Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
First of all, lemmy.world admins do have history of overreacting (e.g. with piracy & shroom) . So I don’t think we should base our decision on theirs.
I have heard of lemmy.ml users being an issue at some point in the past, but it seem to have settled.
I personally don’t have any issue with lemmy.ml; maybe in the past, but I cannot seem to recall any. What I do know is there are active communities there (Linux comes in mind) and we’d lose all that if we defederate.
I think you would see them a lot more if you frequented threads focused on China, or even adjacently related to China in many cases. They are very heavy on censorship and doing so secretly.
It hasn’t really settled tbh. Any political thread, especially re: Ukraine is full of them
Well of course that’s going go be a hotbed. It is an active war that is essentially being livestreamed. You’ve got a constant stream of combat footage and drone strikes out there with communities celebrating the effective return of watchpeopledie.
Which to me, puts these kinda of threads in a pretty dark context. People be complaining about a FOSS dev being a trans communist while also using that software to mock footage of a conscripts dying scream.