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
Makes sense to me.
It has mbin and piefed on the list, so it’s not harming the network at all. If anything it’s more healthy with more platforms rather than just ml and world. It’s one site directing people to the fedi, I’m not butthurt about it
Nutomic and Dessalines may be tankies, but they’re our tankies
They may be your tankis, but they sure arent our tankies.
They can fuck right off
Good way to phrase it ha ha
They can do whatever shit they want with their instance and believe whatever they want. The software they make provably doesn’t have any more biases than any other software. As long as that’s the case, I’m fine.
Yeah, but it’s guilt by association. Think about how X is now. Its owner is an asshole, and that hurts the platform regardless of how many cool people use it.
Lemmy was removed due to:
- reports of how the developers handle certain types of content (post removed, view an incomplete archive)
- the behavior of its creator
- how the sotware itself handles users’ privacy.
All valid concerns.
This is why I’m looking forward to Sublinks launching.
These concerns, and more, are why just today, during a conversation with some people 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 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 woman person who isn’t techie. I’m techie, so I’m used to the vibe, but for a normal woman type, Lemmy is a 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.
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.
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!
Oh interesting, thanks for sharing!
Python based: I was looking for that
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
Excuse me?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
wow that’s interesting :D
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.
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.
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.
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 👍🏾
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?
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:
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.)
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.
Unfortunately, .ml is a default instance and the main devs instance, what happens there reflects on all of us
Default where?
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
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.
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:
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?
Thank you!
since the fires started in LA
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?
It’s almost certainly because of the tankie factory that is .ml and the fact that it’s admins are all hard core tankies (including the main dev! And ofc the whole infamous Nutomic transphobe incident)
Coupled with the fact that a few of the biggest communities are on .ml does not bode well.
That’s why I keep calling for a general boycott against posting content or comments on .ml communities.
.ml doesn’t want growth, they want a tankie echo chamber, if anybody wants to actually see Lemmy grow at a healthy pace it starts with shuning the hostile tankies and their instances.
Make your own instance and defederate .ml or any of the other instances you hate. Go nuts! Show us how it’s done.
sorry, but what does tankie mean?
Generally, those who praise authoritarian regimes who mask, or attempt to, themselves in the cloak of communism/socialism e.g. China or Russia and are SUPER anti-West (Parroting views of the China Russian regime)
Which comes with a whole host of shit takes, like Russia being justified in their invasion or even denying Tiennamen Square and definitely denying the China Uyghur genocide
Basically, they’ve gone so far left they’ve circled back into Right-wing authoritarianism
oh i thought tankie means different here
Same, no idea… Tank wearing people? Lol
Coupled with the fact that a few of the biggest communities are on .ml does not bode well.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active_month
- 0 community in the top 10
- 2 communities in the top 20
That’s why I keep calling for a general boycott against posting content or comments on .ml communities.
[email protected] is a good alternative to [email protected]
Well I was going by subscriber count, but good to know that it’s not as bleak going by (probably more accurate metric to go by) MAUs, but still [email protected] is #10 in the top 10
For memes either [email protected] or [email protected] is a good alternative to [email protected]
Isn’t number 10 [email protected] ?
Also, by the active numbers metrics, those other memes communities definitely took over the ml one
Oh it is, ig I miscounted lol
Still many top tech communities (in their niche) are on ML. Open source, Linux, Privacy, Raspberry Pi, Firefox come to mind.
Several hexbear communities are also in the top 50.
I mentioned l [email protected] already
The alternatives are there, most of the people just don’t seem to care enough to leave the .ml ones
Several hexbear communities are also in the top 50.
Are they? I see 2.6k monthly active users for [email protected], which is definitely lower than top 50, seems more like 80 or 90, or even past 100 (currently on my phone, can’t really count accurately, and Lemmyverse doesn’t have row numbers)
I do use all the ML alternatives, but engagement is notably lower. I almost wish LW would just bite the bullet and defederate from ML.
Yeah, maybe more like top 100 for hexbear. I am on mobile too.
I almost wish LW would just bite the bullet and defederate from ML.
