They banned Hexbear.

You should be able to uncheck “Show Read” here in your user settings:

Then you’ll hide any post that I believe you comment on or upvote/downvote, I think? I’m not sure how it counts something as being “read,” that could use some work/clarification. There are times where I feel neutral about a post and don’t want to upvote or downvote (or I see something I dislike on Beehaw, which explicitly disallows downvotes).

Lemmy doesn’t - yet. But it’s pretty easy to just make another account. ;)

My other account @EnglishMobster@lemmy.ml still exists, but it’s not like Mastodon where I have followers.

Does that mean these’ll finally be reasonably priced again???

Rest up! I worry about what this place will look like on July 1st, when Reddit shuts off API access entirely.

Mastodon is “too confusing”, don’t you know??

It really seems like that’s the one area that ActivityPub in general could work on, though. It’s hard to change instances (I jumped from lemmy.ml to beehaw.org, for example, but you really can’t tell). Because it’s hard to change instances, choosing an instance is a pretty big choice.

But if instance-hopping was made easy… well, then you could have a default instance people land on that they could try out. Think of it like a Linux Live USB for the Fediverse. Just give them a neutral “default” and then offer them a way to filter into a smaller instance if they wanted.

That’s what BlueSky is leaning into, and I wish Mastodon had done the same. Lemmy kinda has this with lemmy.ml, but that’s more of an accident than anything else.

If you go to https://beehaw.org/instances, you’ll see a big list of instances which are allowed…

…and one that is explicitly blocked.

See, Lemmy caught on with certain groups very early on. The main Lemmy instance has always been left-leaning. But one group that really latched on to Lemmy from the extremely early days was tankies.

These guys have their own community, “Lemmygrad” - IIRC, their servers are even based in China, or they claim to be. They were the most active users of Lemmy before Reddit shot themselves in the foot, and their influence has been felt across a lot of the other instances. If you ever went to GenZedong on Reddit, you get an idea of what they’re like. (There’s even a version of that subreddit on Lemmygrad.)

One reason why I switched to Beehaw is because they’ve blocked that instance. If you’re on the “main” lemmy.ml instance run by the developers and you go to your version of /r/all, you’ll see posts from Lemmygrad show up pretty frequently - because Lemmygrad still has a fairly large community, and they’re still pretty active relative to the size of Lemmy itself.

If people go to join-lemmy.org like they’re “meant” to, they’ll almost certainly see Lemmygrad at the top of the instance list. Anecdotally, a lot of Redditors see that and get turned off, thinking this place is full of tankies. (And, to be fair… before everyone from Reddit started showing up, a lot of Lemmy was full of tankies…)

Even on Lemmy itself, there’s a lot of people who dislike that side of the project. They’re authoritarian at best, and genocide deniers at worst. And the people who created Lemmy are at least sympathetic to them, even if they don’t outright endorse it publicly.

But. Lemmy is open-source. No one person or ideology can control the project, as it can always be forked. Even the creators of Lemmy itself have no control over what happens at Beehaw. So steering people away from the tankie side of Lemmy and towards a more, uh, “normal” instance is for the best, especially since this place needs to grow if it’s to be taken seriously as a Reddit competitor.

Beehaw has chosen to step away from that drama by explicitly banning that instance, hence why I’ve been sending people on Reddit here instead of mentioning join-lemmy.org.

Reddit has a whole team of people who delete content. Because they’re a company, as well, individual people can’t be arrested by the FBI if they fail to do their job.

Before Reddit hosted images themselves, though, there was Imgur. I know Imgur was small - I’m not sure how they dealt with this sort of stuff. The answer may be “they didn’t and just got lucky”.

159 and climbing!

It’s already one of the top posts of all time. 😉

I’ve also been recommending Beehaw to people on Reddit because they’re less likely to run into, uh, certain people from certain other Lemmy instances.

I finally deleted my account yesterday. I was one of the earliest Twitter users, so it was hard to say goodbye.