jointhefediverse.net seems to be a commonly linked resource for directing people to join the Fediverse.
Curiously, it does not list Lemmy under the list of Reddit alternatives. Their GitHub README explains why.
Previous relevant discussion: https://lemmy.ml/post/78808
All valid concerns.
No, they’re not.
Doesn’t matter if you stay away from .ml.
Kind of valid, but open source and open license negates a lot of that.
You think anything else on the Fediverse is better? When you post something publicly, it’s public. Doesn’t really matter what the software does. If you don’t have End to End encryption, it’s not private.
deleted by creator
The linked post given on the second point is a bit flimsy. It’s basically saying that if you use evidence published by a person with shitty views, you must have them too. To me, that’s absurd as claiming that referencing FBI statistics makes someone a federal agent.
This is why I’m looking forward to Sublinks launching.
Piefed is more promosing. Sublinks has been on hold for a while now
These concerns, and more, are why just today, during a conversation with some friends looking to get off traditional social media, I advised them to join pixelfed, peer tube, mastodon, and loops, but suggested they strictly avoid Lemmy.
The communities aren’t right for anyone who isn’t seeking something exactly like Lemmy or leftie-Reddit-lite. I don’t even really like it here all that much anymore. Not the content; the interactions… across all my accounts… even joining “nicer” spaces is not a particularly nice or pleasant experience, plus the more interested is a woman, and Lemmy is a horrible sausagefest echo chamber not at all suited to a normal average woman person who isn’t techie. I’m techie, so I’m used to the vibe, but for your average cis-woman, Lemmy is a very very bad fit.
Bring on the downvotes if you like (the echo-chamber anti-voice sentiment is part of why people shouldn’t be recommended this platform, after all) but these are legit concerns for people who may want to join, and those of us already here can and do steer people elsewhere as a result.
Fair points, to be honest. We can all do better.
Far be it from me to point out this is exactly how reddit started.
The foundational promise of lemmy and the fediverse writ large is freedom from proprietary software and closed-protocols; the kind of people who are going to be interested in seeking out those types of alternatives are going to gravitate toward techy men.
It takes time for new social media sites to fan outward from their initial adopters, that’s just how it goes.
Same honestly. I never discussed politics on Reddit, but it’s all the content that’s here. Partly why I don’t recommend it to anyone i know who uses Reddit. Most content just isn’t normie-friendly here.
It’s so depressing and aggressive, honestly. I can’t do that to my friends who don’t do that already.
Point 1 and 2 really need to be addressed.
It would be so much better if lemmy wasn’t developed by genocide white-washing tankies.
https://piefed.social/ is catching up
Any way to migrate a self hosted lemmy instance to piefed?
just run both!
No, it’s not geared up for that. There’s a platform called sublinks where the intention is to be initially compatible enough with Lemmy that it can be a drop-in replacement, but they haven’t released anything yet.
Oh interesting, thanks for sharing!
Python based: I was looking for that
Yeah, I don’t expect it to scale well. Certainly not as well as Rust.
deleted by creator
Have you checked how muh software do you use that is enabled by capitalism?
You should ask it on lemmygrad.ml :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
wow that’s interesting :D
SDF is pretty rad.
Yee
Excuse me?
I hate it when people try to gatekeep like this. I don’t need to be handheld. If there’s a Fediverse alternative to something and it mostly works, it should be on the website. Anything less is not useful at best.
Edit: I say this as someone who has historically criticized the behavior of the devs as well as multiple Lemmy communities BTW.
Well, since you’ve vocally criticised the developers and they haven’t bothered changing their ways, wouldn’t you agree they deserve to be gatekept?
On the other hand, it’s not for you to decide the criteria for what is included on jointhefediverse’s curated list. I personally think it is a perfectly reasonable judgement call they’ve made.
It’s kind of a tradeoff. As much as I like Mbin, it’s not at feature parity with Lemmy yet, having only one mobile app is probably a deal breaker to a lot of users.
People keep saying mbin is not good enough but I bang out hellva work on it.
What does it actually miss for this criticism to be valid?
I think it might help if you advertise it more too. I haven’t heard of mbin in months and partially assumed it stopped existing
Posts not being marked as read and lack of app support.
No, I don’t. If it’s about instances I’d understand it a bit more, even though I wouldn’t entirely agree with that either (I’m a free speech stan), but this is a page listing Fediverse alternative software. The software is fine and relatively untainted from the intentions of the Lemmy devs from what I can tell (although that was not originally the case). They deserved to be criticized, but not censored from Fediverse articles listing alternatives to big tech platforms.
How is this censorship though?
You can always start joinfediversefreespeechstan.io or whatever. The code is even available, no?
I could never understand american-style preference for “free speech” themed theatrics.
Because as the leading “Fediverse alternative” website, it essentially tells the viewer that Lemmy doesn’t exist, which I think does a disservice to prospective Fediverse users.
But yes good point, anyone can make an alternative website, I think right wing people made like a fuckgab.com site back in the day to recommend Gab alternatives on the Fediverse.
