Lemmy.ml has long had some political conflict among the userbase, especially in communities like worldnews. This is because the instance is composed of both leftists (anarchist/communist) and liberals (those who agree with the mainstream political views in western countries). Additionally, the instance admins all belong to the former group.
Recently we made an announcement offering free Lemmy instance hosting for one year, for non-politics instances. We are hereby making a similar offer to host a liberal or mainstream political instance, which can accomodate those who are unhappy with lemmy.ml moderation.
This has many advantages. Instance admins have full power to set the rules, block federated instances (like lemmygrad.ml), or remove unwanted content. An administration team that is closer aligned politically would certainly be an improvement for some of the users here.
So if you are interested to host such an instance, send an email to contact@join-lemmy.org some relevant details about yourself. You will also have to buy a domain. We will only host one such instance, so if multiple people are interested, you should coordinate among yourselves. As in the original offer, the hosting will be limited to one year.
On a side note, we would also like to help with the creation of a general-purpose instance that is less focused on politics than most of the existing instances. This is fully within the terms of the initial “free instance hosting” announcement, so if you are interested, send us an email!
One of the criticisms that has sometimes been brought up against Lemmy is that it is just for “tankies” (which is not true, but they see the biggest instance described as “a community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts”, that contrary to all other social networks doesn’t label communists and other people as being part of a dangerous violent extremist movement; and the second biggest instance whose icon is the picture of a literal tank with red background, and a title that is a play on Leningrad and Lemmy). I therefore think that promoting diversity among instances in actions like these is a good idea.
This is merely a product of people not being aware of / understanding federation.
And the fact that the software and flagship instance have the same name adds to it.
Yeah true, but I think we should also take into account the people that lack understanding of the concept of federation (maybe some kind of tag system on join-lemmy in the future like PeerTube has? And maybe randomized instances by default?)
Technically, they just use the same Slavic suffix, -grad, for a town, city, or fortified settlement.
Yeah, you are probably right, but I thought of leningrad, because both also begin in le.