Lemmy.ml has long had some political conflict among the userbase, especially in communities like worldnews. This is because the instance is composed of both leftists (anarchist/communist) and liberals (those who agree with the mainstream political views in western countries). Additionally, the instance admins all belong to the former group.
Recently we made an announcement offering free Lemmy instance hosting for one year, for non-politics instances. We are hereby making a similar offer to host a liberal or mainstream political instance, which can accomodate those who are unhappy with lemmy.ml moderation.
This has many advantages. Instance admins have full power to set the rules, block federated instances (like lemmygrad.ml), or remove unwanted content. An administration team that is closer aligned politically would certainly be an improvement for some of the users here.
So if you are interested to host such an instance, send an email to contact@join-lemmy.org some relevant details about yourself. You will also have to buy a domain. We will only host one such instance, so if multiple people are interested, you should coordinate among yourselves. As in the original offer, the hosting will be limited to one year.
On a side note, we would also like to help with the creation of a general-purpose instance that is less focused on politics than most of the existing instances. This is fully within the terms of the initial “free instance hosting” announcement, so if you are interested, send us an email!
Reddit has had some issues with moderation lately. They have this unit, “Anti-Evil Operations”, that has been going over moderators’ heads to delete comments. They’ve been taking sides in some hot button political issues in the US, which has left the political debate sub I moderate in the uncomfortable spot of just banning those issues entirely. Their actions and decisions have been mostly opaque to moderators.
That’s in addition to the top 30 or 50 or some huge number (I forget) of reddits being moderated by the same people.
I wonder how much of that is just because they got to Reddit early. A friend of mine is moderator over a smattering of enormous subreddits mostly because he started on Reddit when it was only a year old.
Probably. The why doesn’t stop it from being a problem though…
Is it a problem, though?
Echo chambers, centralization of power, etc. Pretty sure a lot of people consider that a problem 😉
Most of the internet is a liberal echo chamber. Libs can adapt to a place where their own believe set isn’t the mainstream for once, they wouldn’t care about us and would like to beat us, why should we be better to them and give them all they want everyplace, even ours, insteaf of them being like the guests they are and show some minimum politeness?