this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2022
1 points (100.0% liked)

Asklemmy

43498 readers
2072 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] coldhotman@nrsk.no 1 points 2 years ago

There’s some far-left takes on Lemmy for sure. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that

Absolutely. And I'd go as far as to defend both lemmy.ml and lemmygrad's right to run their instances any way they want.

Lemmy.ml, which ultimately is the main instance

Not by any metrics, IMO. I think it's been explicitly stated by the admins that lemmy.ml is not a main instance or a flagship instance. It's not a general instance but a "community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts". The devs doesn't even recommend lemmy.ml on join-lemmy.org, but rather two general purpose instances instead.

Of course, promoting that it's run by the devs do give off some pretty strong "official/main" vibes to any users.

Saying that lemmy.ml is the main instance is somewhat contributing to the problem, no offense intended. What we should say is that there isn't any main instance, and that size doesn't matter since we're all (in theory) federated. If anything, users should check out join-lemmy.org/instances for a meta-community that seems like a good fit.

but it does limit growth

I believe that people confuse the difference between Lemmy, the federated platform, and Lemmy.ml, the federated social news aggregator. If new users had a better knowledge on how everything is interconnected instead of the standard monolithic islands, maybe they wouldn't seek out the "main" or even biggest instances for a fear of missing out.