Just saw this on AskLemmy at .ml, thought this and chuckled, and now here we are.

Will take the opportunity to thank our admins for what they do, and all you humans for being here and generally being cool.

  • OpenStars
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    5 hours ago

    It is far worse than that imho, sadly.

    For one, we are most definitely actively getting smaller, both since the Rexodus and also since just earlier this year. I think people are returning to Reddit but wherever they are going it is not here. We lack sufficient content for them, despite having the good apps that Reddit used to. This is software built by tankies, and has authoritarian purposes baked into the core.

    And for another, a Google search for “Lemmy”, after the singer, pulls up as the top instance lemmy.ml, which notably uses a Local rather than All feed by default. So it’s just absolutely full of posts hating on the USA, UK, Germany, and anyone else who opposes the interests of Russia and China and North Korea. THIS is what “Lemmy” is, to people who don’t use DuckDuckGo as their primary search engine.

    It may already be too late to reverse this trend: we lost the momentum of the Rexodus, and we won’t even be honest about who and what we are now, which would be a prerequisite for change - we are a Nazi bar.

    An example of our authoritarianism is the modding tools here. The fact that we have a modlog at all is awesome, but the fact that it just says “mod” rather than who removed something, while simultaneously offering no modmail to communicate with whoever did it in order to ask why, is not. Also reports don’t federate. Lemmy was built by the admins of lemmy.ml, and if we want more of a non-authoritarian experience - e.g. a modmail - it seems we would have to build such ourselves?

    Also, on Reddit (at least, prior to the Rexodus, I dunno if it still does today?) when a post is removed the post link remains viable, and people can still have discussions within it. On Lemmy, a capricious mod can remove something entirely. Imagine writing our a long response (such as I’ve done here:-), only to find after all of that that the post has been removed in the meantime and I can’t even respond to the person I was talking to, even if they were not the OP. Nor can I even finish reading through the comments - they are just, poof, gone.

    As authoritarian as Huffman made Reddit into, we are so very similar - not at the top, obviously, bc open source makes all the difference, but when it comes down to the actual user experience, e.g. how a Redditor will look at us and judge this place to be, based on how we will treat them (and I haven’t even begun here to get into how centrists from the USA will feel in this leftist dominated environment!:-P). We have the seeds to be more, but we won’t make the computer code to make that happen.