Wow - thank you for sharing that. There are aspects of this instance I don’t love, but banning over shadow rules is enough for me to consider just going elsewhere.

it’s just not as content rich as reddit at the moment

This can change fast.

You should’ve seen it two weeks ago.

I joined lemmy.ml because the join-lemmy site gave me extremely little to go on. It was a coin toss between this and beehaw.org once I realized how few instances were established and not right-wing.

That was only 2 weeks ago and already I’ve seen the site force 2 server upgrades, even as the admins have strongly encouraged new users to join elsewhere to prevent centralization.

The instance list desperately needs a few columns added, including whether new signups are encouraged or discouraged.

This will hopefully start to create some quality content.

Important note here not directed at you: Quality content is something we all have to pitch in on. We’re in the thousands, not millions. We’ve all got to make a few posts and make a few comments. Self-sustaining communities can form pretty quickly with our current numbers but the onus is on us to make an effort to prime the pump of engagement, so to speak.

Censorship of CCP criticism would be in the modlog if it were true. I’ve only been here a couple weeks but the only things I see the admins refuse to tolerate are racism, homophobia, and hate speech in general. They don’t allow porn but that has more to do with practical challenges than any (expressed) problem with other people wanting it.

This is where the transparency that comes with FOSS vs private corp really shines. You can always check an instance’s modlog to see for yourself where lines are drawn.

What do we need to do to move forward?

Accept that much or most of reddit will look normal tomorrow. Reddit will proceed by projecting that everything is normal, whether true or not. Lemmy will continue to be an alternative with FOSS benefits and much smaller communities. Your own habits have to reflect what you want and there’s no wrong answer.

I’m personally elated to find the smaller communities with higher-quality content. Thoughtful comments aren’t buried under piles of karma-seeking horse-beating jokes.

At the same time, reddit continues to offer historical reference that won’t be matched elsewhere anytime soon. I’m not going to rant as if the place has no value, or as if it can be replaced in a few weeks.

Lots to consider.

Are we defining failure by their standards, or ours?

When my favorite communities were wrecked by being moved to front page, default-for-new-users and flooded with low effort content that may as well have been bot spam, it failed me.

When they made an API policy that ostensibly allowed profitability (despite charging far beyond what they might make from ads on the official mobile app) and avoided training by AI (despite refusing to grandfather in known 3PA and offering to approve new ones), it failed me again.

If I’m soon unable to access the site via the old.reddit interface to avoid intrusive ads, it will fail me yet again.

I won’t be surprised if others add more failures to this list.

Maybe reddit makes money hand-over-fist from these changes without me, you, nsfw content creators, licensing / API fees from all current popular 3PA apps, and whoever else. I’m not eager to characterize this as success because VC’s get their money back.

Reddit trying to go the slow route, removing one thing at a time, will make it easier for lemmy to scale and grow to accept all the users.

If they did API, old.reddit, and nsfw all at the same time it would be absolutely impossible to accommodate.

I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem.

My concern: Are there enough moderators for the deluge coming?