Comparison of different Lemmy Instances
github.com
github.com
They say the instance you choose doesn't matter that much, but if even large instances are going to start defederating then there is a kind of Keynesian beauty contest to choosing the right instance - you might not care what an instance looks like if you're just using it as a gateway to the fediverse, but you need to choose an instance that doesn't repulse the other instances too much.
I would way that's not true.
Mostly speaking from a Mastodon perspective, but should be true for Lemmy/Kbin too. Healthy small ones with active moderation should be a good choice as they have a lesser chance of being defederated. Many smaller instances recently defederated mastodon.social because of spam. You should also choose one that doesn't defederate other instances left and right (if that's what you're not after).
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy and https://fedidb.org/software/kbin might be helpful.
I also signed up to another instance (which I am not going to mention) and to hachyderm.io (which nominally caters more to techies, and where I'm essentially lurking) and the local timeline is full of self-promotion and activism. Better cat pics, but I'm struggling to find good discussions. The former instance was just full of idealistic randos chanting as Twitter went belly-up, and although it was all "positive", it was very much the Clockwork Orange kind of positive...
Regarding Lemmy, right now I'm on the fence.
The defederation of Lemmy.world means I can't follow the 3D Printing community there (as well as a couple of others catering to makers and electronics), and Mastodon integration isn't working, so I'm really tempted to just subscribe via RSS or set up a private Lemmy/Kbin instance just to follow the things I'm interested in (which seems wasteful and overly complex).
Anyway, my opinion right now is that the bubble syndrome is really strong in the Fediverse.
I’ve ceased looking at the local feed (instead of people I follow), because it always seemed to be defederation drama.
This mostly seemed to be “This other large instance has one person we don’t like and won’t impose _our_ moderation standards, so we are defederating”. Or, poor you if you wanted to follow Doctors Without Borders because a news organisation your instance doesn’t like joined it.
Running your own instance seems to be the only way to avoid this, but Mastodon doesn’t seem to be lightweight and I don’t know how sustainable it is for e.g. _everyone_ to do that.
The problem with this is that running your own instance is also seen as inherently suspicious by the same communities, see the comments about Pleroma by the admins of many medium size instances - because it's easy to set up it's often set up by people avoiding bans, but they miss that easy to set up is a factor that helps everyone.
To me this highlights my top issue with fediverse replacements for sites like Twitter & Reddit.
I always want to be able to see everything. I do not care a single bit about the "local timeline" of my Mastodon instance (also hachyderm.io here). I have no desire to choose a Lemmy server based on its population. The thing I like most about sites like Reddit & Twitter is that they provide me with boundless one stop shopping, and I can choose to ignore things I don't want to see at any particular point of time.
People compare these federated social platforms to email, as there are many email providers and they can all exchange mail with each other. But there's no concept of being "defederated" in email. Or is there? I just don't understand the term.
Speaking as an admin, if a server starts sending me hundreds of spams an hour, it's going to get blocked because I don't want to spend (my limited) resources on spams, much less push the handling of that down to my users.
The entire instance is sort of "shadow banned". Everyone on it can post, but no one will ever read it (except for the few dozen people on that instance). Since forums have some minimum number of users/readers that if the number falls below this people just give up and go away, it will be dead within a month.
Not only is it like being shadow-banned, but you get to be shadow-banned for what the other people on the instance are posting.
The Fediverse might be a good model for a Twitter-alike (it's debatable), but I don't think it's a good model at all for a reddit-alike.
Conversations aren't meant to always be civil. If you enforce that harshly, it turns into a place to post cat pictures.
- Over time, a few instances will grow to dominate and nobody will defederate them because they are too big and you'd lose too much/make too many people mad. These will be the Gmail, iCloud, Hotmail, etc. instances.
- As they become larger, instances will be motivated to follow established politics of the big instances so they don't get cut off.
- Small instances will exist as echo chambers for certain unpopular points of view and mostly none of the big instances will federate them. Porn, Nazis, KKK, Anarchists, religious extremists, etc.
- Possible large bifurcations may develop, e.g. "Fox News/Breitbart" vs. "CNN/Huffington"; each has large followings but they would probably not federate each other.
- New users who just want a place to do normal Reddit-like stuff will be confused by all of this.
I’m one of many to run my own instance, letting me be in control of who I federate with (though there’s of course the risk of being defederated myself). It’s not for the faint-hearted, but doable, and doesn’t require much in the way of hardware (for me, a Raspberry Pi CM4 with 8GB of memory).
I’d be willing to answer any questions people here might have.
> risk of being defederated
I was not aware of this risk. How does this defederation work?
