to start: after some consideration, we've altered our entry question a little bit so that entry is not guaranteed. during the daytime you can basically expect waits of 30 minutes or less when it comes to approval/disapproval, but overnight it'll be anywhere from 6-12 hours. just FYI
if you'd like to introduce yourself without it getting lost in all the posts already made, i just made a thread for that over here
our sidebar should give you most of the information you're looking for about us, but to reiterate some: we are pretty relaxed here, but we have a well carved out understanding of what we want to be. if you would like more elaboration on that, you can find elaboration on that at length in the following two posts:
for some less lengthy and more relaxed elaboration, see the discussion in the comments of this post.
as for funding: we are 100% user-funded. if you would like to contribute to our ability to keep the website up, you can donate on OpenCollective, which supports both one-time donations or monthly donations.
a few other questions occasionally pop up like "why do we have the set of communities we do?" and "why can't people make their own?" (the latter is a feature of lemmy). for elaboration on that, you can see the following post and the discussions here. we are open to suggestions and creating communities as demand sees fit; see also discussion here.
downvotes are disabled on this instance and that's a thing we're not liable to change. if you'd like elaboration for why that is, see this comment. this may be a point of friction for some coming from reddit, but i hope you'll understand why we're doing it even if you don't necessarily agree with it.
if you're interested in our governance to this point and a brief idea of our long term goals, see the comment here.
feel free to sound off on other questions you have; i'll try to update the OP with those and our ability to answer them as time goes on.
yo QUESTION. how much freedom do users have here? can i say swearsies? or talk negatively about a minority? discuss bomb making?
Fuck yes!
Please, no.
Please, no.
Server rule: Only F-bombs are allowed.
Well, shit.
what if i'm more of a minority?
The easiest question to ask yourself is, can I do this while still being nice? And when I say being nice, I mean, would other people reasonably interpret this as nice?
Saying fuck yeah, for example, in celebration is very different from saying fuck you. So there's no clear cut answer here to your questions. What matters is both intent and how it's perceived.
Applications are a must here, since we had some pretty bad gore spam problems. Servers that don't have an application process had to be blocked for a while, since spammers would set up lots of accounts there and post to the bigger communities here.
And that's why we can't have nice things. There was a time when you could allow anyone and everyone to add arbitrary HTML to your web page, and the worst anyone would do is yell at each other in big green letters. It was a very innocent time.