In an attempt to better understand Lemmy I’m wondering if some of you can shed a light on what the deal is between.ml and .world. The history, any significant event or a betrayal, how did we all run away from spez only to come here and throw mud at each other?
I’m sure it confuses a great deal of Reddit refugees who just signed up with the largest instance because of (in my case future proofing) reasons.
I’m wondering how this historic feud came to be and how I can be called a “Zionist” just because of my instance, and they are called “fascists” even though I’ve come across some pretty levelheaded people from that instance too.
Please, keep it civil!
I’m not trying to start a fight or mud slinging, it would be good if several people could say their piece and nobody shame or attack them for it no matter how much you disagree.
Thanks
I’ll be locking this post, as I know for a fact that nothing but debates (which generate a flood of reports) happen with these .ml questions. I hope 197 comments is enough for you.
You can find info on .ml (and probably even .world) and their behaviour in other comms, such as !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works.
!fediverselore@lemmy.ca (even though it is currently locked) also has some info, if your instance has the posts.
World and ML are two peas in a pod. The World moderators won’t punish you for fighting with Tankies but they do monetarily support ML, and likewise ML developers own the Lemmy landing site which sends people to World.
My advice is to avoid Lemmy frontend whenever possible. Its maintainers are the owners of ML and really horrible Tankies, and most if not all instances who use Lemmy frontend support them directly.
For more info about that check out the the Documentation of Extremism Megathread from the !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works comm.
The world admins pay the Lemmy devs?
Correct, before I moved to Piefed I confronted them about the donation banner the Lemmy devs ship with updates and the moderator on the Lemmy World support comm, in a round about way, admitted as much.
"So they’ve provided you a solution to your problem, but you don’t want to use it to solve your problem, and you’re mad at them because you’re still using the thing you don’t want to use.
Got it."
The lemmy.world admins ask for donations to lemmy’s developers and a chunk of that goes to running the .ml server.
I know nothing about
lemmy.world, butlemmy.mlandhexbear.netare filled with tankies (aka angry teenagers IMHO) and have been defederated with a lot of instances.lemmy.mlis writing the original source code of Lemmy, but I don’t remember any betrayal. Most users are not throwing mud, we mostly and politely ignore each other I guess.(anyway, come to https://piefed.social/ instead because it’s the best frontend!)
Is Piefed still using a hidden shadowban list?
When did that happen? I’ve only heard of that frontend UI doing that
The history is a bit confusing because the frontend scandal you’re referring to was for a frontend called “tesseract”, but piefed has also long had a questionable blacklist of phrases applied to screenshots and stuff using the Tesseract OCR toolkit. Piefed has been much more open about it than the frontend dev was, but it’s the same idea:
https://join.piefed.social/2026/08/04/anti-fascist-piefed-features/
I hadn’t caught this blog post previously, thanks for sharing
Its instance based and not hidden. Last time I checked(?) Its been a while since I dove into the source code. But anyone can.
Yes
And they killed pugJesus!
He was a bit of a zionist, but otherwise decent.
Piefed.social and most piefed is created by a man baby that bans anyone that ask or criticizes his shitty decisions. Check numbers and you’ll see that over the past several months Piefed has been slowly decreasing in daily active users.
It there some alternative raising up?
Tankies are not just “angry teenagers” but in fact hostile advocates of militaristic dictatorships, many of whom are under their direct employ.
I don’t think there is any organized feud, as such. A lot of instance population is actually self-selecting. Ideological instances are common. .ml happens to be one of the bigger ideological ones. Unfortunately, they tend to support authoritarian narratives coming out of countries that like to invade their neighbors. Lots of russian disinformation comes from that instance in particular.
i don’t think it’s so much a feud so much as .ml folks are much more hardcore and they actively proselytize their beliefs and .world users aren’t as aggressive in that way. .ml is more active and .world is more reactive, at least in my experience.
generally you also won’t get banned in a .world community for disagreement, you will absolutely get banned for any non-group think in a .ml community.
Eh I dunno’ I got banned from tv on .world for having such a gross opinion as, “Pluribus’ writing royally sucks” with many examples of how the (mild ep1 spoilers) supposedly interconnected consciousness that just wants nice things for humans made so many absolutely asinine decisions in many technical and social ways. Along with several other scientifically unsound things even within the universe of the show.