Where does it say “Lemmy doesn’t exist”? The admins of the site are well within their right to curate what service they include. I say this as someone who uses Lemmy a lot and really wants there to be a non-corporate, competition-focused alternative (instances, UIs) to reddit specifically and oligarch run social networks in general.
I don’t understand how “censorship” plays into this (beyond shallow polemical grandstanding). Where is the censorship?
It’s not “censorship” when somebody decides to omit a software from a curated list over the developers’ horrible takes. See also Soapbox.
Edited to add: Free speech does not obligate anybody to boost or acknowledge subjects that they disagree with.
Is that really what all this protest is over? Someone’s ‘horrible takes’?
They are suppressing information about the fediverse based on political views. They had it up and then they took it down. Please explain how this is not censorship. I don’t know where people get the idea that censorship is an inherently negative thing.
Yeah you’re right of course, it is censorship. It just happens to be positive. Although, I’d argue that maybe it isn’t based on political or religious views, rather on not wanting to give someone a bad impression of the fediverse and make them leave again? As in, self-serving interests?
The main argument I see against Lemmy devs is that they’re “tankies”, which is most certainly political. And I agree. Except that there’s nothing in the software itself that is political. Only the devs, and many of the .ml communities and users.
In the encyclopedic sense, you’re right. In this context that I replied to, however, censorship had a negative connotation, and my response spoke to that rather than the formal meaning.
Right, and I do note that you talk about jointhefediverse “suppressing” Lemmy — another negative connotation.
I’ll maintain that, no, they are just leaving it out. Again, that is the privilege of a list curator. Nobody else have a say in what and why is included on the site. Choosing what to publish, and the omissions that entails, are also protected by free speech.
It can be their privilege and also be censorship. You seem to imply otherwise.
Generally fair point. My issue though is that most people will just go to this website and won’t consider other lists or websites, viewing this as the definitive list of Fediverse alternatives. Someone not putting someone’s software on their website isn’t technically censorship, true (this is the other coin of free speech), it does effectively censor Lemmy from the general conversation about Fediverse alternatives.
Do most people go to jointhefediverse, though? Honest question, I don’t know the site’s traffic stats vs fediverse.to or fediverse.party (which both show up way above jointhefediverse in my duckduckgo search). It’s not like an authoritative index or search engine blackballed Lemmy, it is literally about a single grassroots site.
Lemmy is bigger by a LOT (LIKE A LOT) than mbin and piefed. So don’t see how Lemmy is losing the strong grip it already has on this type of fediverse. Heck, google reddit alternatives and Lemmy is also king.
This change on that site was in 2023. It’s 2025. So it has not impacted Lemmy’s user base.
Another good point 👍🏾
To me the first one is an instance problem (ml, hexbear?), and not a lemmy problem. It has looked like they’ve been trying to separate the two as much as possible.
But the Lemmy project and specific instances are not so easily separated. From the archived mastodon thread:
So yeah, newcomers are presented with a join-lemmy site that promotes Lemmygrad and Lemmy ML, both of which appear to be run by the Lemmy devs.
That pretty much makes it a Lemmy problem.
On what basis can anyone declare one instance to be the ‘main’ one? I’ve seen a number of people claim the same thing about .world, but none of them need to be considered the ‘main’ ones. The entire motivation for the creation of the fediverse is to allow segmentation… I think people simply want to make it an issue because without these little cross-community spats things get boring.
Unfortunately, .ml is a default instance and the main devs instance, what happens there reflects on all of us
Default where?
https://join-lemmy.org/
I don’t see it on that page. Going to “See all servers” lists “lemmy.ml” at a random position in the list. Looking at “Join a server” and using “Generic” or “All topics” also lists it in a random position. Am I missing something?
If you use “Most active”, it will shows up after lemm.ee and the other big instances. So not default, but would still be recommended to new joiners
Well to me that doesn’t fit the “it’s default” description.
While looking at that, I couldn’t see lemmy.world on that page. I found that join-lemmy.org now excludes instances with >30% user share in order to dampen centralisation. Which makes sense I guess.
It was made very clear from the start that .ml was not meant to be a ‘default instance’.
Too bad for all of us that it is though.
How was it default? I’ve been here for years and in all that time, it was never default. It was one of the most popular, and the most widely shared, but that’s not the same at all.
To me, the only solution to this is to do a hard fork. Take the code (It’s AGPL), rename it if Lemmy is trademarked, and encourage admins to use it and contributors to target it. Maybe start a non-profit or LLC while we’re at it.
Sublinks is doing a rewrite
Good luck finding Rust devs interested in link aggregators. That fork would probably fall behind, and people would switch back to Lemmy as they keep delivering features.
Mbin and Piefed use more popular languages and haven’t caught up yet
Instead of trying to fork, maybe we try and go the Gotosocial way and make a MVP smol version. Something that can house 10 or so users. People can spin up whatever they want.
Honestly what I wouldnt give for a reddit theme on mastodon that uses their hashtags as the communities themselves. That would be cool in my opinion.
