I am exploring Lemmy right now and what I see is very worrying to me, but I also don't understand wth is going on with some instances here.
I don't know if it's smart to post this, but here we go.
I am partial to Marxist and anarchist ideology, but lemmygrad looks completely unhinged to me. Is it a parody?
Some content is fine and some of it is insane.
On the other hand, beehaw looked super inviting from the outside and I even applied to join them. Then, I looked closer and that instance's moderation looks totalitarian and rigid in the other way. (I understand why they blocked lemmygrad though...)
I'm seeing this impact other communities in different ways and there's some kind of witch hunt happening on both sides...
I want to interact with people that can respect each-other and that can hold open-minded discussions about any topics without devolving into some tribal war.
Edit:
I realize my post is not a simple question... Let me clarify some thoughs:
-I do not mean beehaw is far-right. The just seem strict and that's their right.
-I worry profiles can "inherit" the bad reputation of instances they interacted with and get pre-emptively banned.
-People are used to reddit and tend to centralize. Is the "just switch community" really an option?
-English is far from my first language and I might've judged things too quickly/harshly so take my criticism with a grain of salt.
I'm also new here so I cannot really answer your question. But are you saying Beehaw leans far right? Because I thought they wanted to foster a very welcoming and supportive environment (even disabling downvotes) and I thought they even blocked some instances which are too right for them?
nonono, It's not that. I haven't lurked there for very long, but it seemed that they were trigger-happy on bans from what I gathered. I don't have examples at the moment and the modlog feature doesn't seem to work well..
Ah got it, ok sorry I misunderstood you. But yes, this sounds believable. As I understand they have a very clear vision what is wrong with social media and believe that only very strict moderation can fix these problems. If this is right or wrong I cannot really say...
It definitely is an interesting and there might be some merit to it. I'm just worried. Let's say I post in lemmygrad for any reason and then comment something unrelated and neutral on a beehaw post. Will I be silenced because of that first instance's bad reputation? Maybe I'm thinking too much.
It doesn’t seem like they’ve been doing things like that at all.
Good question. But I guess only the beehaw admins know the answer to that. But from my understanding so far they would only silence you if you actively spread negativity - but I might be wrong.
FWIW, I don't think there are any 'far right', or really any right-leaning Lemmy servers at this point. None that I've seen, at least.
there is one. backchodi. Its a hindu nationalist (and hence islamaphobic, racist, casteist, queerphobic instance)
You can find some in beehaw’s list of blocked instances.
that's good to hear 😉
Yeah, hopefully it stays that way, but with popularity it's likely we'll get all types. I suppose some asshole will come along and setup "christo.fascist.world" or something at some point.
Yeah you're probably right. But the good thing is with lemmy the "community" can decide what is acceptable behaviour and what not. If the admin of an instance finds another instance abusive they can just defederate it. And if the users of this instance don't like that the other one got de-federated they can just switch. (or at least that's my basic understanding so far...)
True enough, but that doesn't stop people like that from having a place to congregate, and then nothing else is stopping them from creating logins on different servers and brigading other communities from there. There's no way around that though with the Fediverse and Lemmy being designed how it is.
I don't agree with the removal of being able to downvote. Both up and downvoting serves a purpose. Would you support a community that only allowed downvotes?
Beehaw doesn't lean far right at all. They blocked lemmygrad for being authoritarian (i.e. pro North Korea), not for being on the left.
From one of Beehaw's stickied posts: "We want to explicitly make a nice little corner of the internet where we can hide from racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, and other forms of hateful speech."