I get the feeling that even if you got what you wanted, you would still complain about .ml
Right now, you could block .ml personally. Have you blocked .ml?
Everyone should defederate from that toxic shithole. It serves no purpose that isn’t duplicated elsewhere only without the heavy-handed admin/mod team.
I almost wish LW would just bite the bullet and defederate from ML.
I really don’t understand why they won’t, they did it with lemmygrad and hexbear but with .ml they wanna take this kid glove approach. The best theory I got is they don’t want to because of the more active communities on there ig
That’s why I keep calling for a general boycott against posting content or comments on .ml communities.
I mean…I joined that boycott months ago, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before this moment.
Bro. I just posted a meme about it 3 days ago
And I post from time to time about it, enough that some of the more prominent .ml users have started to take notice lmao
I’ve also been consistently for weeks now cross-posting a ton of fresh (non-tankie anyways) content to the relevant non-.ml communities, it’s like the bulk of my posts rn lol
I wrote this before
I spotted Dessalines posted literal propaganda on some community I joined
gotta be honest that does not sit well with me
Yep. And note how the other mods/admins are almost always found commenting alongside them.
to anyone looking for somewhere other than Lemmy I’d like to suggest mbin. I’ll admit it’s not perfect (especially on mobile, interstellar is decent but it’s the only app and has some bugs) but it handles reddit-style content pretty much the same as Lemmy except for the lack of read-marking on posts. as a bonus, it handles microblogs so you can see those without an account on mastodon or something similar.
What bugs/issues does Interstellar have that you would like to see fixed? I’m Interstellar’s developer btw. I tried to get the majority of the know bugs fixed in the last big update. If there’s anything specific you’re running into, I can try to focus on that.
I ran a kbin instance, which kbin forked, and man it was so resource heavy compared to lemmy. Quite expensive to run at scale. Has mbin fork helped with that?
I’m not sure about self-hosting (not feasible for me right now) but as a user it’s not bad. I can say I haven’t seen anyone complaining about it yet.
Wow that change is from June 2023.
Yes, that’s quite old, not sure why OP is bringing this up now.
Most of the people here know about the Lemmy devs political stances. Quite a few people are waiting for Piefed and Mbin to catch up. Nothing new to see here.
This is just the 2nd feud post this week. It had to be disguised because otherwise people might start to understand how truly pathetic it is to make these posts. Over and over and over.
Block .ml
Block me
Who cares how others use Lemmy? I don’t. Feel free to make a 3rd feud post this week. Stick it to us champ!
I don’t know. I just came across it yesterday, and I thought it’d be something interesting to share.
It was explained in the post’s body actually:
Curiously, it does not list Lemmy under the list of Reddit alternatives.
Most of the people here know about the Lemmy devs political stances.
Seeing as I’ve only started using Lemmy less than a month ago, I’ve only just very recently started realizing that.
I appreciate you posting it
It’s okay, I see your account is quite new, so no worries.
As I said, those issues are known, you can have a look at [email protected] for posts complaining about power tripping mods, be it lemmy.ml or elsewhere.
The key takeaway is that even with its flaws, Lemmy is the biggest Reddit alternative by far (Discuit has less than 200 weekly active posters, Lemmy has 42000). If there would have been a better alternative people would probably have moved there, but there wasn’t (and still isn’t) any, so here we are
This was like me months ago. A lot of people here take the mentality of “Well I know about it, so it MUST be common knowledge that everybody knows!”
Completely forgetting that there are 8 billion people on the planet, and something like 65k people on lemmy. Statistically speaking, this means basically nobody in the entire planet knows about lemmy, or the issues with lemmy.ml.
So for every NEW user, this is ALWAYS new info. It’s not like facebook where I don’t have an account, but already know zuck’s a massive piece of shit.
So, I should quit Lemmy now too?
Not at all, just filter out .ml. Problem fixed!
So far I haven’t found a better alternative. Lemmy communities are already much smaller than their Reddit counterparts.
Personally, I don’t plan to venture into even more remote locations. It defeats the community part of it…
Piefed looks interesting!