I’m running OpenBSD 7.3 and manually compiled Lemmy 0.17.4 from git (I plan to eventually submit it as a port). I’m running lemmy-server and lemmy-ui behind relayd to ensure both are accessible (this is a bit finicky, refer to the nginx config in the official Docker container to see how everything needs to be forwarded to make federation work). Lemmy-server (the backend) is a single Rust binary and lemmy-ui (the frontend) is a single-page web application whose server side runs under NodeJS. The PostgreSQL instance that holds the data runs on the same Pi. I’ve not yet installed pict-rs (which is what Lemmy uses to host images).
Rust, PostgreSQL and NodeJS are all from OpenBSD’s ports.
I admit that this isn’t for everybody, so most will want to run the official Docker container.
> Do you host your RasPi at home?
Yeah, it’s in a closet at home. With Lemmy running it’s still perfectly usable for the kind of hobbyist development I otherwise use it for (I may eventually want to switch to a dedicated server).
> How does this defederation work?
Any one instance is totally free to block anyone else. Plus I’m guessing that eventually, as the Fediverse grows, smaller nodes are going to be blocked entirely to keep spam under control.
To put it another way, would you want to join an instance that isn't trying (or is failing to) contain harassment and other forms of bad actors? That's the challenge the de-fed is addressing: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Harassment is such a vague term and has been stretched out to cover such a huge swathe that it can basically used to police almost anything.
After requested clarification, it was explained that this was done because it is a contentious topic that has high likelihood of getting heated, but moderation was completely blind to how allowing only one visible perspective on an issue completely distorts how a community’s stance at large on that issue is perceived.
HN is more of a case of “least worst” rather than “best”, for me.
And this is why the idea of the fediverse (outside of a content blind common carrier type scenario) is DOA. Once you get outside spam and widely illegal shit, defining the "terms the same way you do" has nearly as many possibilities as users, and the overlap of that Venn diagram does not exist - so the natural evolution is just a bunch of tiny instances none of which want to federate with another.
The only purpose these new fediverse systems seem to have is for disjoint communities to increase availability - in one of the clumsiest ways possible and at the wrong level of abstraction.
Edit:
Now having read their "What is Beehaw" Post [1], I can clearly see I was correct and would NEVER want to be a part of that oppressive community, That post is fill with political ideology, plainly false statements, and mental contractions... wow. just wow
> Our goal is to create a platform in which nice people will want to stick around so that the experience is less toxic than other websites and because of such it needs to resemble an offline community - the rules must be more open to interpretation and the way the rules are interpreted needs to be a community effort.
> We want this to be a community - this means that discussions about behavior should organically arise. When someone violates a rule they aren’t banned immediately, but rather reminded that they need to behave appropriately. In the offline world, this might resemble a friend asking you about how you treated their friend, a pastor pulling you aside and talking to you about how you’ve seemed on edge lately, or security asking you not to vape inside their establishment.
Beehaw is a Community: https://beehaw.org/post/140733
They state they are a platform 16 times on the link I provided including directly saying ". Beehaw is a social media platform. "
Beehaw: On this platform I attempted to address this emerging problem of rationalism
The first step to being a true rationalist is to realize you’re as vulnerable to cognitive biases and emotion driven thinking as everyone else, and focus on your own thought processes first and foremost.
Being a rationalist isn’t about lording over other people, it’s about trying to make your own thought as clear and rational as possible, and that requires challenging your own deeply held beliefs and opinions constantly.
Most people I see who call themselves rationalists aren’t that.
But I’m really glad it exists. I’m glad they have a space for themselves. Glad I can (hopefully) find a space for myself, and that we are no forced into co-existing. I might even recommend Beehaw to some extended acquaintances… but it’s fairly anti-me.
Anyone recommend something like Something Awful from it’s glory days? I don’t mind trolls and saltiness and edginess, just don’t want spam.
But what a complete farce this whole fediverse is. Any instance with any traction is going to attract people that you, I, or even the majority are not going to wish to interact with. Hell there's plenty on this site. And beehaw sounds like a community I have no interest in associating with.
> and that we are no forced into co-existing.
Not sure how simply federating servers forces coexistence.
Defederating is such a ludicrously blunt and ultimately ineffective moderation tool.
Beehaw has some weird ideas about harassment and hate speech. Essentially civility and concern-troll like behavior cranked up to the extreme.
The instance I'm on is a bit rowdy but has a tight culture and something like 600 average users online at once, 20kish accounts, and a very active banhammer to boot.
We take things like transphobia, homophobia, racism, etc very seriously. The mods have zero patience for wreckers and "debate me" types. As a result, we find historical figures such as John Brown very admirable and hold strong opinions on what should happen to slaveholders and their ilk. Beehaw doesn't seem to like that.
