As I’ve used Lemmy, I’ve discovered just how politically charged it can be. This is likely just due to the nature of the software and the types of people that tend to care about it, but I’d like to avoid associating with radicals, both left and right. As such, I want to make a new account on a new general-purpose instance. I can speak German, so I was thinking feddit.org or lemmy.at, but I know nothing about them. What do you suggest?

I know the obvious things like federation and fediverse, but do we say upvote/downvote, updoot, karma? I hate to bring up the software that must not be named, but I don’t know what else to call things.

I’m a huge nerd, so the reason I joined Lemmy is because I was looking for a social media platform that conforms with my views on FOSS, moderation, and internet privacy. I would assume many other people are in the same boat, but is that accurate? Who’s just here because they looked up “Reddit alternatives?”

For example, are you in !linux@lemmy.ml, !linux@lemmy.world, AND !linux@programming.dev?

My feed is looking a little scarce right now, so I’m looking for suggestions.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ...

As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.

I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.

This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:

Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say?

When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.

Proof:

So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance."

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there's nobody to discuss anything with.

I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

I own a desktop but have been wanting to switch to something more portable. I have been saving up for a laptop and, as such, will soon be installing and reconfiguring an OS from scratch (one of my favorite pastimes). I’m normally an Artix Linux user, but I’ve been becoming increasingly intrigued by BSD.

Arguably both the best and worst thing about Linux is that it’s just a kernel, which means there’s so many ways to do one thing (musl vs glibc, x vs wayland, pipewire vs pulse vs alsa and so on). This is great because it allows the ecosystem to innovate and stay modern and lets people like me kitbash a system that’s perfect for them. However, it also forces developers to build compatibility layers, distribute and manage multiple builds, etc. Generally, it’s just messy. Now, I could just use a “fully-featured” OS like Mint, Fedora, or Ubuntu, but I prefer lighter systems, and I absolutely love custom tailoring a system to fit my needs. I couldn’t tell you why.

From the research I’ve done, BSD seems to “solve” this issue. It’s a full operating system, so there’s a set way to handle things like networking, package management, etc. However, it doesn’t come with a GUI, so I get to rice and configure to my heart’s content. Is this assumption correct? Also, do you have any words of wisdom for a Linux user thinking about transitioning?

P.S. I’ve looked at the section on the website about laptop compatibility, but suggestions from you guys would also be great. I don’t have the most pocket change, so old-ish laptops are fine.

Gruß!

And why?