People don't become Neo-Nazis without spending time among other Neo-Nazis listening to Neo-Nazi talking points. People don't become Tankies without spending time among other Tankies listening to Tankie talking points.

People are more likely than not to join the flagship instance than any of the smaller instances and significantly more likely than starting their own instance. Some of them will realize the kind of people they have found themselves surrounded by and leave. Many more won't - especially due to general ignorance about Tankies (see this entire thread and the absolutely bizarre common defense of Tankies not being equatable to Nazis when they absolutely are and have resulted in more deaths and suffering than the Nazis ever have or will.) The people who stick around might start thinking the Tankies make some good points. This is how you end up with more Tankies. More Tankies is always a bad thing just like having more Neo-Nazis is always a bad thing.

Most people have a good sense to not surround themselves with Neo-Nazis. That good sense appears to be missing when dealing with Tankies.

[–] Widget@kbin.social 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Aren't the flagship instances right now essentially lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works? Maybe Beehaw once the re-federation gets figured out? And then kbin.social on the kbin side.

This only matters if you use lemmy.ml, which I would expect to be largely defederated at some point soonish.

[–] dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy.world at this point is over twice as big as Lemmy.ml, and lemmy.ml isn't even linked on the join-lemmy.org page anymore. It's more of the reference instance than the flagship instance now.

[–] Widget@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah, reference instance sounds more correct.

[–] Nadya@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That does seem to have changed since I last cared to look. As dannoffs pointed out - it seems lemmy.ml was unlisted from the join-lemmy.org instances page where previously it was listed as #1 for the Popular section. They also removed the ## users / month metric so the list is no longer guaranteed to be sorted by popularity.

Just last week - lemmy.world was reporting as 87 users/month and lemmy.ml as 1.6k users/month:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230608170721/https://join-lemmy.org/instances

This has of course changed - and unlisting the instance so that it isn't the most popular instance likely has a lot to do with that. That seemed to happen sometime in the last week - I cbf checking every wayback timestamp to see exactly when.

I've been using Kbin myself so haven't been following Lemmy very closely. Only whatever happens to reach my page over on kbin.

[–] arkcom@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

At this point they are definitely getting there, but that only been the case for a few days.

[–] CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyi 16 points 1 year ago

lemmy.ml (or even the infamous lemmygrad) was never intended to be the flagship instance afaik. I first signed up on lemmy.ml but one of the first things I saw was a sticky from the devs to choose other instances. That's primarily why I looked for others (I wasn't aware of these "rumors" back then). It just happened to be the biggest at that time.

Personally, as long as their political beliefs aren't being pushed on lemmy then I don't see anything wrong. Many of us came from reddit, and they're not exactly without controversies - that never meant we supported or even believed in some of those.

The people who stick around might start thinking the Tankies make some good points.

Then it's up to them to educate themselves. We've all been exposed to things we disagree with.