Not quite shitposters like genZedong but committed communists nonetheless.
I also find that many people are way too quick to label, and will find myself tending towards that as well. In practice, I try to keep a conversation open and civil so long as personal insults aren't flying. I am human, however and will also close conversations if I reach a point where I, myself, am likely to slip. I feel it's a fair approach.
I do miss when online communities were mostly local BBSes where you will meet, see and interact with locals that will have differing views from you. That doesn't mean there aren't toxic personalities, but only that a little bit of understanding can at least go a long way in terms of community and society. I feel that, in terms of politics at least, negotiation from opposing views is supposed to be part of what makes it worth. The general ill feelings towards anything that is "other" is disappointing.
It's generally a really positive place, a lot of well read folks who can back up their views. Not pure shitposting a la genZedong.
Not a fun place to go if you want a debate off the bat.
It was originally a diaspora for /r/chapotraphouse after they were banned for "promoting violence" after basically saying "slave owners deserve to be killed", which like, yeah. It was banned at the same time as /r/the_donald which really felt like a "if we ban one extreme, gotta ban the other". If you ask me, the sins of the two weren't equal but we did a ton of brigading so we sorta deserved it anyway. Diaspora split between discord and hexbear. The latter has two daily megathreads that get more interaction than most lemmys see in a week.
It will be federating soon, lemmygrad to start with and most likely some hobby and special interest lemmys soon.
Reddit has all these problems too, as well as any other big site like Facebook, etc. The solution there is a one-size-fits-all policy that generally, surprise surprise, conforms whatever the dominant culture of the company that created it is. I mean, what else would it be, right? No sarcasm. Then further modulated by the commercial interests created by the advertising-funded nature of the large-scale community. And especially because of that, the desire is typically to just shovel any conflicts under the carpet.
But these pressures are still there. They often seem to explode at some point. Reddit may or may not be seeing that now.
This is why I remain unsure and unconvinced that these one-size-fits-all communities can function as communities for the long haul. There's this intrinsic build up of stresses that will eventually overwhelm the system. Clearly they can function for a decade or two, since they have, but can they go beyond that? Yeah, in Internet time that may seem like forever, but it really isn't all that long or stable on human time scales.
You simply can not shovel the whole of humanity into one "community" and expect it to work.
What does this even mean in the context of a social media site?
> Group A: “They’re Nazis, they deserve it”
Something along those lines. In this case not exactly “punching Nazis”, but advocating something “should happen to slaveholders and their ilk”.
For context, John Brown tried to organize a violent rebellion among black slaves in the South: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)
> Group A: “We should punch commies, we actively encourage punching commies” > Beehaw: “Hey! You can’t advocate for violence towards people!”
> Group A: “They’re commies, they deserve it”
Something along those lines. In this case not exactly “punching commies”, but advocating something “should happen to commies and their ilk”.
I know who John Brown is, but that history is completely immaterial to the topic at hand.
Then shouldn't people like us run our own instances, which then just act like an aggregator and wrapper around our single user account?
Or am I federating TOO MUCH in a way that's hard to explain to new people?
Because in my head... Each subreddit/community maps almost perfectly to 1 instance, and each technically savvy user also maps almost perfectly to 1 instance. That feels right to me...
So why would that be stupid?
Genuinely curious and open to being corrected.
Today, nothing speaks against that. But if this proliferates, I'm predicting white lists to become more common on "sensitive" instances like Beehaw.
It's just like Email today. Sure you can run your own Email server. But expect to sometimes end up in the spam folder of users with Gmail accounts. You can thank the spammers for that, and the trolls if that ever becomes common on Lemmy.
This. And it's not just lemmy either. Mastodon, pixelfed, diaspora and other fediverse-capable platforms are a pain in the ass to set up and self host.
As a technical guy, I've set up most of these and while it's certainly possible to do, the hoi polloi don't have the knowledge/skills to do so and aren't interested in gaining such skills.
RPM/DEB/etc. packages with set up scripts and windows installers would make a world of difference, but instead we have 'curl <url> |bash' and docker containers.
While I'm not really too upset about the great unwashed being able to access the Fediverse (I wouldn't mind if it were mostly the technically minded, but I can just choose who to follow to get that), the current situation does little to improve the network effects of the Fediverse.
IMHO, the situation is similar to a scenario posited in another discussion[0] about devops, where developers throw their code "over the wall" to let the ops folks handle deployment/operations.
Except the "ops" folks in this case are mostly non-technical end users. With the results being pretty much what you'd might expect. And more's the pity.