To be honest, at this point forking the jointhefediverse website would probably be easier
What is the issue with user privacy? These do not sound like valid concerns to me.
This is all quite old drama, and the issue itself is fixed now, but at one point someone kicked off about how if you uploaded a picture to Lemmy, there was no easy way to delete it (you could delete your post, but the image would still be there at whatever URL was created for it, and it wasn’t even that easy for admins to find and remove it) - so I’m guessing that it stems from that.
Its older than that, and still ongoing. The devs doubled down on how GDPR (and user data privacy rights in general) do not matter to them
it’s federated. It’s the only way it can work. Everything still on that ist must suffer from the same thing. Federation means handing stuff to someone else. Once that’s done, it’s out of your hands forever.
Correct but fedi is supposed to be the public forum of the future.
Social media worked the same… you handed your shit posts to faceberg or sundar the creep, do people think when they deleted their “creation” it was removed?
That cant be the issue because the site is called joinfediverse and everything it lists is federated.
Yeah, seems like it’s just how ActivityPub works / how federated networks are.
Recently came across this very interesting writeup: https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org (via https://social.coop/@cwebber/113639985634239856)
No that cant be why they do not list lemmy. The other services there federate in the same way.
The links from the github in case anyone wants to learn more (in order of the list):
https://web.archive.org/web/20210901023138/https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379
https://raddle.me/f/lobby/96713/heads-up-the-tankie-behind-lemmy-ml-got-banned-from-r
https://raddle.me/f/lobby/155371/warning-lemmy-doesn-t-care-about-your-privacy-everything-is
First link is completely unviewable for me on mobile, the entire thread is a chain of posts that say “Please don’t use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression” with a show more button that doesn’t work, and the original thread is gone. Could you(/someone) paste what it says? I’d try on desktop but our internet has been out since the fires started in LA
Entire thread, all from the same user:
Post 1
Please don’t use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression
Human rights mean a lot to me. I joined the Fediverse to make the world a nicer place. My efforts are pathetically small, but hopefully make at least a tiny difference.
I used to recommend Lemmy very strongly, thought the people who develop it were nice folks interested in making the world better too.
However, recent discussions with the developers has changed my mind completely.
I am very suspicious about their motivations now.
1/6
Post 2
Please don’t use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression
Lemmy’s developers say “we are strictly against all forms of oppression (including genocide), and dont allow anything that promotes or supports oppression” and “We definitely are very staunchly against bigotry or persecution of minorities, and are strict about banning that”.
This is difficult to fully reconcile with what actually happens on the developers’ own instance, and those they feature.
2/6
Post 3
Please don’t use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression
The problem here isn’t Lemmy’s politics, but their attitude to threads about human rights violations.
On the face of it, the developers’ main Lemmy instance has lots of uncontroversial general interest threads, but when you start digging on controversial topics a worrying pattern emerges.
The worrying posts are very reminiscent of the way certain churches have handled priest abuse claims: denial.
3/6
Post 4
Please don’t use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression
There’s threads denyng the oppression of Uyghur muslims (this oppression has been well documented by NGOs, for example: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions/help-end-repression-uyghurs-china).
Other posts deny that North Korea is oppressive.
Meanwhile, another suggests celebrating Stalin’s birthday as he was such a great guy.
(Incidentally, I have receipts, DM me if you want to see them for yourself.)
4/6
Post 5
Please don’t use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression
You get the picture.
These posts were on the main Lemmy instance, as featured on the official Lemmy website.
Over the past few days I have tried to engage with Lemmy about these posts in private, as I was sure it must be a misunderstanding.
However, Lemmy said that “none of the posts you linked are against our rules”, and refused to even discuss the actual issues because “this format is not conducive to political disagreements”.
5/6
Post 6
Please don’t use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression
I deeply regret ever having publicised Lemmy. I’m really sorry.
Don’t use Lemmy.
For whatever my opinion is worth any more, I would now recommend that people cancel their donations to Lemmy, stay as far away from Lemmy as possible, and donate to another Fediverse project instead.
I was wondering whether to stay quiet, but it seemed better to speak up and say something
6/6
Post 7
Please don’t use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression
p.s. I put the wrong link for Amnesty, the Uyghur report is here:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/4137/2021/ug/
Post 8
Please don’t use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression
p.p.s. Someone has pointed out that lemmy.ml (the official Lemmy instance) resolves to the same IP address as lemmygrad.ml (the instance that contains the most disturbing material).
Lemmy.ml also federates with lemmygrad, and the devs advertise lemmygrad on their “join lemmy” site.
Do the Lemmy developers themselves run the lemmygrad.ml site? (Its main logo is a tank, incidentally.)
Post 9
Please don’t use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression
p.p.p.s. There was an older “reddit for the Fediverse” project called Prismo which had some working instances at one point.
Perhaps someone could resurrect it, to provide an alternative to Lemmy?
https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo
Thank you!
Sorry to hear
Thanks, fortunately I’m not in any evacuation zones, it’s just really bad air quality here
Wait wait…what’s that last one?