Hey fellow humans,

I just recently discovered Lemmy. I had an understanding of the general existence of the “Fediverse” for some time, but never gave it much thought. Over the past months or so I read a lot on Reddit and by shear accident discovered Lemmy during that time, as a more federated, free alternative to big-corp Reddit.

Do not get me wrong. I am not per se opposed to big corporations. I am a bit more critical with those corporations that are mainly involved with information and data processing, so basically big-tech.

Now here I am, freshly registered to a german instance and I wanted to share my first impressions of Lemmy or the “Lemmy network”.

First off, Lemmy seems great. It has a nice and clean UI and its easy to understand.

But, tbh I already had a bad feeling when it came to choosing an instance to register to. Will I be basically at the mercy of whoever runs that server (with what I am allowed to say at least locally)? What happens when that person or group decides to shut down the server over night? Will my account still be valid elsewhere? How does this work?

One could argue, well what happens when Reddit turns off their website; And of course on Reddit I am also at the mercy of moderators; From a single user perspective there always seems to be the single point of failure in both alternatives. But from my experience, “money makes the world go round”, meaning: If there is a legitimate business case it is more likely that such a website or instance will stay online, whereas a lonesome enthusiast will likely loose interest after a while. And then its all gone (at least for that instance)? Is Lemmy than a sub-optimal Reddit alternative?

After registration I noticed something additionally “disturbing”. There seems to be a big divide in the Lemmy community, as the instances are free to block certain instances. And I read here, about how big this problem apparently is. Hence, it is not about a big blocklist for unwanted instances, it is also about general focus of conversations across instances.

In fact, this puts me again at the mercy of any instance administrator what I am allowed to see or interact with. Is that not a contradiction of a rather free and open network? It appears anti-liberal in some sense. And a liberal digital society is what we would all strive for, I guess?

Ultimately, this would mean I would have to run my own instance to avoid the risk attached to this situation. But the extreme case of that would be that we are all running our own instances. That does not make sense at all. Then everyone runs and instance and we are all more or less blocking each other.

I guess there is no clean way of doing this? And in the end platforms like Lemmy are always formed by the people who drive them. Hence, personal opinions will always play a role.

But I think a liberal real life society goes to show how things should be: There are rules, but freedom of speech is very much emphasized. For me ideal communication involves that everyone can speak their mind. But then, there are certainly somewhere limits.

I am all against safe spaces, but I am pretty much for respectfulness, indulgence, fairness and constructive dispute. I do not fear any argument that is told in the pursuit of having an honest conversation, an exchange of arguments and ideas.

I would even say, when we are hindering ourselves of having this kind of honest dispute, we are loosing our developed societies.

On the other hand (like in the real world) simply insulting people should not be tolerated.

So, I wonder, is this place actually for me, apparently as a rather liberal person?

Is Lemmy liberal enough from your perspective?

Do you have insights or answers with regards to my questions or blind spots?

Thank you in advance and see you around!

  • MilanMA
    10·
    6 days ago
    • On certain parts of the tchncs infra, an emergency-co-admin already got access, I should prioritize this more so that it also counts for the host lemmy runs on. Other than that, unless something happens to me, there will not be any surprise shutdown of service. In the highly unlikely event of a planned shutdown, there will be at the very very least half a year time for users to move to other instances.
      • The donation situation for tchncs is … fine, at least for securing cost coverage excluding my time. If cost cutting is required (which luckily has not happened yet), I of course try to prioritize on actively used services and try saving on services that are wasteful in terms of user/needed resource ratio. Something like peertube perhaps where terrabytes of video only get a handful of views.
    • Only instances that seem dedicated to lawbreaking/extensive rulebreaking content or unmoderated instances overrun by bots will be blocked. And ideally only if there is too much or risk of too much exposure to our instance, causing too much moderation effort required. There will not be an instance block against instances where I dislike people or similar (there are quite sensible admins in the network tho that would act like that or similar, sadly). If we have an instance on the list, that does not seem to belong there, I am open for reconsideration.

    And note: I keep trying to do whats best for the community. I am always open for ideas and opinions. :) If i don’t respond to something, it is very likely that I once again failed to manage my inbox and tasks. 😅

    • SomeLemmyUser
      2·
      3 days ago

      As a tchncs user: this is very much how I experienced it here, from all I can see Milan is a very nice, engaged and liberal admin always acting in good faith. Although prioritiesing the “bus faktor” (what happens to the service if the one person in charge gets run over by a bus) is never a bad idea.

      Also he even helped me when I had syncing issues with my pixelfed account, no questions asked (although my friends on pixelfed.de still don’t see when I post or comment)

      The fediverse is new and there are some kinks that still need to be ironed out, but in general its already a way better experience then reddit IMHO

      For the “there are multiple communities on the same topic on different instances”:

      I actually see this as a positive thing. On reddit there were Admins who notoriously banned everyone not agreeing with them (like some in the DACH community for example) who just got a lot of power because they happend to be there early and founded that community.

      If stuff like this happens here, other people can make another community with the same name but with a different moderation approach.

      For us users this is a positive thing, one can just subscribe to both and post to the one one likes best.

    • reedbend
      6·
      6 days ago

      thank you for doing the work to offer these services :)