Currently downvotes are disabled here because I’m a big softie. But I have found myself missing them every now and again…

Should we enable downvotes on this instance? Why or why not?

I upgraded the instance to Lemmy 0.18.1, turned on Captcha registration, and then turned on open registration. I'm also requiring verified emails, so hopefully we don't attract a lot of spammers... but I'm excited to see where the community goes from here.

I host a local meet up of queer STEM peeps (along with @xeger@lib.lgbt) and tonight’s event was a game night!

Fairly casual stuff; Happy Salmon, Coup, and Cards Against Humanity. But a good queer time was had by all.

A number of users have made their way here from other instances; we welcome everyone, and I thought I would take the time to offer a clear vision as to what lib.lgbt is, why I created it, and what you can expect from participating in this community.

What is lib dot lgbt about?

We are primarily and firstly a space for queer people (and queer-adjacent people, including family and allies of all stripes). This means we are also inherently "political" in the sense that the existence of queer people is intrinsically political these days. While this reality kind of sucks, I didn't make the world this way; all we can do is live in it as best we can.

To me, all political considerations other than queerness are secondary. As long as your political philosophy aligns with queer liberation, you are welcome here.

The core tenet of all our users should be "everyone should be included and in every way possible." Let's take a practical example: the common troll debate topic of the inclusion of trans people in sports. Well, here, there's no debate. Everyone should be included in every way possible. Including trans people in a sporting league is, to us, as uncontroversial and proper as including Black people or Jewish people.

Failure to adhere to this assumption, or questioning the legitimacy or stability of queer identities, or "just asking questions," or wanting to debate queer people in the free marketplace of ideas, or whining about how the existence of this instance (or its moderation) is curtailing your freedom of speech, will result in scorn, opprobrium, and banning -- not necessarily in that order.

Why lib dot lgbt?

I created this instance as I fled from reddit. I love supporting queer people and debating politics, and was hoping to replace that in my life.

I initially applied to Beehaw and have nothing but love and respect for Beehaw and its mission. I wanted a space whose reason for existence was to serve and connect queer people of all flavors. Beehaw is not (and should not be) that.

This place is that.

Where is lib dot lgbt hosted?

From a purely utilitarian standpoint, this instance is on a pretty solid hosting provider (fly.io) and I expect very little downtime. While this is obviously just a passion project for me, lib.lgbt is not hosted in my living room but in a highly available cloud datacenter; the costs for this number of users are very low and I am happy to foot them.

You may depend on the reliability and stability of this instance and this community.

Who do we federate with?

We're not interested in federating with instances that allow debate on the question of queer identities. Thus, instances that willingly host content like The_Donald, anything TERF-related, and "free speech" bastions are prime candidates for disfederation.

In the end, though, I'd love to hear from you all! What kind of community should this be? What communities should we make here? I hope you all feel welcome, and if there are any questions about any of the above, please don't hesitate to let me know.

We are currently using this blocklist for defederation in order to prevent spam and bad actors: https://github.com/sgrigson/oliphant

Beehaw is defederated from sh.itjust.works, but we are not. However I learned today they host a The_Donald community so I was considering defederating us from them as well.

Anyone have any opinions?

What might people be interested in seeing here? Some thoughts I have:

1. tabletop rpgs (though blahaj.zone seems to have a pretty good community on that, so maybe more of a focus on osr rpgs?)
2. contrapoints
3. jrpgs
4. something programming adjacent
5. something politics adjacent

Community creation is also open if anyone has any great ideas and wants to actualize them without any further discussion.

Following the reddit fiasco, I've been looking for other communities to get tech news from. I was active on HN a long time ago but it's been a hot minute, and I left because the politics were pretty bad; lots of free speech maximalists who loved to just ask questions, especially about queer people.

Is it better now? Worse? Just different?

I shared my fly.io Lemmy project to Hacker News and one of the first responses was “Lemmy is for tankies.”

This isn’t the first time I’d heard this either. In leaving Reddit and researching alternatives I’d heard it a fair amount.

I think it’s basically untrue; beehaw doesn’t even federate with the big tankie servers. But that seems to require some understanding of what Lemmy actually is.

So… what’s the best way to talk about it and/or get around this optics issue?

As I'm sure most of you noticed, you had to fill in an application to participate here.

While this can be pretty useful from a quality perspective, it is also a significantly barrier to entry; obviously you have to fill in said application, wait to be approved, and then have a sufficient level of interest to return and participate.

Lower barriers of entry can help engagement, but can also harm communities with bad actors gaining easy access.

Anyone have any opinions?

Basically what the title says. Tell us about yourself and how you got here!

I'm pretty new to the whole Lemmy thing, but I figured I'd ask peoples' opinions on whether it's worth it to get into Mastodon too now that I'm officially a member of the Fediverse.

Is it active? Is it worth it? Have you had good experiences there?

Hi there!

The Lemmyverse is kind of confusing, especially for a Reddit expatriate. This server is somewhat empty obviously, but it can federate with any other server that you care to join. Then you can enjoy their content, here. To do that:

1. Find a community you care enough to join: say, Beehaw's LGBTQ+ community here.

2. Search for that community on this server by using the little search icon in the upper right and putting in the community name and the source server inside the search box. So, in this case, [!lgbtq_plus@beehaw.org](/c/lgbtq_plus@beehaw.org).

3. You should see the community appear in the list of search dropdowns there, or on the communities page here at https://lib.lgbt/communities/listing_type/All/page/1.

4. Subscribe to the community and participate in it.

Welcome and enjoy your stay.