comfy

I've already started seeing a lot of redundant communities being made here that have already existed on other Lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml is at risk of centralization and overload, so now is a great time to raise awareness of other instances.

For science topics, mander.xyz has a lot of good ones set up, and [email protected] on slrpnk.net has been great!

edit: for new users - you can type ! to begin autofilling a community, even for ones on other instances, like I did for the solarpunk community above. It may take a few seconds for the autofill results to show up if you have a slow connection like me.

[yeah it's twitter junk, I know]

(technically it's /games/ but that's a dumb title)

"Leftist" is not a helpful label here; its meaning changes internationally and personally. It was always vaguely defined and just became more vague and misused for the past two centuries.

This is an issue because:

1. It leads to unresolvable persistent conflicts over what is leftist and what isn't, and therefore who is welcome here and who isn't.

2. The admins' definition appears to be different from some very common definitions. In the post 'What is lemmy.ml?', they imply that a 'liberal instance' is 'something that [lemmy.ml] is not'. This will at best lead to repeated rejection of people who consider themselves 'leftist' but whom many users do not (an annoying and useless exercise for everyone involved), or at worse subversion by people who think they've found home and need to defend it against 'extremists'.

Maybe consider 'anti-capitalist' or 'socialist' as less ambiguous terms, assuming that is what you meant. This will avoid users who identify as leftists mistakenly signing up and defending the place against those it is explicitly made for.

As a demonstration of the wide range of political positions reasonably considered by people to be 'leftist', here is the Wikipedia article for 'Leftism'. Common definitions include ''pro-egalitarianism'', ''liberalism'' and various 'progressive' social rights movements.

What is this post?

A quick and dirty look into Lemmy instances, their size and interactions, and some insights.

Disclaimers

• I AM NOT AN EXPERT OR WITNESS: I only started using Lemmy in March 2022. Lemmy was around for around 3 years before that. I am not a developer or instance owner.
• I DID NOT GO AND TALK TO PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND THIS STUFF: This is just me exploring for fun and starting a conversation. This is not a proper study. Consider telling any one who links you to this page as if it's an expert historical account that I called them an idiot.
• This is limited by my experience and my searching, it's not comprehensive. If someone made a dark instance, I probably won't find it. If there's some deep lore, I probably don't know it.

Thanks to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list for many of these stats.

Alright,

Now for the casual rambling.

Organic posting started on lemmy.ml from April 2019 so I will consider that the start of Lemmy as a service (my understanding is that lemmy.ml is the oldest non-dev instance)

As of now (May 2022) AFAIK, the Lemmy-based sites with the most total user comments are:

• hexbear.net (2.5M)
• lemmy.ml (114K)
• lemmygrad.ml (105K)
• bakchodi.org (42K)
• wolfballs.com (15K)
• szmer.info (15K)
• feddit.de (3K)
• [dev instances ignored]
• sopuli.xyz (1504)
• lemmy.eus (1262)
• lemmy.ca (974)

The count of users active in the last month is similar:

• hexbear.net (unlisted, approx. 1.3K in the last 14 days)
• lemmygrad.ml (508)
• lemmy.ml (474)
• bakchodi.org (286)
• szmer.info (65)
• feddit.it (51)
• sopuli.xyz (31)
• wolfballs.com (29)
• feddit.de (29)
• lemmy.ca (17)

My guess is that the difference at the bottom of the list is due to highly federated instances spreading their user comments over many instances with more activity, and also due to some instances peaking a few months ago and then declining. For those new to user statistics, you'll notice that popularity usually tends to be exponential: more popular things get more popular.

What was that first one? Hexbear?

Two of the sites listed there, Hexbear (aka. chapo.chat) and Bakchodi, do not federate. They are not part of the Fediverse, but they are using Lemmy. Hexbear is actually running their own fork of Lemmy. In that sense it reminds me of Gab, another huge island fork, but only due to size and isolation. While I can't find an admin statement, various Hexbear Gitea issues from 2020 and this comment from December 2021 "We’re working on bringing Lemmy up to speed with some of the features our “fork” (it’s more of a rewrite) has. When that’s ready we’ll switch to that which will already have federation ready for us." and this from Feb 2022 "The only issue is that [Hexbear] doesn’t support federation for semi-technical reasons (happy to explain), but that’s going to be fixed (later this year maybe)?" indicate Hexbear is open to the idea but unready (this 2020 comment even states they chose Lemmy precisely because of its federation goal), and Bakchodi appear to have just not set any up (the admin states "Federation is not functional as of now." in a post and nothing more). Contrast both against Gab who cited abuse/security issues and lack of local federation users for their voluntary removal of existing federation.

