this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2022
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Asklemmy
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Is it far left?
Lemmy.ml or all of lemmy?
If you mean the former, through my experience chatting with folks here, lemmy.ml is mixed and diverse since most newcomers sign up there instead of browsing through other instances (probably because it's most active but that doesn't matter since there's federation). However, lemmy.ml is officially leftist as the sidebar states (something controversial and witnessed many debates).
Regarding the latter, while lemmy can be said to be not in favor of a specific ideology since the present instances are from all sides of the political spectrum. There are as well instances that aren't attached to a political ideology which is something to be encouraged on the website. The admins (also mods of lemmy.ml) have explicitly declared their leftist sentiments but outside of lemmy.ml I see no issue with that.
Not in my opinion, what is yours?
There's some far-left takes on Lemmy for sure. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but it does limit growth when Lemmy.ml, which ultimately is the main instance, advertises it.
Absolutely. And I'd go as far as to defend both lemmy.ml and lemmygrad's right to run their instances any way they want.
Not by any metrics, IMO. I think it's been explicitly stated by the admins that lemmy.ml is not a main instance or a flagship instance. It's not a general instance but a "community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts". The devs doesn't even recommend lemmy.ml on join-lemmy.org, but rather two general purpose instances instead.
Of course, promoting that it's run by the devs do give off some pretty strong "official/main" vibes to any users.
Saying that lemmy.ml is the main instance is somewhat contributing to the problem, no offense intended. What we should say is that there isn't any main instance, and that size doesn't matter since we're all (in theory) federated. If anything, users should check out join-lemmy.org/instances for a meta-community that seems like a good fit.
I believe that people confuse the difference between Lemmy, the federated platform, and Lemmy.ml, the federated social news aggregator. If new users had a better knowledge on how everything is interconnected instead of the standard monolithic islands, maybe they wouldn't seek out the "main" or even biggest instances for a fear of missing out.
Lemmy.ml is not the main instance. There is no main instance. That's the point of the fediverse.