There was Wolfballs, which started out as a right-leaning free speech instance, but was obviously quickly overrun by trolls and fascists, so everyone defederated them and the owner decided to shut it down. As a result all the problematic people including the mods from Wolfballs moved to Exploding-Heads, which welcomed them with open arms despite also not being originally a pure right-wing instance. And yeah obviously they got defederated as well then...
Yeah, I hadn't thought of political leanings when I signed up. I literally just googled for a list of instances, and the first instance that I successfully signed up with stuck. I tried .ml and .world first, but their signup pages were DoS'ed by the hoardes of redditors like myself fleeing when our apps died because of the api BS...
Can't say that I regret my instance though. When ml and blahaj are going off on each other, I'll grab some popcorn and sit back... But I've learned that you shouldn't engage with a .ml community, and the mods on .world are probably the most like the power hungry cunts on reddit.
Whenever I see the admins post, it's always with charts and details that I don't generally see (or at least, don't generally notice) from other instances.
At least at the start, the instance was mostly networking and sysadmin nerds. During reddit's APIocalypse, our admin started up the server and put up a detailed post about the hardware, infrastructure and benchmarking everything. Stuff like that is what drew me and many others to this instance.
My recollection of "the lore" is that the admin already owned "itjust.works" and thought "sh" would be a funny subdomain for hosting lemmy. I think the sjw initialism is just a coincidence.
Excellent! Although you might need to shift LW more fully into the blue if they decide to implement the Flat Earth proposal that they strongly tried to push a month ago, before as you say walking that back in response to the enormous outcry against it. Were they to continue though, that would radically shift the balance of everything across all of Lemmy if all of those community mods gave up and had to find new homes elsewhere.
Legitimately think that they simply did not think the proposal through. It was pretty nakedly an attempt to push back at radical echo-chamber communities, without understanding that rules cut both ways, and in the process of trying to justify and clarify it without being 'ideological', managed to just highlight how absurd the proposed rule was to begin with.
The two big problems with .world's admins is that they're very much amateurs (which is a hard thing to avoid in our scenario here), and that they, like many centrists, have trouble discerning where their ideology begins and ends. They feel the need to phrase things in 'fair' and non-discriminatory terms, but in doing so, often blunder into self-contradictory positions, because ultimately, discrimination (in the sense of discerning and marking) between views is what all rules are based on. The kind of "The law is the law" attitude that people who are accustomed to following, but not making, law, are prone to. One hopes that a mixture of experience and pushback will improve them, with time.
But yeah, had they implemented that, they'd go more auth and right, and I'd probably be packing up all my comms to go to another instance. Again.
This is like the third time LW tried to be front-and-center in deciding how conversations should happen on Lemmy. You are the most popular Lemmy instance and most content is on your instance. This isn’t an experimental safe space instance to dictate how social media should work. Please understand that any weirdly aggressive stances you take affects everyone.
managed to just highlight how absurd the proposed rule was to begin with.
It was (unintentionally) the best thing they could do to show users it was a terrible blanket rule and also showed that they weren't smart enough to notice it was a terrible idea before making it public.
I could see that. I legit thought it was a good proposal to suggest at least this part:
If they’re just saying something you don’t like, respectfully, and they’re not spamming it, use your words instead of your moderation abilities.
Edit: I was probably overstating the case - it could be good, I suppose? Then again, why not leave it to the mods to decide what they want for their own communities? Yet the instance admins should also have a say what kinds of communities exist on their instance, especially if legality of content is part of the issue. It's definitely a balancing act no matter what.
Especially in light of some of the stuff that came before. But it definitely went off the deep end with the likes of:
We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments.
Woah, not the best choice of words there perhaps even if the concept itself was meant legitimately.
I would really hate to see the mods of e.g. !tenforward@lemmy.world have to put up with crap like that, or as you said it's more likely that they would simply step down as mods, and then hopefully migrate the community elsewhere. Unlike the debacle with 196, such a move there would be fully supported by the community members, in that case, I have zero doubts.
Flat earth? Were they trolling or really believed that stuff? A lot of flat earthers are just trolls that don't even believe what they are posting. They're just trying to get a reaction.
To be clear, I meant the blue of this compass, even though in many parts of the world it may differ, like in the USA red = maga while blue = liberal, but in the color scheme of this graphic those are reversed.
As for whether it would shift things more towards the yellow, I didn't even really consider that option: LW was just already split between red and blue and I was saying that it would shift more towards the authoritarian side, as in conservatives would then be allowed to spout their talking points whereas right now most conservative opinions are silenced (bc the vast majority of us are simply tired of hearing them spouted not in a good faith manner). But yeah I suppose it would also shift it in the libertarian axis as well.
There are a lot of groups which coordinate spreading of lies to shout down others and deter others from contributing, firehose of falsehood style, and allowing that does not contribute to free speech. It does not support sharing facts, it doesn't support healthy conversation, it doesn't help anybody learn or discover the truth. Allowing conspiracy theories and nonsense like that is a net negative.
You need moderators who are focused on making sure people feel free to join in good faith.
I think it's even funnier that we hand out labels right at the ticket stand to lemmy and turn around to say that labeling people based on norms is bad.
Someone needs to make a comic, you can't even make this shit up. Sign up for your next stake burning at a server near you.
I strayed into dbzero without knowing what it was. Took me a few minutes of feeling like I was in the Twilight Zone before realizing they were all Libertarians and had a good laugh at myself for accidentally taking them seriously.
They're both dipshits that live within society but don't understand how it functions or even want it to function. But they definitely want to benefit from it.