Another point regarding Hexbear and Bakchodi is that they are continuations of existing popular communities: I believe that Hexbear is a continuation of reddit's banned subreddit /r/ChapoTrapHouse, and Bakchodi is a continuation of the banned /r/chodi (which I believe was banned around the same time as /r/GenZedong's quarantining caused a mass exodus to https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzedong ). To the best of my knowledge, lemmy.ml, most of lemmygrad, wolfballs and szmer are new original sites rather than an existing active community migrating as a mass.

Connections

Most instances are connected into the Fediverse. Hexbear and Bakchodi appears to be the only active non-trivial instances that don't federate.

Due to the political environment of the internet today and the content currently on Lemmy, I personally think it makes sense to classify the current federation networks of Lemmy instances into four loose groups:

• socialist 'left': Primarily value socialism and/or anarchism, and related topics. Generally explicit about their instance's political alignment. The largest group. Examples are lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, midwest.social, and would include hexbear.net if it were connected.
• liberalist 'right': Primarily value freedom of speech and other liberty. While none yet are e~~xplicitly politically-biased through administration~~[correction], they do overwhelmingly have users with views typical of the American 'right-wing' as an inevitable result of where they are promoted, the ideas only they tolerate and the existing posts. Examples are wolfballs.com and exploding-heads.com.
• general open: Overall mainstream OR diverse political views, will generally tolerate political instances on both sides of the above divide. Often national instances or 'general-purpose'. mander.xyz is an overt example, gtio.io is also an example. lotide.fbxl.net would be an example, but it's a lotide instance rather than Lemmy.
• anti-intolerant: Primarily value friendliness and inclusivity, and so will readily block instances that tolerate intolerance, such as those in the liberalist 'right' category and potentially those further in the socialist 'left' category. An example might be sopuli.xyz.

These are all politically determined, as unlike Mastodon and Pleroma there don't tend to be any instances based around controversial single topics or around graphic content that causes instances to defederate. I thought there were more instances that blocked both sides of the 'left'/'right' divide, but they don't seem to exist yet (which is a good sign) beyond lemmy.rollenspiel.monster. It is also worth mentioning that lemmy.ml has blocked some instances due to abuse rather than any cultural disagreement.

The first two of the four categories are by far the most popular, even if not the most numerous in instances, probably due to them picking up users being kicked out of reddit and reddit alternatives as they block more and more political subreddits or become unsavory. The earlier kicking of many 'harassment' subreddits from reddit around 2015 lead to many 'right-wing' users to populate Voat and then later bannings lead to communities.win becoming popular, which I believe explains why Lemmy doesn't yet have a strong influx of users who align politically with those banned subreddits and more-so with recently-banned communist subreddits (the core developers' political views and lemmy.ml's reputation may have impacted people moving to instances named after Lemmy or considering hosting new instances, but I suspect it wouldn't affect people who were invited to a place called Wolfballs).

Interestingly, there is already a mirror instance that reposts from reddit: goldandblack.us.to

Growth

fediverse.observer has some stats. Ignoring the huge outliers in the middle, there has been a jump in growth in the past two months which I would mostly attribute to the influx to lemmygrad.ml wow look at that second graph and the launch of unfederated-but-included bakchodi. Apart from that, there has been a remarkably consistent growth in all the active instances. That's a good sign that this group of communities could last a while.

Some concluding thoughts, with regards to reddit

As someone who hasn't really used reddit in many years, I like to promote the view of us being independent, growing our own culture, our own norms and not merely aiming to mirror the same shallow emptiness. The bottom line is, we grow a lot when reddit shuts a place down, and as you can see in some of those stats, growth creates more potential for growth. I think it's important to think about what habits we see now both here and there that we want to encourage, and which habits we don't. Think about what should each community tolerate and reject and enforce (and make no mistake, that answer differs depending on purpose and audience!) and how do we redirect people in the wrong places or teach those who are mistaken? (protip: typing these things out each time is very dumb! That's why we invented FAQ pages!) What struggles did Mastodon face as they started to grow more and more?

