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!

  • nutomicOPMA
    14·
    3 years ago

    I see, you make a good point. Your instance has been running for a year, but received very few users compared to lemmy.ml. My guess is that you receive new users mainly via join-lemmy.org/instances, is that correct? The problem is that most people only look at the top 2-4 instances, as you can see in the stats (removed everything thats not a Lemmy instance).

    Problem is, that list is sorted by most popular and strongly favors established instances. I think it would help a lot of we put 2-4 “recommended instances” at the top of that page, particularly small or general-purpose instances like yours. It would also be pretty simple to have different recommendations for each language, which should help regional instances. There could be a sort of tag system as well, but thats a bit more effort to implement. What do you think?

    cc @dessalines@lemmy.ml

    • DessalinesA
      10·
      3 years ago

      Eventually I can add a tag / filtering type thing like joinmastodon does… especially for different language instances. But I think just sorting that page by popularity is pry fine for now tho. Joinlemmy is not the bottleneck IMO.

      The main issue is that communities are already on reddit or elsewhere, and they need to actively choose to migrate to lemmy. That often takes the moderators / admins of those communities doing that work, and bringing over a large chunk of users. That’s how the largest lemmy instances got to where they are, and there’s no way around that.

      • nutomicOPMA
        6·
        3 years ago

        Based on that screenshot, there are about 400 users per week who visit a Lemmy instance via join-lemmy.org. Thats a pretty significant number, and it likely contributes a large part of the new signups on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.

    • QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz
      5·
      3 years ago

      My guess is that you receive new users mainly via join-lemmy.org/instances, is that correct?

      I haven’t really done promotion for my instance so that is correct.

      I think it would help a lot of we put 2-4 “recommended instances” at the top of that page, particularly small or general-purpose instances like yours. It would also be pretty simple to have different recommendations for each language, which should help regional instances. There could be a sort of tag system as well, but thats a bit more effort to implement. What do you think?

      That would be magnificent!

    • Faresh
      3·
      3 years ago

      I think in the mean time, one could by default randomly sort the instances.

      • nutomicOPMA
        5·
        3 years ago

        I dont think that would work well, because there is a large number of tiny instances with 1-2 monthly users that would show up at the top. Those are probably not the best place for new users.

        • Faresh
          2·
          3 years ago

          Maybe randomly sort the instances with more than x users?

          • nutomicOPMA
            2·
            3 years ago

            That could work, but it seems hard to figure out a good value for x. Plus it is likely that there would still be low-quality instances at the top sometimes. A hardcoded list of recommended instances gives much more control.