Hey everyone, I’m new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says “Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.”).
The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the “lemmy.ml” server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”.
So I thought I try that one when it’s from Lemmy’s own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?
It’s normal and actually kind of cool by design - the ‘fediverse’ is basically a bunch of different servers (instances) that can all connect to each other. I’m on Lemmy.world, my other account is on midwest.social, but when I’m looking at posts from all communities on either of those I see more or less the same stuff from all the other communities across the other instances.
But some instances have a theme, like Midwest.social is kind of intended for people from the midwest, but anyone can join. Lemmy.ml is kind of a communist hangout. Solarpunk(spelling) is a lot more eco-conscious than other instances.
You can join any instance you want, sometimes after you join an instance you notice a theme that doesn’t really vibe with you, but you can join a more ‘vanilla’ instance, stay on your current instance, or look around for some instance that’s really into whatever you’re into.
But at the end of the day your credentials on an instance are basically a passport for all the other instances, and it’s mostly gonna be a legit good passport.
That said, if an instance goes to crap from bad moderation or from horrible viewpoints or culture, other instances can basically block it, and if you’re on an instance that becomes defederated your basically cut off from all the other instances, so you better go find a better instance, but that doesn’t happen all too often