Parts of reddit and similar groups will continue to arrive. Look at this list of communities that used to be allowed: it started off with the very blatant controversies like sexualizing minors, moved on to open blatant racism-focused places that conducted raids, and now they're at banning subreddits about a US (former) president and pro-China memes. Now that Lemmy has established itself as the home of some of the most recently banned communities, I personally think it's only a matter of time before reddit pops off a few more communities as they face pressure from media flak, investors or other major influences, and we should prepare for how to handle this: make potentially targeted communities aware that we exist before an incident, and make sure communities have a clear set of rules and guidelines written for the people that come in expecting this to be reddit again. I think this is an opportunity to fix the things we don't want repeated.

For me, its the celebrityism taking credit for the work of others, the encouragement of worker abuse and the faux-philanthropist façade pretending to be a benevolent savior.

8 views

Does anyone remember this famous viral video?: "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy". A creepy montage of a wide range of local channels repeating the same message, reminiscent of 1984 and other dystopias.

For those who haven't read it (just download free copies online), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988, with revisions) is a book which proposed a propaganda model explaining the trends and behaviors of the US mass media system, not just how they are influenced by government but even more how economic and social influences promote this behavior without overt coercion or state censorship. It uses a variety of major historical examples, and later editions preface with discussions of the increasing centralization/consolidation of media companies and their move to the internet. It's an excellent and influential book, and an Orwell Award winner.

But about CONSPIRACY

A conspiracy is when participants have a secret plan or agreement to some harmful or illegal purpose[wiki], such as the Business Plot (1933) by various corporations and COINTELPRO by the FBI.

In Manufacturing Consent, the creators explicitly declare that their model does not rely on conspiratorial reasoning: that the propagandist patterns of mass media are all a result of an explicit conspiracy which all the major perpetrators are co-operating with. Instead, they argue that a variety of uncoordinated but systematic external factors create a pressure for media to encourage and discourage certain types of content. They define and justify five main 'filters' that determine the content we see:

• Size, ownership, and profit orientation of dominant media outlets: they must cater to the financial interests of the owners such as corporations and controlling investors.
• Advertising: almost all revenue needed for them to survive comes from advertising, so media must cater to advertiser's political and economic desires.
• Sourcing mass media news: larger and more aligned media outlets get special access to many routine news sources like government announcements and large organizations in a mutual benefit situation. Other news sources are more expensive and risky to access by nature, and the large routine ones can arbitrarily exclude media publishers they don't like, especially those non-mainstream. This encourages mainstream media to seek those routine sources, creating a bias in what facts they receive.
• Flak: legal, social or reputational harassment is expensive and damages advertising revenue. It is often conducted by powerful, private influence groups like think tanks. Even if not explicitly a conspiracy, they often still align incidentally. This threat to media outlets deters reporting certain facts or opinions
• National enemies: during the Cold War, anti-communism created a social filter that not only affected communism, but rather anything considered remotely related such as socially-progressive policies, civil rights, and being opposed to the invasion in Vietnam, along with impacts on how news criticized Nicaragua's democratic elections while unanimously legitimizing El Salvador's extreme violent repression and corruption as democratic. After the fall of the USSR, this was replaced with the War on Terror as the major social control mechanism, affecting reporting on the recent conflicts in the Middle East.

(more quick explanation and justification for those who haven't yet read the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model )

The point of that list being, the mass media organizations, government, think tanks and advertisers all have their own motivations and don't require a conspiracy or overt government coercion to cause the censorship and propaganda they create. They individually have agendas and abuse their power or profit or influence, but the model's creators argue that there is no need to blame a real conspiracy for this behavior. An interesting side effect is that these induce self-censorship and a bias in sources where the writers usually haven't been told not to write about something, it's simply not economically viable and discouraged independently by each large media outlet, leading to an unorganized but systematic system of propaganda that discourages criticism of the state and of major businesses.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you believe it's justified to claim the mass media's biases largely aren't conspiratorial, or would you debate otherwise? Do you think this is comparable to the alt-right concept of "Deep State" or that DS theory implies the hidden shadow conspiracy that this denounces?

Technically, I think there are an infinite amount of correct answers.