It's not too far off already, considering .ml, grad, and hexbear's propensity to advocate for violence against others for being "liberals."
Basically it's already a nazi bar with some red paint and a star on the door. The people who I told about lemmy all left pretty quick because of it and I've stopped recommending it to people entirely.
Long story short, discuss.online defederated hexbear recently, making it a potential recommendation for new joiners (they also block lemmygrad)
https://lemmy.cafe/ blocks ml too, but they have the 0.19.7 pictures bug. Once they fix that, they could become another go-to recommendation for new joiners.
That's good to know, I'll keep an eye on it, thanks! But tbh the reality is that .ml is still too integral to defed yet, until your decentralization efforts take hold (and btw I try to sub to the other communities whenever I see you post one I'm interested in and will sometimes unfollow the .ml one if I can, thanks for all the recommendations!)
I think at this moment people can live without .ml if they're not into tech. Sure, !privacy@lemmy.ml and !firefox@lemmy.ml are the most active in their fields, but the non-tech user probably doesn't care. And alternatives like !linux@programming.dev are getting more and more active
That may be true tbh, I'm more techy so I can't yet but maybe for someone who isn't they could.
Keep at it for sure! If this place really ends up thriving and getting bigger for niche interests and stuff it's in no small part because of your efforts to do so! I genuinely appreciate it, even for stuff I'm not personally interested in.
PieFed allows you to block all users from an instance of your choice without needing admin approval. The Lemmy apps Sync and Connect do also. So I've already managed to defederate from Lemmy.ml personally, aside from lemmy.cafe, dubvee.org, or quokk.au that have all done that at the admin level.
Although it sounds like you meant more that so many communities are still on that instance - which is fine - and don't have alternatives yet elsewhere, which is not fine. If you can, perhaps consider making just one and modding it to help it grow. It won't fix everything but it will help, and if 9 other people did likewise then that's 10 communities that people would not have had access to without those group efforts:-).
Little by little, I think that we don't have to consider places such as hexbear.net as part of "us" anymore. Perhaps it will take the further development of Mbin, PieFed, and Sublinks to accomplish that for Lemmy.ml. Otherwise we simply will progressively give up while the place dies slowly around us, as people leave and new ones refuse to join.
I agree, and the point of my comment wasn't to suggest gay people and nazis are the same (or even similar), it was that the mere presence of something disagreeable doesn't mean the place is full of it.
Are you familiar with the nazi bar quote? I was referencing that phenomenon:
When Tager asked about why he booted the guy, the bartender, a seasoned pro, said that if you let one Nazi in, slowly they replace the clientele.
“You have to nip it in the bud immediately,” he said, as Trager paraphrased. “These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after a while, they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.”
“And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh *****, this is a Nazi bar now,” he continued. ”And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.”
No, I wasn't familiar with that quote. Sokath, his eyes open. But nazis would not receive a friendly welcome here like in the bartender's hypothetical story, so the same outcome is so extraordinarily unlikely, the reference seems like the same level of overreaction I said it was.
It's not about voicing your disagreement, it's about removing nazis entirely. Their very presence degrades the quality of the platform. Twitter had plenty of people arguing with nazis, and it still sucked, because the nazis were still there.