It certainly is! The only “bad” part is the lack of a mobile client. And it kinda looks funky on mobile.
The Thunder client is a godsend for Lemmy, I’m so happy with the work that developer has done. I feel like I’m still back on Reddit using Relay in the compact view.
For any of these alternatives to succeed mobile apps have to exist, and I doubt all the devs that popped up to make Lemmy apps want to retool yet again for a different platform.
It’s not so much that we expect the developers of Lemmy apps to retool. The hope is that, if we can provide a sensible, well-documented API, then it will appeal to front-end developers looking for a project. Also, if there are any devs of Lemmy mobile apps who are unhappy with Lemmy’s API for any reason, then getting involved with PieFed’s whilst it’s still in development, offers them a chance to shape one to their desires.
Speaking of Thunder though - I’ve been able to compile it for desktop, and get it working with PieFed’s API in the state it’s in now. I’ve no experience with Flutter / Dart or front-end development, so it suggests that - for open source Lemmy apps, at least - it doesn’t need to be the original author who ports it, and that the actual details a particular API are only a relatively small part of creating a good mobile app.
I’m guessing you had to make some changes? I get a url error when putting in piefed.social but the logo appears.
Oh yeah, sorry. I didn’t mention that the API isn’t available on production sites like piefed.social. I’ve been messing around with a build of Thunder on my dev instance, and - among other things - the app doesn’t uses the same V3 endpoint that Lemmy does, so it’d always need to be a different version than the one that’s currently available for Lemmy.
Same feeling with Sync for lemmy. Basically the same experience of reddit I’ve been using for years.
You can access the same communities on kbin. Does that change anything though?
kbin is abandonware: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/112929613414300764
Found a related post: https://lemmy.world/post/22523493
But mbin?
Then how about mbin?
If I could use a single identity across the whole Fediverse, I would. Unfortunately, that’s not a reality yet.
So we’re forced to choose instances (i.e. “home servers”). And for me, that means I’d only choose to stick with the largest ones, as they have the highest chances of providing me with a sort of permanence.
I don’t see any big mbin instances:
you are aware that you aren’t restricted to things on your instance right? what your talking about is literally what the fediverse is. also who cares how big an instance is?
you are aware that you aren’t restricted to things on your instance right?
I’m not new to the Fediverse, so yes, I’m aware of that, and also of the drama that comes with defederation (lmao)
also who cares how big an instance is?
I’d only choose to stick with the largest ones, as they have the highest chances of providing me with a sort of permanence.
Or in other words, they’re much less likely to just shut down without notice.
https://fedia.io is the ‘big’ mbin server, but they appear to have closed registrations at some point
https://fedia.io/ has 413 monthly active users, how big do you need the instance to be, especially when all the content is available there too?
Didn’t they close registration tho? Lol
Fair point, but at this time, I’m on mastodon.social and lemmy.world, i.e. some of the largest instances. I simply don’t have much motivation to migrate.
kbin.earth and other kbin instances have migrated to mbin. Only the domain names remain the same.
That answers that.
You’re good, just block Lemmy.ml.
The code is open source. Everyone can read it.
how do you block an entire instance?
Searching for the instance and then tapping on the element gives you the menu that provides the option to block on the third party app Mlem.
I use Voyager, but this helped me find it in the filter settings. Thank you!
But there’s mbin which is clearly the SUPERIOR alternative.
I’m a big mbin stan, but it’s clearly the inferior software platform right now.
I was mostly joking, I like that there are multiple options amd we can still interact with each other.
Definitely
Having only one mobile app is already a deal breaker for some users
Is that Interstellar, or another one?
I was thinking about Interstellar indeed, is there another one?
I would sort of consider web as the other one, since kbin (and now mbin) were designed to play nice with mobile browsers, I use mbin on my phone via PWA and I’m pretty happy with it, aside from mbin UI issues which I keep kicking around the idea of fixing but have been lazy about it.
I see, I usually use PWA myself, but I’ve heard quite a few people saying that apps were a deal breaker for them
