but about the moderation, I think it’ll be better to let moderators do most of the job, and since you’re busy developing, surely other admins are willing to help with moderation.
oh, I didn’t mean to make lemmy free speech zone for neonazis, racists and bigots. that would only make people leave lemmy instead joining it.
I don’t think the no bigotry means only leftists will be allowed. what about centrists? what about progressive liberals? I know soferman didn’t talk politely, but do you consider him a bigot? sure he was biased, but a bigot? for calling people with alien ideas (to him and people around him) crazy? woulden’t it be better if we could make him more open minded instead of making him hostile towards us? I talked about this in my reply to nutomic.
sure, lemmur can have more features, and it would be interesting to try and modify some reddit apps to work with lemmy (I think having infinity would be nice) but I don’t think that’s the only reason. network effect, lack of diverse content and maybe intolerence towards some fairly tolerant people would also play an important role.
nice to hear, thank you!
I wanna say it again, I’m not asking for lemmy to become something you don’t like or don’t feel passionate about, just wanna help <3
You can make a thread on that topic, and as we are quite active here, we will most likely respond. But there seems to be a major misunderstanding what lemmy.ml is about. This instance has always been niche, and we dont have any intentions to change it (in fact we like it this way). Lemmy and lemmy.ml both are what they are, and we dont intend to change anything.
You talk about making Lemmy better, but what do you mean by that? Making it more mainstream, or getting more users? These are not our goals and never will be. If thats what you care about, another instance might be better for you (either an existing or a new one).
I do like it too, I find it much more friendly that reddit. but I would say having a niche instance as your flagship hurts the wider adaption of Lemmy. and fediverse needs Lemmy as an alternative to reddit, so it also hurts fediverse. I don’t want lemmy.ml to change drastically, I like to be here, but I also think it’s a good idea to have a more inclusive instance as Lemmy’s flagship.
making Lemmy more welcoming to new users, making it a better part of the fediverse, and helping to spread its culture to more people. getting more users will be only a side effect. I mean if you agree that more people need to share lemmy.ml’s culture (FOSS, decentralization, privacy awareness, etc), then it would be a moral action to bring more people to Lemmy and increase the number of people who share its values.
take soferman as an example, he liked decentralized platforms, he was into FOSS, he cared about privacy and he was social dmocrat (so I guess you would consider him a centrist). the only problem was that some opinions were too radical to him and in deep contradiction with his beliefs and worldview, and since he felt offended by these ideas, he felt he must work against them. two things could have happened, Lemmy could be kinder to him and educate him, or become as hostile to him as he was to opposing ideas. the second one happened, and the result was soferman leaving, and resenting lemmy’s culture, and becoming more defensive to such ideas in the future.
I think if the first one had happened, we could have a soferman more open to other ideas, with a more realistic political opinions, spending more time learning about lemmy’s culture, and becoming a better person.
I think you agree that making better people will make a better world, and if we had helped soferman become more mature, we had made a world slightly better. I mean what’s the point of socialising and social media if not making better humans? sure as an open source dev you want to make a better world with better people. but we made a slightly worse world by making someone hate us, by making him more defensive towards us. by making him less tolerant.
if I had to guess, I would say your goal is to see more people who share lemmy’s culture. I mean if your goal was just having a niche community with a friendly environment, you’ve already got it, (and I must say I like it.) but you’re keeping adding new features and improving Lemmy, so there is a higher goal here.
I will stay here, because it’s friendly to me and I like it, I just wish more people could feel the same.
I dont know what the “fediverse needs”, but lets assume you are right. Lemmy.ml is not indented to be a direct alternative for Reddit, and there is no reason why we as developers should be the ones to create such an alternative.
For the rest of your comment, read this post which addresses pretty much all of it.
It is not. Our goal is exactly like you say, to have a niche community with a friendly environment. The goals of Lemmy as a software project are completely separate from that.