So… I guess all that is to say, some mods/admins on Lemmy are happily carrying on the Reddit traditions of being the worst users.
i remember when reddit mods didn’t ban you for having different opinions than them, but that was 15 years ago.
hell, some of the places i was on reddit the mods would defend people’s rights to have differing opinions and thoughts and beliefs. but that starting changing in the mid 2010s with the influxed of ID politics nutjobs who started becoming mods or harassing older mods into compliance with their insane beliefs that people are inherently evil or good based on their politics or their physical characteristics.
the irony always being that ID pol people scream they are the proponents of ‘empathy’ but their ideology doesn’t believe it can genuinely exist between people of different identities.
.world users have the benefit of all current propaganda pushing their positions so it makes sense they don’t feel the need to talk about it. I have been banned by many .world subs simply for linking evidence against claims, while I only was banned from .ml once when I unintentionally promoted hurting someone (and was unbanned when I messaged mods about it, which has yet to happen on any .world).
Lemmy is strongly left-leaning and well you probably know the joke where two leftist enter a bar and 3 splinter groups come out.
My general advice is to instance block lemmy.ml and avoid the war in Palestine/Israel.
Lemmy.ml is the flagship instance of the authoritarian lemmy developers @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml and they unfortunately are not separating development and server administration. As Lemmy.ml is the oldest instance, many newbies think it is “the main Lemmy instance”, way before they realize what the concept of federation means. ml’s influence has weakened in the last years, but it’s still influencing the discussion a lot. Check !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works to get an idea about ml.
You people are exhausting. What is authoritarian and please give examples of non-authoritarian states.
they are exhausting.
any state where you can get evicted by the cops for not paying rent is authoritarian
the act of overthrowing that situation is going to be authoritarian too.
i know which one i would prefer.
it’s impossible to be free from authority while other competing states exist. in the name of self defense until every remaining capitalist state is overthrown any adversarial political economy is going to need to retain some level of authority
The problem with tankies specifically is that they cheer when their authoritarians do shit, like when they cheered in 1956, and again in 1989.
Both times tanks were rolled out to literally crush left wing uprisings against the pretend leftwing governments.
They cheer for Russia invading its neighbors.
At least most of us in the west are horrified about the shit our governments are doing. Tankies just cheer.
You’ll get banned for showing support for Ukraine or going against Russian narratives or if you remind them of Putlers promise to not invade or just shit talking Putler in general
Or calling out propaganda sites - https://lemmy.world/post/32776038 | https://lemmy.world/post/33416433 | https://lemmy.world/post/34051329 | https://lemmy.world/post/35919522
Or so much more, I actually haven’t updated the megathread in a few months, but there’s more recent stuff on !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works
Not that you’ll read any of it, since you are a tagged Tankie
In my opinion this is what kills the fediverse. When instances block other instances, you just fragment the whole thing. I think what is needed is a Proxy. What do I mean with that? I can host a read only instance. This way I can control what instances I want to access and which I want to block, but this instance doesn’t host accounts or posts. I would still need an account with a regular instance. The proxy instance would allow multiple accounts at the same time, so you don’t need to worry about to change accounts or URLs, just to see a few other communities.
The whole federation thing is quite neat, but you need so much information beforehand, to choose your “right” community. Of course there are some very isolated instances, that do get blocked by most regular instances, but between the regular instances, there are quite some differences. For example some instances forbid NSFW. Hetzner (server hoster) does not allow NSFW in their ToS and a while back, a lot of instances used Hetzner. Some instances got surprised by that, because they didn’t read the ToS.
Also I have the fear that when some governments could make the life worse for instances and make them accountable for other instances, that you can access through their instance. As an example could be the age verification, that some countries do require now.
people kill the fediverse because they can’t keep their insane beliefs to themselves, and feel compelled to harass and intimate anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs.
including the incessant demonization of anyone who isn’t as extreme as they are.
Different countries, different laws about free speech and expectations of free speech. Also different countries, different propaganda and their leaders/governments pushing certain agendas. Within their country, they are not wrong. A lot of centralized websites are US based and do follow US laws but you can’t expect that the Internet follows US or EU laws and their culture. Obviously this creates problems and the thing is, that every country tries to fight it their own ways and try to push their agenda. One example would be the GDPR. Some US sites just geoblocked EU IPs, because they didn’t want to deal with these laws, that aren’t even from their country.
Lack of moderation and a flood of botnets and employed hostile actors is what could kill the fediverse, like what is happening with Twitter, Reddit, FaceBook, or YouTube.
