I don’t care how big .world gets because it’s the same thing with mastodon.social or pixelfed.social. Coming from primarily centralized services, people will always be looking for a “main” instance because that’s what their brains are used to and that’s what will help adoption. The ones who care will use another instance. As long as fedi has the users and not the proprietary alternatives, it’s fine. We can manage.

The way that I see it, the issue with lemmy ml’s administration and moderation is not quite political in origin. It’s about transparency

Well it’s really both. The issue is the combination of a number of factors which on their own would be fairly easy to deal with, but put together they are very problematic:

1. The admins are political extremists
2. lemmy.ml has a very prominent position in the lemmyverse, because they were first and got a headstart
3. The admins are actively using their position to heavily police discussion according to their extremist political views. The fact that they’re not being transparent about it is aggravating, but not the root problem.

This prominent position of lemmy.ml is the fundamental difference with the hexbear or lemmygrad situation. Those instances can easily be contained at the user level: most people can just block and ignore them entirely because nothing interesting happens on those instances for non-extremists. Not so with lemmy.ml, which hosts a number of large bona-fide communities.

So I think it’s necessary to make a concerted effort to reduce lemmy.ml’s prominence in the fediverse, so that political extremists can’t put their thumb on the scale to nudge discussion in a certain direction. Part of that effort is raising awareness about lemmy.ml’s nature, which is what this PSA does, but that likely won’t be enough due to network effect. It will take more to get people to move their communities to other instances. If other large instances, like lemmy.world, would block lemmy.ml that would provide a real stimulus for a large amount of people to move away from lemmy.ml.

With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to “use lemmy.world instead”. I don’t have anything against LW’s administration, but I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further

I agree that spreading out more would be desirable, but on the other hand “just use lemmy.world instead of lemmy.ml” is a very simple and practical suggestion to move away from ml.

With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to “use lemmy.world instead”.

It’s where big replacement communities happen to be, that’s all there is to it. Avoiding centralisation is a good thing in general but “tired of .ml mods? Here’s alternatives” isn’t the right time to go for it I think. Maybe the admins can come up with a scheme to round-robin disable community creation or something, to spread things out. Also, community migration is in the pipeline software-wise that would help a lot.

IMO organizations should self-host their official communities. If you’re going to move, it ought to be to something like !openmw@lemmy.openmw.org.

In addition to the obvious benefits of having admin control/being able to avoid moderation drama imposed by others, it also means you could have more than one community: maybe !openmw for general discussion, plus !modding, !development, etc.

We love to be the home of smaller communities, but for sure, any larger ones should look into running on their own setup. If you need help, drop us a line!

I had a look at your community, do you want to save post and comments?

If not, the easiest way is to announce on the current community where you are going to move, then lock it, so that people indeed move to the new one.

I did it from !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee, it worked quite well.

And .world is liberal amerikkkan bs then?

(not saying that either one is right btw)

It affects people who think that Lemmy.ml is the default instance, as it says itself and people say that any instance is fine to join.

It also affects people in the batshit insane comments that come from people on that instance, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, that occur with noticeably higher frequency than from other places.

It also affects people on that instance who talk as if into a void with many people blocking their instance but they don’t even know that. And that effect will increase over time.

It lowers traffic on the Fediverse, decreasing overall engagement, and drives people away from it altogether. It also lowers the likelihood that you can recommend to people irl to check out the Fediverse - when THAT stuff (e.g. defense of genocide) is seen it tends to turn people off who aren’t used to it or who are tech or culture savvy enough to know how to handle it.

So it does affect you, I promise, even if not directly, and over the next few months will do so increasingly as your instance turns into more of an echo chamber than it has been in the past, as more people block it either individually or at an instance level.

Agreed that many of the users are regular people who are just innocently getting swept up in all of this due to the actions of the admins. Just like users of Reddit were when spez did his power flex moves.

You might want to at least make an alt somewhere else so that you get some experiences that your .ml account increasingly will start to lack.

Sounds like programming.dev might be a good fit, or perhaps dbzer0?

.world liberals are on a propaganda crusade to close off their Zionist echo chambers.

I mean it’s obviously run by Russia so anything that makes people realise you can’t trust anything that comes out of it is good.

Isn’t the point of lem.ee that you get as wide an access to the fediverse as possible? I agree that lemmy.ml is run by terrible people, btw, I’m just wondering why you chose your instance.

Feel free to create an elaborate post on !fediverse@lemmy.ml or !fediverse@lemmy.zip

I’m sure people would read it with great attention

Elaborate?

I like to think that a lot of the more “Reddity” Reddit refugees from .world, those who tend toward pearl clutching theatrics like these posts, will eventually head back to Reddit. Maybe they’ll find their perfect alternative, where there are no dev or admin issues and everyone has a comforting (for them) center-left to center-right, Western ideology driven political stance that never challenges their preconceptions.