PSA: Alternatives for the most popular lemmy.ml communities
For all your boycotting needs. I'm sure there's some mods caught in lemmy.ml's top 10 that are perfectly upstanding and reasonable people, my condolences for the cross-fire.
OpenMW's official Lemmy community has been on lemmy.ml since 2021, way before lemmy.world existed (and most other instances, too), and way before there was any inter-instance drama. It's becoming increasingly likely that it's not going to be a suitable long-term home, but we'd be much happier if we could migrate the existing community rather than start from scratch with a new one. Is there any way to do that yet?
I keep seeing posts about ml recently. Is it time to migrate off? I joined it because it was like the only instance available during the start of the reddit migration and it says "FOSS and privacy enthusiasts" which I am. I didn't even care to know what a tankie was until my all feed started to fill up with so. much. politics. including from lemmygrad and hexbear for the last few months. Fellow ml users seemed normal too.
Idk friends I just want to wear linux knee socks and engage with my niches. I didn't expect all the hail china or seeing "removed" all the time or to end up being grouped in with lemmygrad and hexbear by users from other instances.
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; and I think that this wall of text that I wrote about how lemmy dot ml handled ani.social shows it well, as the dispute in question was not political in nature. (I can abridge it at request.)
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, it defeats the point of a federation. That instance is already 40% of the MAUs, and hosts the largest comms using Lemmy.
The views of .ml mods have not affected me. I don't really check my subscription feed, only /all or /top->day, therefor im still exposed to all those other communities.
The only instances that I've noticed are missing are porn related, and as an asexual, I don't have an interest in them. If I did, I could just visit a different site, like pornhub or w/e
Not all .ml users are tankies, or communist, or foss enthusiasts. I'm just a guy who likes memes and tech
JOIN US! Comicbooks is slow, I'd like it to grow so I can discuss less popular creator owned comics, at the moment it's mostly some news posts, my list posts, some super hero discussion, and some dude who thinks internet comic strips are "comic books" (but nobody has corrected them because they seem nice enough lol).
This may sound cheesy but this list is the healthy way to solve the issue people had with Lemmy.ml moderation. Thank you for compiling it, I didn't reliaze there were instances for programming and anime. Glad to see a solution where we didn't have to go through the adults (admins and mods in this case).
Also, it's healthy for the fediverse to see communities spread on to many instances but it does make Lemmy harder for your average redditor to understand (but long term goal of a healthy fediverse is more important).
There's also all of these communities on Reddit if you're truly unhappy that the volunteer owned and run social media you signed up for isn't being astroturfed with US-Israeli state press releases.
If you don't like it, petition your admins (via posts on your own instance) to defed.
If they don't want to, find a new instance that does, or stay and block their instance so you don't see their subs.
If you want to build up alternatives, post and comment so they're more active.
I just don't see the point of these posts when most Lemmy users have been around for a while and know what lemmy.ml is like by now.
Be the change you want to see, post in those communities yourself instead of these daily announcements threads on an instance that's already defederating apparently
It feels like .world is going to defederate soon, which will likely result in a multipolar Lemmy. Leftists and Leftist-aligned communities, and Liberals and Liberal-aligned communities, with hands-off communities like Lemm.ee being visible on either.
At this point, without any active Marxist communities, and defederating from almost all overtly Marxist instances, it is pretty obvious .world is anti-Marxist, so I doubt Marxists will stay with .world accounts.
Considering .world has a far less leniant defed policy it might just collapse on itself and the user base go back to Reddit, but that won't be a rapid process.