to start: after some consideration, we've altered our entry question a little bit so that entry is not guaranteed. during the daytime you can basically expect waits of 30 minutes or less when it comes to approval/disapproval, but overnight it'll be anywhere from 6-12 hours. just FYI
if you'd like to introduce yourself without it getting lost in all the posts already made, i just made a thread for that over here
our sidebar should give you most of the information you're looking for about us, but to reiterate some: we are pretty relaxed here, but we have a well carved out understanding of what we want to be. if you would like more elaboration on that, you can find elaboration on that at length in the following two posts:
for some less lengthy and more relaxed elaboration, see the discussion in the comments of this post.
as for funding: we are 100% user-funded. if you would like to contribute to our ability to keep the website up, you can donate on OpenCollective, which supports both one-time donations or monthly donations.
a few other questions occasionally pop up like "why do we have the set of communities we do?" and "why can't people make their own?" (the latter is a feature of lemmy). for elaboration on that, you can see the following post and the discussions here. we are open to suggestions and creating communities as demand sees fit; see also discussion here.
downvotes are disabled on this instance and that's a thing we're not liable to change. if you'd like elaboration for why that is, see this comment. this may be a point of friction for some coming from reddit, but i hope you'll understand why we're doing it even if you don't necessarily agree with it.
if you're interested in our governance to this point and a brief idea of our long term goals, see the comment here.
feel free to sound off on other questions you have; i'll try to update the OP with those and our ability to answer them as time goes on.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I'm getting big digg exodus vibes right now.
I think it'll happen in waves. There were the early adopters for federated servers. Then the second wave of settlers (right now), then more and more waves will happen as the commercialization of social web platforms squeeze users of everything they have.
Culture trickles up from the deep niche communities, and one by one those communities are being suffocated. It's only a matter of time....
what's craziest to me is that I've actually gone back to digg, at least for interesting article aggregation. it's like pocket, but more frequent churn to distract me from *gestures broadly*
LOL
I legitimately thought that digg didn't exist anymore.
I might throw it back into my rotation.
I wouldn't say it's great, but it's another batch of stuff to read during the day. I added it to my inoreader feed, but did end up stashing it in an "Unsure" folder because I only click on like one out of 10 of them. Still, it exists!