Alo you 'orrible lot, another year is almost at end end. Can you believe we launched this ship one and a half year ago? And we’re still going strong! Our instance keeps growing even with the “stringent” application instructions we have, with a good mix of pirates, anarchists and other weirdos joining. All according to plan!
Communities
Last year the waters have been fairly calm, with our three top communities continuing to get more traffic
- !leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com continues to upset libs whenever it brings up electoralism, while getting highly upvoted on everything else
- !adhd@lemmy.dbzer0.com hitting the frontpage with almost every post and getting a regular mix of rule 1 violations and people self-realizing.
- !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com being of course the most popular safe harbor outside of corporate shark infested waters
At the same time, our new communities seem to be finding ample traction
- !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com allowing people to air their grievances and striving to keep mods and admins in check, in lemmy and out.
- !flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com fills in the gaps leftymemes leaves and provides a shiposting spot for anarchists while being unapologetically anti-tankie.
- !fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com continuing to bash disinformation wherever it appears.
- !lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com uniting and organizing all the image sharing comms together
Do mention your favourite new comms in the comments
Moderation
Generally y’all seem to be playing nice enough. We haven’t had to issue that many bans instance-wide except for some dedicated trolls. The application instructions seem to be working quite well at stopping automated spammers and stupid bigots from getting in, in the first place.
Likewise there’s been very few, if any appeals in our matrix channels and 0 !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com callouts.
Moderation load is manageable but do let us know if you think there’s areas of improvement.
Fundraising
As always, our instance is completely donation based. We don’t want to sell anything or advertise anyone. The plan is to avoid giving any incentives to enshittify this instance, or otherwise to give any ammo for anyone to claim trying to spread disinfo. The goal is to provide a truly communal space for people to express themselves (mostly how much they hate copyrights and capitalism 😅).
Our ko-fi page has managed to almost completely cover the server costs until the end of the year and anything extra will go as buffer for the next year. I’m also working on creating something official to enhance this whole process and hopefully I will announce it soon.
Given our costs and our monthly active users, each euro being donated, is currently supporting ~10 other active users in this instance, so do consider everything you donate as mutual aid to those needing a digital home!
(If you have any ideas on how I can reward sponsors to this instance, do let us know. I already offered custom emojis, but people don’t seem to be interested)
Users
Just for fun, I decided to see what kind of answers people have given for our application. The tool to compile this took me way longer than I would have liked and I still have around 1500 answers that need improved parsing, but I’m out of time so here’s what people answered for their favourite character
Historical Pirate: 447 (9.5%)
Digital Pirate: 1021 (21.7%)
Fictional Character: 479 (10.2%)
FOSS advocate: 1338 (28.4%)
Free Software: 400 (8.5%)
Anarchist: 480 (10.2%)
Other: 46 (1.0%)
Total Answers Analyzed: 4712
Answers matching multiple categories: 632
Top Mentions per Category:
---------------------------
Historical Pirate: Blackbeard (248), Anne Bonny (40), Zheng Yi Sao (25)
Digital Pirate: Fitgirl (183), Aaron Swartz (173), Empress (96)
Fictional Character: Captain Jack Sparrow (215), Luffy (73), Dread Pirate Roberts (43)
FOSS advocate: Linus Torvalds (888), Richard Stallman (332), Luis Rossman (97)
Free Software: Lemmy (304), Gnu (30), Github (23)
Anarchist: Kropotkin (86), Emma Goldman (78), Chomsky (53)
Other: John Oliver (15), Tim O'Reilly (15), Bernie Sanders (6)
Epilogue
I’m very proud of how well this instance, and the threadiverse in general (lemmy + mbin + piefed) is going. This feels like a fairly active forum from the good ole days, which cannot easily be taken away from us by shitty admins and corpos. Here’s to one more year!
It’s tempting to donate but I was banned for using the r-word (against things, not people). I’m not sure if I want to support censorship though. But that’s just my two cents… Idk
If you haven’t recognized that word has been socially unacceptable for over ten years now that’s on you. You mention free speech as if you’re not on the wrong
This is not a “free speech above all” instance (AKA freeze peach). Language harmful to marginalized groups is not allowed, in order to make this space welcoming to the people from those groups.
What is freeze peach? A play on words, obviously, but is it a Lemmy instance?
There were instances like that in the past, Exploding-Heads being the most popular example. They’re absolutely miserable to be in because most of the people are hateful assholes because civility rules aren’t enforced there.
So COD voicechat instances…
Yeah basically, though they were also filled with transphobic and racist memes. Probably more like a (semi) federated 4chan clone. Or Steam forums but on the Fediverse.
Sure, I just don’t agree with the approach. I think it will backfire in the long run. But this is not a place to debate these things, I know…
better to ‘backfire’ in the future than now by allowing such speech.
Lol everything for short term profit huh. Who cares what happens in the future, right, nut my job
uh huh. the permissiveness you want is exactly what causes the issues to begin with. I disagree the downside is worse than the lack of enforcement. a fact that has been proven again and again. ‘free speech’ morons end up creating nazi bars. I’ll pass.
There is a reason you need to moderate your speech and ideas in general its because unrestrained nonsense is a negative for the community and causes friction and violence. having small limits in place avoids the worst of this.
The good news is decentralized systems are robust to both ends of the spectrum (see lemmy.world nonsense). feel free to go find another instance or make your own if you find the current environment objectionable.
Perhaps a filter on the user side is better than to outright censor things. Then you preserve the free flow of ideas and opinion, while limiting unwanted exposure to uninterested people. That way you eliminate the biases of what is deemed permissible and what not. I think that is a good solution for both sides
what do you think an instance effectively is? that filter. you’re just outsourcing the filtering to a set of people who you generally agree with. doing it all manually is a bit of a pita.
That’s not the kind of filter I’m talking about. I mean that all content in still there and accessible (to everyone) but only hidden depending on user’s settings/preference. This should not require manual labor, if filter is functional enough. That way it’s not outright removed, preventing said consequences of potential biased censorship.
I’m not saying said filter is easily implementable but theoretically it’d be the best solution I think.