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.
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.