Hey everyone, I’m new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says “Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.”).
The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the “lemmy.ml” server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”.
So I thought I try that one when it’s from Lemmy’s own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?
I would say it’s one of the first, but not THE first. Lemmy.world is definitely the most popular instance (to a problematic degree).
But I don’t think expressing one’s love of Spongebob inherently “excludes” anyone from using Lemmy. I don’t think the Lemmy devs have any duty to anyone but themselves. And any interest they have in user adoption is for their own reasons.
Nothing would stop someone from forking Lemmy and making an alternative with different ideologies. I assume the license would ask them to use a different name to not cause confusion, and I would hope that they don’t break ActivityPub or federation compatibility with existing Lemmy instances. But at that point, what’s the difference between a fork for ideological reasons…and just spinning up your own instance?