In this thread people often talk about “a contributor”. However, lemmy’s the core dev teams has a very specific “political view” which is coupled with the project. The project was started to serve people with that “political view”. And this makes really hard to decouple project and the people who drive it.

I remember when extreme political views of main Lemmy Devs (which are/where admins s of lemmygrad as well, if I recall correctly) were discussed here several times, people suggested to ignore them and focus on their work. Donate for Lemmy development, not to the persons…

what concrete solution do you see, switch to kbin? Continue to separate development from their other activities?

You don’t need to spend any time on reddit or even make an account to take advantage of that functionality. You just Google your question and add reddit to the end and voila.

I was talking about asking my specific question, not googling for information.

Thanks for the list - agree - these communities are are rather alive, what is promising.

Good for you. I have a very mixed experience.

This is true, but also subjective. How do you define enough? Enough to doomscroll or enough to check for 10 minutes daily? All we really need to be self sufficient is enough content to keep people coming back regularly, we don’t need to replicate reddit.

Right, this is subjective. For me the main criteria is: if I want to get an answer to a question, especially a non trivial one which is not releated to lemmy/fediverse - I should better go to reddit. And I think lemmy should better replicate reddit with this

This seems like an exaggeration. Most communities that have quality content also have quality discussion, in my experience.

Probably, can you give me example of such communities which are not about fedeverse, technology, foss or memes?

30,000 range for MAUs before the end of the year, … current userbase is fairly well established and self sufficient.

I see it differently. It looks like the majority of communities struggle with not enough content/discussions, many de-facto are blogs of mods/creators where others are passive subscribers.

They cannot. But, if you created a community on your instance it must align to the instance rules and admin can moderate it (does matter who posts there).

The second, smaller, issue people will associate you a bit with the instance you selected for your account (even if it was by chance).

except of course keeping it legal

This is also up to them. If the admins are ok to get corresponding consequences - they can do this.

Posts like this posted here from time to time.

And I think the main problem is: the fact that an instance has a very strong political view and even a censorship becomes a big surprise for people using this exact instance.

It looks like an instance and community policies must be somehow better visible.

Then do not invest your time in communities hosted on lemmy.ml (if you do not agree with the instance ideology).

The most popular (?) Open source software community is hosted on Lemmy.ml

You have many good points here. Still, I have a feeling that Lemmy as a platform and as a software is still very coupled with its creators.

Yes, there are other contributors as well. But these guys currently own the official repo and make key decisions. And if you donate to Lemmy you pay a salary to these two guys (afaik, Lemmy is their full-time work these days).

So, for me, it is still rather complicated.

Well, the situation is a bit more complex. Admins of this “specific Lemmy Server” are creators and main maintainers of the Lemmy project as such.

So, generalization you are afraid of makes some sense.

Yes. People who just consume content can easily switch. But for people who create content this is not that easy, especially for users who created communities there.

I have mixed experience with community quality here. For many topics you should better ask your question on Reddit - you will get better answers there (and faster).

I missed csam story completely. I expected that Lemmy’s weakness will be attacked soon, but did not expect that such a brutal and dangerous for admins way ☹️.

Thank you for doing the “weekly”

Probably you did not notice that, but the article is under a paywall.

For me Lemmy, mastodon etc are tools, like email or http. People which use these tools are very different and have very different political views. So, for me the answer to your question is “no”.

Definitely. Am German living abroad, so it’s a great instance for keeping up with local stuff.

Then feddit.de sounds like a best choice for you :). BTW, you do not need to have an account on feddit.de to subscribe and participate any community “hosted” there. So keeping up with local stuff is relatively instance independent (but there are nuances, still :( )

As for privacy, I don’t expect anything to be private anywhere on the internet. But for a lemmy instance I’d hope that the admins are a) running it on secure infrastructure (firewalled, etc.) and b) they’re not just handing off email addresses to the biggest bidder.

I see. For me this sounds like security, rather then privacy. Anyways, I assume that feddit.de meets your criteria again - it is hosted in Germany and, as far as I remember, says that follows German laws (what covers “reasonable” security/privacy requirement).

Freddie.de is a solid choice. But if you want to create an generic, english-speaking community think twice. I saw many people assume that all community on Freddie.dr are regional. To the level that some wanted to block whole instance because they were not interested in Germany local topics.

Another question: what kind of privacy protection do you expect from a Lemmy instance? Cannot think about anything private here.

For me this was enough: from graphic to speed with which it followed my drive (delayed) it was not a good tool for me. Most probably, usable, but way less usable than Google maps and Waze.