edgerunneralexis

Are you considering making and moderating and equivalent community here on Lemmy? A lot of people here want to start communities or at least for those communities to exist but don't have the time or experience or mental health to moderate them ourselves, so moderators directly moving here from Reddit could make a massive impact!

im just shooting that down outright, what about the devs or the server they run matters?

It matterd because the servers those devs run with their heavy pro authoritarian red fascist moderation and cultural bias were the two largest instances, the flagships, both by virtue of their size and their official nature. That size means they influence users' overall experience of the lemmy network's culture and atmosphere via posts and comments and votes, so yeah, you can sign up for a different instance and that local community won't have that atmosphere and those moderation problems but you're still connected in the network to the tankies and the tankies have the largest and most dominant instances so they have the most effect on the content of the network, and you can't completely avoid them except by deferating and basically hamstringing yourself by separating from the two largest instances.

Thanks to Beehaw and especially lemmy.world though, I think this is rapidly changing and won't be a significant problem for much longer, although there is the remaining concern that the developers' biases will show through in how they develop the underlying lemmy server software. For instance, unlike Mastodon, right now there is no way for you as an individual to block an entire instance, and I foresee it possibly being difficult to convince the lemmy developers to allow that, since one of the hallmarks of Marxist-Leninist ideology is a focus on mass movement building where everyone is forced to interact and join this one giant movement, even with people they don't like or can't get a long with, which could make them hostile to allowing more freedom of association in the fediverse. I'm already seeing tankies from lemmygrad accusing instances that defederate from them of sectarianism and endangering the "movement", in fact.

I think it might for a little while but not for much longer.

When the influx started, the two oldest and biggest Lemmy instances, the ones maintained by the developers, and thus presumably the flagship instances, were lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml. Tankies are definitely overrepresented in those two instances, and since the devs themselves are tankies, there's a lot of moderation bias in favor of red fascist authoritarian regimes even in the nominally "neutral" lemmy.ml — such as them refusing to remove genocide denial or outright genocide justification, while also removing posts critical of China and so on.

You might argue that this doesn't affect you if you just pick a different instance, because the culture of that instance will be different and so will the moderation, but the problem with that is that if the vast majority of users on a network are tankies and are moderated by tankies then that's going to influence your experience of the network as a whole pretty much unavoidably unless you defederate with the largest instances and thereby intentionally hamstring yourself.

So even if you joined another instance, your experience of the site as a whole would be dominated by a tankie leaning culture via comments and posts, and that's where the reputation (deservedly) came from. And it probably did and maybe still does hamper the growth a little bit. It definitely made me, a trans anarchist, think twice about joining.

However, with the more neutral and professionally-run lemmy.world taking over as the second largest and flagship instance, and beehaw as the third (iirc), as well as the overall influx of a variety of users from Reddit, I think over time the dominance of tankies in how the network is experienced by users, even from other instances, will drastically decrease, especially as many instances defederate from lemmmygrad, and so the reputation will also fade.

Yup, that's kind of my plan

I really want to exclusively switch to Lemmy, but as it stands I'll probably end up starting to use Reddit again as soon as the the vast majority of the blackout ends (I'm not gonna give in easily, but once it's mostly over, there's no point in me continuing).

The problem for me is that on Reddit even extremely niche communities had a substantial amount of members and activity, whereas Lemmy is smaller than Reddit, so everything scales down proportionally, meaning that suddenly communities that were niche on Reddit are infinitesimally tiny or even just absent on Lemmy. Like, there's no malazan community, elitedangerous and wheeloftime are dead, amiga is dead, and so on.

I actually got a ton of extremely high quality, positive interaction on the subreddits I was on, because I almost entirely stayed away from the really popular subreddits, and I'm losing all that moving to here, where the popular communities have higher quality interaction but the smaller communities have way worse interaction. Also, Reddit is a massive treasure-trove of useful niche information for me.

Same. I really appreciate the hyperrealistic, amazing graphics of stuff like Cyberpunk 2077 don't get me wrong, but I would be more than happy to accept a game with even like Half-Life 1 levels of graphics as long as it has amazing gameplay and story and lots of real hand-crafted content. Obviously, you can have both (CP2077 again!) but you have to really pay for that, and I'd be okay with those games being rarer and having more games like I described.

Would it be possible to make the bot post the content of the Reddit posts, instead of links to Reddit, via web scraping? That way we could avoid giving traffic and engagement to reddit.

Reddit's down for me lmao

Exactly this. A long term blackout, especially a user blackout, is not feasible without a replacement place to go to.

Yeah when the blackout started I disabled my Reddit app and haven't been back there once since. We need more people doing this.

Dude's unironically saying "you'll be back" lmao. Well, it sucks that the intimidation tactic of demonstrating our numbers and solidarity with a short strike didn't work as I originally feared. I said a couple times in the lead up to the strike that only striking for two days instead of indefinitely was ultimately going to be a performative move because it would give them assurance that it would be temporary and so ultimately the scene as a temporary inconvenience at most by Reddit management. That to really make them hurt and to make them scared a sizeable portion of subreddits would have to go dark indefinitely.

Someone pointed out to me that the performativity was kind of the point, because it was just a demonstration of concern and solidarity, and I had hoped that would work as a sort of forewarning of a more serious strike if they didn't listen, but that didn't pan out I guess.

I agree wholeheartedly. I think what all of us who care about these alternative underground social networks need to do is try to provide the best content we can, because that will attract other people here, which will benefit us in turn through the content they make!