You can reply “I hope Musk gets shot in the head” for all we care, friend!

Hey OP, I just want to say from experience the reddit bashing usually dies down a bit after a quick spike of reddit refugees like we’re seeing now.

The earliest exoduses were socialist political communities banned from reddit (particularly /r/chapotraphouse who formed Hexbear, and /r/GenZedong who landed in Lemmygrad). Then, the most recent exodus is related to censorship related to Luigi Mangione, a US political issue, coinciding with a strong sudden re-emergence of global anti-American [government] sentiment due to diplomatic catastrophes with a range of former allies.

In fact, the founders cite reddit’s corporate nature and its pro-US-imperialist, racist stances as their motivation to create Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html

So I’m not surprised at all that the default feed is covered in political topics, it’s always been a strong topic here and it’s just gotten stronger. But there’s probably enough activity now that one can filter it out and still have enough action to keep it fun.

Well there’s some lovely anti-imperialist coups going on in West Africa recently, here please read these 30 news articles about Burkino Fa

Aw, they actually did the ban. That’s unfortunate.

On one hand, yes, legal liability and all that, but on the other hand half the site is copyright violations. The law only matters sometimes. I say this as someone who has hosted web communities myself, there’s no reason to be banning for something like age on these instances, especially when we’re talking 16 and not 12. It’s unenforceable and trivial enough that there’s no legal pressure to do so.

Joined about a year or two before the reddit API fiasco.

• I really don’t like ads+tracking and didn’t want my posts supporting a company like reddit
• I’m an advocate of FOSS
• reddit has inherent pressures to censor content based on mass media pressure and profit, and to permit anti-social far right trolls
• reddit punishes proxy users, where many instances here allow me to protect myself while posting here
• didn’t like the new reddit layout - even before I came here, I was lurking for a year or two on alternate frontends
• I believed federation was a good strategy at building a better reddit alternative

But also, it actually had some communities at the time. If it were more dead, or unfederated, I’m not sure if I would have put as much effort in building communities.