Calling them dead or about to be killed, is a wide stretch. All of them do got some dips and people leaving these sites, but I don’t see a big rush away, as the content is still there. With YouTube you don’t have an alternative. With Twitter some went to Mastodon, some to Bluesky and some to Trump Twitter. Reddit is still doing good and Facebook… The whole concept is not doing well.
For all it’s important, including fediverse is the content. Let just focus on Lemmy and Reddit. With Reddit you did have communities splitting of abusive mods. With Lemmy you suddenly have some general purpose communities on different instances and you need to figure out which one is worth following. Some communities quickly die off and they go back to reddit, as there are more users for that community. This alone is hurting whole Lemmy. When you then have somewhat active communities across different Instances, because they think, their instance is better or the other instances sucks, then you split the community more.
To survive you need content and active communities. Reddit still has a lot of that and Lemmy is trying to get more, but their design makes it hard to keep it together. Lemmy has just a few options to survive long term. Get more people and content, so the fragmentation doesn’t play a huge role. Change the design, to prevent fragmentation or the users stop fighting and stop fragmenting the content and try to agree on one community and the others get deleted.
Stuff like Mastodon/Bluesky don’t have such a huge problem, as it’s about a single person and not a community.
YouTube MAU peaked in 2023 and long form videos are crashing down in views across the entire site.
Short form creators don’t really make any money to begin with so they have no future on the platform.
How far it will fall, nobody knows, but if the equivalent happened to a smaller company it would be fatal.
But there is no big movement away. Yes creators do get less views and money, but I don’t see a big movement of creators, nor viewers. Some big creators try to get the viewers back, that they lost because of the algorithm. They do create and use platforms like Floatplane or Nebula. Here in Germany some do go to the streaming sites of TV Networks. This isn’t really solving the problem, as you switched from shitty YouTube to streaming fragmentation.
Bilibli apparently tries to go international and they do have the infrastructure to be an alternative. I use YouTube since 2008 and there was always people saying that their peak was a few years ago. I saw one try to move away from YouTube here in Germany. A lot of creators rushed to a platform, took viewers with them and started to upload their stuff there. The site couldn’t handle the demand, quickly bought new hardware and what happend next? A lot of people walked back to YouTube. Creators didn’t wanted to double upload and manage 2 sites and from a viewers perspective, not everyone switched, so they stayed where everyone was.
I saw so much the last years. People are always upset about changes and they always say they move but in the end, not much happens. People forget and with the next change, the whole thing repeats. There are no worthy alternatives. Some companies do try it, but it doesn’t quite work out. Do you remember Facebook Gaming/Live? Do you remember Mixer? Both platforms that tried to replace twitch. Even YouTube tried to focus more on Game Streaming but failed. You still can stream on Youtube, but the whole YouTube Gaming thing is dead and never really took off.
To be honest, currently is a good time to try again to switch away from YouTube, as it really messed up a lot of stuff, because they focused more on short videos, than long videos. The other question is how long long videos do exist. Do they move more towards other platforms, like more classic vod streaming services (Netflix, Prime, Paramount, Disney, Discovery or streaming platforms of local TV stations) or do they try to fit more in the short video sector?
Schismogenesis: two groups that perceive themselves as rivals will tend to amplify and identify with whatever initial differences they have.
Yeah, a lot of online communities are like that.
til
Don’t believe a word of this, it was all hyped up by Big Fedi to drive up clicks
CI@ spy op
.world is less crazy/extremist than .ml generally.
still, the majority of the lemmy/fedi userbase skews far left idealism, and is 100% comfortable with extremist opinions of using violence and mass coercion and demonization of anyone who doesn’t believe like they do.
According to .ml you are Zionist unless you don’t support the extermination of Israeli and Israelis. accord to .world you’re a Zionist if you don’t support the expulsion of Jewish people from Palestine and the dissolution of the Jewish state. both are pretty far-out there opinions, but again most users here are extremists or one flavor or another.
if you aren’t a far-leftism foaming about the mouth about mass murder of your political opponents you’re going ot find it trying to be here for long. unless you’re just indifference to the hostility you will encounter, or systematically block people who tell you to die for having a different opinion or even acknowledge the existence of different opinions, than they hold.
