I closed my 500k member subreddit yesterday!
It feels sad, but it needs to happen. We've moved here to Kbin - @Disneyland - and I linked it in the "we're going private" message.
Hopefully we get people to come over. We have half the original mod team and I'm still trying to convince the other half to join up before Kbin closes registration (I'm not sure if you can mod across instances).
Reddit paying moderators means they have editorial control, which means they lose safe harbor protections and are liable for all content on their site.
Arguably, Reddit picking moderators may have the same effect. See https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/1856011.html.
The nice thing about federation is that you can always go somewhere else if you disagree with a particular instance.
Lemmy's devs have questionable politics at best. IMO, I don't care as long as it doesn't impact how they run the site - people have a right to their own opinions, as long as those opinions don't harass or hurt others directly.
But let's say they changed one day. Maybe one day they added something to the code forcing everyone to praise the CCP or else.
Because the software is open-source - people could fork it before the change. It's out there already. People can totally make their own little variants of Lemmy with added features, if that's something they wanted to do. You can modify the code yourself and then self-host the modified version. No matter what Lemmy's devs do... they have no power on your instance. A fork means you own the code.
I've seen the sentiment tossed around that it's unethical to use Lemmy because if you donate to the project (or contribute to donations towards the project) you are financing people who have bad politics. That's your prerogative. I personally disagree - again, as long as your politics aren't actively contributing to harassment/harm you shouldn't be punished for them - but I understand the sentiment.
To that, I say - well, there's other options. That's the beauty of the Fediverse - you don't have any Musk or Spez that comes along to ruin everything. I'm on Kbin, which I like a lot. The dev is a great guy, and I really like how it combines the best of Lemmy and Mastodon.
Even if you want to stay on Lemmy, there are wonderful communities on Lemmy that disagree with the direction of the devs. Beehaw is a great place with a fantastic mod team, for example. You can donate to Beehaw's devs and know it's going to keep Beehaw running, and it's not the same as supporting Lemmy directly.
They do. However, it's only after federation has been established between two communities.
After a while, these newer communities will be federated in and everyone will be connected.
As lemmy.ml is the oldest community, it also has the most history (as the newer instances don't currently get the history).
This will likely be fixed at some point.
You can use the app just fine, or you should be able to. If you can't, then you should file a bug report.
Are you comfortable with saying how much this instance costs to run? Or even just a ballpark of how much you think it would cost per-user?
A few subreddits are having a discussion later today about hosting our own "official" instance collectively and we're trying to figure out how much each option would cost.
So any kind of data would be fantastic to help me convince them to choose Kbin. ;)
On Lemmy, they are "communities".
On Kbin, they are "magazines". I am told that "magazine" is a pun in Polish (Kbin's maintainer is Polish).
Basically the main difference is who your admin team is. So that means different moderation styles, allowing NSFW or not, allowing downvotes, controlling which communities get made (or not), etc.
You can create communities on your home instance if your admins allow it (Lemmy.ml and Kbin do, Beehaw does not). But you have to make an account on an instance to create a community there.
It's totally reasonable to jump between instances until you find one you like.
The short answer: yes.
The long answer: Yes, but...
If this is your home network, you're providing attackers with an entry point into your network. You're also giving yourself an avenue to get DDOS'd etc. You'd have to open ports and get that set up - or deal with a reverse proxy or whatever.
But generally it's as easy as running a Docker container and pointing a domain at your IP.
They're supposed to have the same content, but may have different moderation.
A great example - /r/gaming vs. /r/games on Reddit (or /r/truegaming). All basically the same thing, but they have different moderation styles.
This is an issue on Mastodon as well, and the way it was solved there was by adding a browser extension which did the rewriting.
It was something about the fact that those are completely different websites that can't talk to each other, I think.
There are 4 options:
Public. This is how most subs operate. Everyone can post and comment.
Restricted. This disallows posts. You can set it to "restrict posts only", "restrict comments only", or "restrict both". Mods and "approved users" can still post as normal. /r/polandball used this to make sure that only good content from known people got submitted.
Private. This turns off the subreddit entirely - the only people who can see it are mods and the aforementioned approved users, while everyone else just sees the subreddit description. An example of this is /r/centuryclub, which only approves uses with over 100k karma.
Gold-only. You need to set this at subreddit creation (it can't be changed later). This restricts the sub to only be visible to people who have Reddit Gold.
Most subs who are "going dark" are setting their stuff to "private" and then changing the subreddit description to say something about the blackout, because that's all that users can see.
On Old Reddit, you can see the full message. On New Reddit, you see the first 20ish characters. On the official app, you don't see a message about why a subreddit is private at all.