A lot of questions on here are aimed at the reddit users experiences, but I’ve been wondering what the older users thought of his move. Are there any reddit cultures you are hoping do not come with the users? Are you confident or fearful of the growth coming from the reddit community? I’m curious how the reddit influx is changing these communities either for better or for worse.
I just assume that the far-right nutjobs are a small minority and as long as this is true, I prefer them getting drowned in one huge community over many small walled communities which only federate with a small group of similar-minded instances. Thats all. Basically the same as we had on Reddit with one large community but many different /r/ Its totally fine if you have another preference
When Mastodon was tiny but already stuck in the left-right battle, it was just a bit extreme imho. Some Mastodons allowed everyone in, some hat a banlist of far-right instances, some only federated with explicitly pro-LGBTQ instances (but always incompletely, since the community is always rapidly changing). This makes it difficult for new users to choose the right server. If Lemmy/Mastodon/whatever has 100 mil users or more these things stop to matter, of course. But before I would rather have one large platform growing
GTIO is an interesting concept, though, and solves the problems I assume maybe. Thanks for the link, I didn’t know about it, will check it out
The interesting thing about GTIO was that lemmy.ml eventually blocked Wolfballs, the “free speech” (read as: antivax by founder, racist and everythingphobic by userbase) instance that shut down in Jan, so a large amount of posters on GTIO couldn’t see half the posts, comments and replies! And to be far I’m not saying lemmy.ml shouldn’t have defederated with WB, nothing of value was lost, but it is a little annoying due to the fact that these users were intentionally seeking out this community with more lax guidelines. I had to create a sockpuppet over on gtio.io just to talk to half the users and tell them why I disagreed with them ;)
For what it’s worth, Lemmy founders intentionally and openly promoted liberal and ‘centrist’ communities, even having an initiative where they offered 1 year free hosting to new communities. And that’s good for them too, they don’t want lemmy.ml to be a flagship or official instance, and didn’t want centralization, or for people to only find political extremists banned from reddit and leave. So those concerns are fair and I suspect Lemmy founders have made some effort to try and mitigate them.
Even so, and just like those Mastodon communities, some people really don’t want to have to deal with any right-wing nutjobs in their community. There are some communities that people visit to relax and talk among peers. There is very strong value in a lot of the communities which aren’t general-purpose, it allows more focus and a more relaxed atmosphere without antagonism, including unintentional antagonism. So I appreciate the mix, and the ability to pick which serves your current needs.