TIL
I’ve been here for a while, where did you catch these notions? I feel like there’s this Friday night after work drinks I’ve never been to, so I missed out on all the office gos.
you catch these notions? I feel like there’s this Friday night after work drinks I’ve never been to, so I missed out on all the office gos.
they really pulled them out of their ass from what i can tell. easier to argue against caricatures than real people
I can’t even respond to them and expect a reply because i’m instance banned from piefed.social (rimu doesn’t like me, got banned around the time of this post )
Dude, same. This isn’t the fourth time I’ve seen posts like yours and comments. I’m having a ok time here (slow activity) looking at Star Trek memes and self hosting but everything else is just meh post topics or RSS. Not sure where all this other stuff is happening.
just because you personally don’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
log out and browse an all feed and click in a couple a couple of pages from the top, and you will see a lot of crazy shit.
if you only see what you subscribe to, yeah you won’t see any weird and crazy shit on here. hell, go into any news community on .ml and 90% of the comments are ‘death to america!’ kind of shit.
I’ve been here for over three years. I left reddit in like '22, before it was cool to leave reddit.
it was a lot more chill a year or two ago, the reddit refugees who have come here recent have brought a lot of their toxicity and intolerance with them, and a lot of them have started a lot of communities where, like reddit today, the easiest way to get banned is disagreement with a moderator/admins personal opinions.
the easiest way to not have a terrible time here is to block incessently, and block entire instances where you can. i have about 5 instances blocked, and 100s of users blocked. it cuts down my content by like 70% probably, but I’m not interested in kind of content those communities/users post incessantly, which is mostly inflammatory rage bait and victimhood self-pity nonsense. and the personal harassment I get is fairly limited compared to when I dind’t block .ml and a few other instances that are basically ideologically extremist.
I know nothing about any of this. I’m on PieFed/feddit.online. I don’t even know if there’s bad stuff here or they’re blocking content/instances. I like the fediverse but sometime I feel lost and confused when I see posts like this. What am I missing here?
piefed is heavily filtered by default. you have to turn the filters off.
the PieFed people have their own weird agenda they push. They want things to be Disneyfied and ‘positive vibes only’. it’s not so much political per se, but they want to socially engineer user behavior in a way lemmy does not.
piefed blocking tools are superior to lemmy ones though.
.world is the generic reddit audience .ml is tankies
I’m not trying to start a fight or mud slinging
You have an account 2 years old so either you are trying to start something or a complete moron.
Not everyone lives on Lemmy and/or lets internet drama live rent-free in their head. I’ve been on here a while and I’m only vaguely aware of inter-instance drama. I know everyone hates .ml, but like OP I’m not sure why. So, maybe, don’t be a dick?
As an aside, do you remember the days of !fediverselore@lemmy.ca? I think there were a solid chunk of people on Lemmy that lived for the 'net drama, grudges, trolling, flamewars and squabbling between instances, users and everyone in between.
It was petty more often than not, but I won’t lie, sometimes those threads got kind of interesting to me.
In the beginning there was lemmy.ml only, BTW no one mentioned it but the dev choose .ml because “Marxism–Leninism”. It is a far-left guy with far-left ideology.
When reddit blocked its APIs a few years ago, a lot of people went to “lemmy” and a lot of new instance were created, like lemmy.world, which is not far-left, so a lot of people joined it.
They chose .ml because it was a free domain at the time.
I keep some lemmy.ml communities on my feed because it’s refreshing to see news out of china that while likely propaganda, is at least not the usual flavor of propaganda.
When I read other countries’ propaganda, it makes me realize how much US ruling class propaganda passes through unnoticed
I’ve come across some pretty levelheaded people from that instance too
This was me (for some definition of level :D)
I joined
.mlbefore I really understood the differences. Even once I realised the connotation, I didn’t switch until I realised that !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works was blocked on that instance. That made me think about what instance I wanted to join (based on what communities I was most active in) and then I switched over here.So, there are definitely a mix of people on each instance. It makes me sad when I see people jump to conclusions based on instance, although I also understand it if 90% of their experience is of a particular type of person.
I keep meaning to find another instance although as far as I can tell it hasn’t limited my access to the communities I’m interested in (FLOSS software, technology and UK politics). Part of the inertia also comes from my experience on Mastodon which occasionally sees waves of server shutdowns when the costs become too much for individual admins to absorb. At least while the core contributers continue I can be reasonably certain the server will stay up.
If you are here for fun, trolling people from .ml is both easy and invigorating, as they take themselves very serious, lack a sense of humor and get enraged about almost anything. I had great success with mentioning Palestine, Putin and I even got banned FOR LIFE from a community for defending the POLICE (hahaha 1:0 for me!) The discussions went on and on, you do need a skin as thick as a MAGA, but it is very rewarding… as thick as Putin’s butt after riding his bear I should say, to stay in my role. And they don’t use deodorant rumor has it.
Thank you for defending Sting and sus muchachos.
