The confusion about how the protocol works for new users is real, and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading, firstly when you’re not used to how fediverse stuff works, but also when bizarre rules about no swearing or NSFW content are applied at an admin level. I first started on .ml, but moved here after some deliberation because people can tailor their feed and content through joining communities, not having their instance hyper-politicised by ban-happy tankies. (I’m very progressive myself, before it’s claimed otherwise)
I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption. Of course admins are entitled to their own opinions, but the entire purpose of communities like this is to try and decentralise the problematic censorship which has ruined reddit (among other issues). Having faith in the users and mods to consider content and conduct with as impartial as possible development and administration is vital to the site having any chance of being transparent and worth-contributing to.
I don’t want to see the whole concept of Lemmy written off by outsiders because their first experiences of the site are of the rabid circlejerk messageboards instead of a new and exciting format for online content with greater interoperability and user control. To this effect, I’m still on the fence about defederating with those communities at a user level, but I think that I’m going to make a more concerted effort to make content and foster the communities I want here, so that .ml fades into insignificance - I don’t want to feed into their narratives of persecution.
I wanna call on @dessalines, and @Nutomic, among others, with the greatest respect for their views and contributions to the project, to put the future of the platform ahead of turning it into an echo chamber - either by relinquishing themselves from one or the other (admin/dev), or by the admins collectively creating a clear policy about politicised banning to acknowledge people’s concerns about this behaviour.
as a big proponent of FOSS I see where you’re coming from - but the reality will always be that apps which have a significant learning curve to even install are obviously hugely off-putting to the majority of users. While the rest of us might be comfortable cloning a repository and building from a tar file, expecting the average person who wants to talk with friends and family to jump through those kind of hoops is exactly what has held back wider adoption of better standards.
Things like flatpacks and snaps have gone a long way to making this less daunting, but when matrix isn’t a ‘self-hosted decentralised chat’, it’s a *‘version of whatsapp that isn’t always online, and i don’t know where to download it and have to learn what the terminal is to even get it on my laptop’ * - we can’t be surprised people stick with the less secure, private, easy options. That’s why I’m a big advocate of signal - it’s not perfect and part of me wishes it was matrix or threema or one of the other standards, but getting people comfortable with the idea of free and open source software, while making it as simple for them to install on their phone or computer as anything meta makes is a really good first step - in the meantime, it’s up to us in the wider community to make the other solutions more intuitive, simple, secure, and trust that if a good enough job is done of that - they will come.