3d ago

Best instances with a good balance allowing free speech while avoiding disinformation/astroturfing?

Fled Reddit to join lemm.ee a few months ago. It was a glorious few months, and I hope the admins know how appreciated their work was.

I'm very sad but grateful that there was a place to go where I felt like I could speak freely, read, and share information that is being suppressed on other platforms.

I was wondering what recommendations people might have for any instances that are allowing new users, and seem to have found a good balance between avoiding disinformation/astroturfing/bad actors, without swinging too far in the opposite direction and potentially suppressing information?

29 comments

If you can't find an instance that matches your preferences, you can always go with the most permissive, then block other instances/communities/users that are causing problems. It's a little more work at first, but it's possible to tailor your own experience here wherever you're registered.
- I suppose it's worth noting that being more permissive with federation and a lower signup barrier was part of lemm.ee's philosophy. The shutdown is related to burnout from the moderation side. More permissive federation means more stress to mods/admins, since they have to deal with more questionable user behaviour. Often times defederation just comes out of not being able to handle the constant stream of reports of anti-social activity from particular servers.
  
  Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem in action.
  The bigger the platform, the wider the spread of opinions on how moderation should look, and that means wherever the admins land, there will inevitably be some who think it's too little, and some who think it's too much. You can't please everyone.
- Yeah. To be honest the experience I've had between the three instances I have used is pretty much the same other than server uptime.
  The bigger the instance the more external communities show up in All which is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to stumbling across fun communities.

good
The problem with using "good" as a criteria is that nobody decides "what we need is a bad balance". People are going to have different takes on where they want that slider to be.
- Exactly. People will have different definitions of "good".
- I feel like a "good balance" inherently means accepting that you will probably see some things you don't agree with or support, but you can also present your own case for why you don't agree without attacking the person who posted it, or just keep scrolling past that to something else.
  A bad balance would be just imbalance where everyone in a community is trying to push one single opinion/agenda, and if anything contradicts that opinion, even if it's well supported by evidence, it results in removal of content or a ban.
  That seems to be the real root of suppression of information. Like if someone is told from the time they join an instance or a community that bigotry/abusive speech isn't allowed, and then they use a bunch of slurs or abusive language, they've violated a rule, and it seems like that really shouldn't surprise anyone that would need to be addressed.
  If someone can't present evidence contradicting a popular narrative, or critique an argument, idea, or a public individual without getting banned, that is an issue.
  People can disagree with what is said/downvote it/present their own evidence why they disagree/or ignore it and block the person, but if it's not intentionally violating a rule, you shouldn't have a bunch of people reporting it as being a violation just because they don't like it.

Mine, lemmings.world, I don't tolerate misinformation and bigotry, but I'm not ban happy and very tolerant of opinions I don't hold.
- Huge if true.
- Well that’s cool to know

I used to be on lemm.ee before but I don't remember it being any different that the other instances I've tried. I feel like it only affects where I post from, not what I read.
That being said, I haven't had any issues with feddit.uk even though my opinions often aren't particularly popular here.

I'll plug my home instance, discuss.online. We're generally low-key and don't heavily moderate stuff, but will also respond to bad actors.
- Lisa! You're tearing me apart!
  
  I said bad actors, not amazing-and-underappreciated-in-their-time actors

The main instance I found to replace lemm.ee was lemmy.zip. They seem to be well-regarded, well-admined, and appear to have a similar (de)federation philosophy as lemm.ee. In other words, they are widely federated in both directions, which is an increasing rarity on the "threadiverse" (Lemmy and other similar federated discussion software). One interesting thing they do is that in place of completely defederating some of the more controversial instances like hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, they pre-emptively block those instances for new users instead. I feel that this is absolutely the correct middle-ground approach as it leaves the choice with the user (edit: while still hiding the controversial instances from new users).
Edit: I have learned that reddthat.com only defederates from threads.net, and it seems that lemmy.ml is not defederated from any major instances as far as I can tell, so I've removed it from the list below.
The other instances that still federate widely including those two controversial instances have some other issues:
lemmy.today is apparently new and I read yesterday that they've been having a bit of an issue with spam
lemmy.sdf.org, where I started with my first lemmy account, doesn't defederate from anyone and seems to not be very actively maintained with lemmy upgrades, etc.
- I'm on today and I can recommend it. The whole point of it is not to have its own communities but just to be a neutral place to have an account. That was very appealing me as someone who really doesn't care about the "pick a community" part of Lemmy.
- I chose .zip as well. Other pluses aside from similar federation principles:
  Isn’t involved with the big instance infighting
  Uses the latest version of lemmy
  Defederated from Threads
  The admin is transparent with the instance maintenance
  Did you notice how .ee was noticeably faster? Really shows the exceptional job the .ee admins did.
  
  All good points.
  Faster than .zip? Perhaps. But when I moved from lemmy.sdf.org to lemm.ee I went back to using SDF several times because .ee would have major slowdowns. Which is weird because of how hands off the SDF admins seem to be. Perhaps the performance has more to do with network location and resources allocated to the server?
- yup, don’t go .rar, go .zip

I've not once had an issue with our dbzero admins in terms of disinformation or censorship. We're big on "free as in pirate freedom". They're proactive and very engaged with the community too. Come give us a look.

Mander is great

If you're serious with lemmy I'd suggest hosting your own instance. Either by renting a server or getting someone to do it for you and paying them for the server. I guess if you give someone 10 $ a month they should be able to spin something up for you. 20 $ would be max I'd invest.
Otherwise, its important what you want to see. Tchncs is pretty nice from a "centrist" perspective. Slrpnk is rather interesting but i cant really judge their content. You could jump in the deep end and check out ml, grad or hex. Or you go full horseshoe on truth social. You get it all. I think there even are lets say liberal places in terms of age. Disgusting imo but who am I to judge.
- I'm not really looking for any one specific perspective, I just don't want to help strengthen an echo chamber whether it's spreading disinformation, edge lords saying shitty things to make some kind of Fred Phelps like point about free speech, or just set on ignoring valid information in order to keep pushing an agenda regardless of facts
  
  Not sure I understand. You'll never see all of it except if you host your own. In that case you'll see things that might change your perspective on things.
  Again, you can jave centrist with more or less blocking of radical views, radical with blocking of centrist views or you can diy. I dont know of amy places that really show an accurate picture because i think it is naive to think that this exists.

The only instances I've seen that don't allow criticism of a government is .ml and hexbear.

29 comments