Hey everyone, I'm new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn't publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says "Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.").
The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the "lemmy.ml" server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers".
So I thought I try that one when it's from Lemmy's own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called "The Principles of Communism" which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I've never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it's part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?
The original developers of Lemmy are communists who were seeking to create a social media space that would be free from corporate censorship and centralization. When they created ml, they decided to have it be geared towards communists and leftists as their specific flavor of the Lemmy community, because that is what interested them.
If you are looking for a less political and more general instance, I’d recommend:
lemmy.world
sh.itjust.works
lemmy.dbzero.com
lmfao dbzero terms of service is literally to follow the anarchist COC, hosts Lefty memes, and one of the largest anarchist communities.
World is peak neoliberal, has a stupid media bias bot calibrated for neoliberal positions as centrist, and is explicitly aligned with the USA in law and ethos.
Shitjustworks is similar to world but Canadian.
Life is political and people hosting online communities have ideologies. Shock horror I know. An ideology being invisible to you because you are raised in it does not make it any less explicit.
All 3 of those are highly political instances, though. Lemmy.world is overwhelmingly liberal and enforces that bias, and dbzer0 is mostly Anarchists. Sh.itjust.works is the least overtly political but leans liberal.
Very interesting, thanks for the reply. I signed-up on lemm.ee since that's the 2nd biggest instance on their list. Is this a good server as well? (The description here says: "General-purpose Lemmy instance. New users and communities welcome!")
I've been happy on lemme.ee for the fact that they didn't get caught up in the defederation drama about a year ago, and that they're mainly a neutral landing instance to go about interacting with other communities on other instances. Other instances will defederate with instances they disagree with, a form of censorship in itself, whereas the admins of lemm.ee leave it to you to block what you don't want to see yourself.
Exactly why I like it here too. They really do let the user choose their own censorship limit.
Lemm.ee is less politically oriented than any of the 3 that were recommended, by the other user, but it's lesd of an instance and more of a tool for interacting with other instances.
Yeah, that’s a good one. Honestly, at the end of the day, it matters more what communities you follow than what instance you are on.
But what communities are available to you depends on which instance you picked. Right?
Yeah, because they are all part of their respective instances and those instances (de)federate with each other. ml and ee are both good for that purpose. My own instance is bad for that purpose, but after spending some time on a more mainstream instance, I decided this was better for my mental health.
Wrong. You can subscribe to any community from any instance that is federated with yours, and it will show up in your feed. Once one person has subscribed to an outside community, it will start to appear under All in your home instance as well. If you pick a home instance that is federated with most of the others, then you essentially can see everything you would feasibly want to see.
I am subscribed to communities all over the Fediverse.
Lemme.ee is fine. It wouldn't hurt to have multiple accounts in different instances in case one goes down for maintenance so you can keep browsing. I recommend dbzero since they're techy and don't lean on politics as much as other instances.