thanks to those who donate and keep this place running, cuz I can't right now :)

So all the discourse around lemmy.ml has made it clear to me that Lemmy's primary org has fallen prey to a key problem I've experienced running multiple social media sites and seen in my professional life as well.

And it boils down to this:

The tech guys are trying to be moderators. These are two entirely separate jobs that need completely different types of people to successfully execute the role.

Tech folk are brilliant in their subject, but often terrible at understanding people, social dynamics, and the limits of acceptable discourse. Their profession requires them to spend enormous amounts of time alone, which limits their real world experience, often to a crippling degree.

Good moderators (what used to be publishers and editors in the days of print) are those who understand people like tech folk understand SQL. They understand the multiple layers of subcontext that can be derived from an innocent sounding statement, and they have an innate sense of social dynamics and what is of interest to their audience. They also know how to speak to their audience and promote good content.

Most importantly, they understand that they are the gatekeepers of the publication's reputation, and safeguard it by being as impartial and fair as possible... a lesson the moderators of lemmy.ml have clearly failed to learn.

The only way to solve this dilemma in Lemmy.org's case is this:

1. Separate the mod and dev teams. Devs should not mod, and mods should not dev

2. Abandon or spin off lemmy.ml to folks not on the dev team - the fact that the instance is run by members of the dev team taints the reputation of the entire project and infrastructure. I do believe in free speech, but in this case, the reputational damage lemmy.ml has caused to the financial state of the dev team is too great to ignore.

3. Lemmy.org needs to clearly state this delineation and prevent the official dev team from running instances officially attached to lemmy.org.

If this doesn't happen, I think that donations will continue to decrease until the project starves. There is great value in what the dev team has done, but unless they abandon lemmy.ml and focus entirely on development, I think this project will fail financially unless another dev team with a better rep takes their place.

ITT: a mighty showcase of the divide-and-conquer strategy by psyops.

Instead of realizing that our goal as an alternative community to Reddit is first and foremost to... well duh, to build a community and keep it thriving, people here are infighting, preferring to subdivide themselves into tankies and non-tankies.

If Lemmy eventually fails and no other project with a similar feature-set can show up in time, we end up killing the existing momentum.

If that happens, all of you shall remember this very moment, and bravo to the psyops people (be it from the government or corporate) because you won yet again.

Donated. Though because I am living in a third world country it's just a measly ~25 dollars.

Not while the devs run a pro-genocide echo chamber. Tankie punks fuck off.

Fuck the lemmy.ml devs. I'm not going to donate to a group of people who have clearly targeted me over and over again across multiple accounts with petty bans for gently questioning their authoritarian orthodoxy.

Donate to forks like piefed or mbin. Let .ml reap what it sows.

If half the people circlejerking in here were serious they could pay a liberal developer to contribute instead, but somehow I doubt that's happening.

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613

I'll donate money to individual instances, but for as long as Nutomic/Dessalines is in charge of the .ml instance I will not be donating to them.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy

They should spend more time devving and less time mod actioning wrongthink

Nah.

ml can shit itself and rot. So can the rest of Lemmy if that's not a price that's worth being paid.

I just logged into Liberapay, and then I saw their profile pictures. Remembered I can't donate to tankies (inb4: I didn't say communists) any more I could maga supporters. or IDF apologists

lemmy.ml:

Hey but they're not that bad! Nutomic responded in this thread:

I certainly dont praise or support civilians being displaced from their homes.

Isn't it wonderfully vague? ~~You know who expressed the same sadness about displaced people? guess~~ (I can't find a source/misremembered? my bad)

You can remove all ambiguity by saying who is the unequivocal aggressor responsible for the gruesome death of thousands of young men and civilians in Ukraine.

How's the denazification going, guys?

No ads and no algorithm isn't free.

Folks, open your wallets and throw a few bucks Lemmy's way. I'm a monthly donor myself, and I consider it money well-spent compared to the shit show that is every other social media platform.

Am I wrong or is the same person making fun of the ridiculous censorship rules on Reddit while enforcing similar ridiculous censorship rules on their own .ml instance?

All this is very confusing to me. I had to look up what tankies are and if these giuys are tankies then they can go fuck themselves. I came here from reddit and now I am thinking I might have made a mistake. I don't know enough aboput this federated stuff to understand it. I have no idea how to block .ml nor do I know who these people are who run it. I do know that I had a very close Ukrainian friend as a child and although he is dead now I still see the Ukrainian people are brothers and sisters. I am not sure I want to give any of my money to an intance that actively shits out fucking ork propaganda. I need some educating here.

While I understand the moral objections people have to supporting the developers, I do think its fair to highlight how they do not treat us.

We are not a product here to be exploited and advertised to. They also respect your choice to block ml and not to interact with them at all for the rest. I am sure I would be absolutely abhorred by the depth of depravity of your average silicon valley CEO's hot takes, but they dont share it for this exact reason. Instead they just design their entire product and business around it, which is the enshittification we all know and hate.

People you dont agree with having a place of their own on the fediverse is a logical consequence of the idea behind it, and while uncomfortable, is a greater good in the end.

But to maintain that it means putting your money where your mouth. If not to them, to your own instance.