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I understand that it is likely impossible to perform a direct 1 to 1 migration to another link software but I thought we must consider while we are a smaller instance regarding this.
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The debate among the admin team is still ongoing about that, although it was cut a bit short by the hack that’s currently impacting
lemmy.world,lemmy.blahaj.zone, and (likely)beehaw.org. We’re currently monitoring that situation, but we’ll continue the discussion on lemmy.ml as soon as feasible.There are a few reasons though: political segregation of the fediverse might not be preferable, and we have to weigh the drawbacks of disconnecting from chunks of the overall Lemmy community against the benefits of cutting out problematic users and behaviors. For example, we’re certainly not removing burggit and exploding-heads from our blocklist, because it’s clear that the main purpose of those instances is to engage in behavior that breaks our instance rules – and you can be sure that if anyone comes here and breaks those rules, they’re getting booted. But lemmy.ml doesn’t seem to have an abundance of tankies, especially since said tankies seem to prefer lemmygrad, which we have defederated from already.
We have yet to reach a final decision on lemmy.ml, but should you disagree with it, you’re still able to block any communities on there. (Unfortunately, for one you’ll have to do this one by one as they come up, but I have seen people ask for a feature to personally block entire instances, it will probably come at some point.) If defederating from instances that do not share your values is important to you, you may also consider moving to beehaw.org (when the hack is over), as they lean far more in favor of defederation and also seem to share your values. We do want to ensure that pricefield.org remains a safe space for all fans of life is strange, but whichever way we decide, it’s likely going to come down to whether the instance and its users threaten our communities and users or not, as opposed a judgement of what they’re doing on their own instance.
Yeah, the software is developed by tankies. That’s an unfortunate fact that I’ve personally only become aware of after setting up everything and starting to interact with the community through the already running instance, and I can’t speak on behalf of the rest of the mod team. I’m not exactly happy about it.
However, Lemmy is also free and open-source software. The tankies in question have no influence over us, they just work on the code. They’re not our u/spez – in fact, Lemmy, much like the rest of the fediverse, is specifically designed to ensure that every instance owner or admin team is their own u/spez, so that if anyone goes off the rails, others will just slide into their place. The instance ran by the original devs, lemmy.ml, isn’t even the top instance at this point, that would be lemmy.world which is mostly unaffiliated (obviously there’s going to be some conversation when they’re the top instance) and the admins over there seem to be nice.
At the end of the day, we are in control here, not them, and I think I speak on behalf of the rest of the admin team as well when I say we absolutely do not tolerate tankies here. The first instance we defederated from was lemmygrad, and we do distance ourselves from any tankie or alt-right instance. Thankfully, such users do seem to concentrate around these instances, so this appears to be a very effective method for now – if that changes in the future, we’ll make the appropriate steps to keep this a safe space for everyone.
On that point, the concerns raised here about lemmy.ml are absolutely valid too. I’m going to bring the topic of defederating from them to the mod team. But I’d like to make the point that lemmy.ml is not the entirety of Lemmy, it’s just one corner of it, and it’s not expressed anywhere that this is the “main instance” you should be joining. That would be lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works for anyone joining around the time of the Reddit migration, both of which feature open registration, while lemmy.ml switched into approve-only mode after experiencing significant overload. They’re not the best approve-only instance either, that one is pretty clearly recognized to be beehaw.org, which is about as anti-tankie as it gets.
There is still something to be said about engaging with the work of immoral individuals, but the Lemmy devs aren’t Rowling. And I’m not talking about magnitude here, I’m talking about logistics: unlike something like the Harry Potter fandom, supporting which is inextricable from supporting its transphobic author due to copyright, you absolutely can use and engage with Lemmy without supporting tankies. Fortunately, there is no such system tying us to them in this case – in fact, the devs themselves seem to be very strongly against any such influence. I guess that’s a silver lining in their ideology. (There are also a lot more people who work on Lemmy who aren’t tankies, open source projects run on community contributions, it’s just the two head devs who this is focused on.)
There are also some practical concerns with migrating to an alternative, which would likely be Kbin. A lot of people lost their private keys used for federation in such migrations, we’d likely lose our domain and would have to start over. I talked to a lot of other instance admins who had that happen to them due to an improper first setup.
I’m not a member of your instance. I browse by all and new but wanted to add my two cents. I think that’s one of the good things about having a federated platform. You can distance yourself from other instances. I imagine that mindset will be further diluted as more people join and contribute to Lemmy.
I think most upcoming platforms like Nostr or Raddle.me also have some political aspect people would disagree with. I’m not sure where else would be much better.