...I wish it had thrived enough to have Federated Apps integrated with it intelligently.
I love how the App Store works on Sandstorm.io and in Linode (for initial set-up, anyway).
I also hope that this stuff gets integrated with something like Tailscale... So if I run an instance, I can see which individual users or apps on other instances are allowed to talk to my apps on my instance, and it's all end-to-end encrypted...
I continue to hope for the fediverse to do well!
And yes, people will subscribe to Allowlists and Denylists, and that's not great, but people are terrible...
I think the only people motivated to do that would be trolls and spammers. In fact, it's probably easily automated too.
Spam, get banned, restart instance, repeat.
I prefer blocking at individual level(s) as well over platform blocking, even for what I see myself. YMMV though.
It feels a bit sparse at the moment, but I'm hoping it grows steadily and not too much! :)
- https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Kbin magazine list:
Shame we don't live in a world where Reddit somehow turned into non-profit for the common good like Wikipedia before it monopolized forum culture and now wants to squeeze users for profit.
If you search for a new email provider, you'll see the same legends. Email adoption is not doomed.
I'd like to host my own mail but it's not worth it anymore thanks to spammers.
What helped in my case: Picking another username. It's possible that somehow it handles existing username errors weirdly which leads to the infinite spinner.
I tried again using view desktop site (on Firefox Android) and then it worked but still anything but a smooth intuitive process for now it seems.
Passwords can't be longer than 20char. It's a bug. Also don't enter an email when trying to join initially, if you can. The UI waits for the email to send before returning. Another known bug.
Self plug: come join on https://reddthat.com. We currently don't have email requirements, or any "forms" to fill out before you join.
:)
This has to be a bad joke.
> Also don't enter an email when trying to join initially, if you can. The UI waits for the email to send before returning
Sorry, this is supposed to be a viable alternative to Reddit?
> This has to be a bad joke.
There are plenty of rough edges, that the community is finding.
> Sorry, this is supposed to be a viable alternative to Reddit?
It is an alternative that removes a problem that Reddit users were facing. Lack of Control. It gives control back to the users. I wouldn't say it's perfect but if a person doesn't want a company being completely in control of everything relating to that platform. The fediverse is that solution
Based on your reply, it's clear that lemmy will never be anything other than an afterthought.
This isn't a VC startup. This isn't even funded i believe. Why the hostility?
2) My general frustration with FOSS projects having zero interest in good UX/UI design, resulting in a lack of prioritization for basic stuff like this
Like, if Lemmy has no interest in being a viable option to most people, then fine. People just need to stop pretending that it is.
Sure, but i think viable is in the eye of the beholder. In this case it's bleeding edge software not even 1.0 yet, with a massive influx of sudden, demanding users, and no dedicated employees or income (i think). I'd counter that people need to set their expectations accordingly.
For those people unable to deal with reality on this subject Reddit still exists. Stay on it if you want VC polish and the funding that requires. No one is out here making purposefully bad software.
Your frustrations seem better spent on individuals arguing everyone move to Lemmy than it is Lemmy (devs) directly. Stay on Reddit, it sounds like you prefer the VC experience. There's nothing wrong with that.
The FOSS devs are just doing the best they can with the time and resources they have.
It is currently being worked on through a grant from https://nlnet.nl/
https://lemmy.ml/comment/479066
> When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.
> ...
> For the past three years dessalines and I have been funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we implement certain new features. But now we are busy answering questions, reviewing pull requests and urgentlyfixing problems. That means we are unable to work on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won’t receive payments from them. We are increasingly reliant on user donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more developers to our worker co-op in the future.
What is your personal gripe against Lemmy? Lemmy is a FOSS project developed by volunteers. The instances are run by volunteers for fun. It may become something or may not become anything. But the people developing and maintaining Lemmy will have fun regardless, I'm sure.
And all that hard work and fun is offered as a gift to you and me if we want to join one of their instances. You and I don't have to. But that option is there as a gift. Why are you so angry with this gift? If you don't like it, don't use it!
What have they been doing since 2019?
Your ToS mentions Australian law so going to guess I am just as unwelcome here as everywhere else
But it would need to be heavily moderated. There are already some "trees" communities. Subscribing to them from our instance I wouldn't have a problem with
Edit: position: no, unless we get other moderators and admins we can trust. Currently it's just 2 people doing admin n moderation. Having a community like that may be a lot more involved that I would want to be.
I am not using auto-generated passwords. Like I said the browser is not sending any request at all to the server.
I noticed there's a web socket connection and when you submit the info goes there (not a separate request). Then the client gets something about a captcha and the spinner spins forever.
1. Too long username
2. Username contains _
3. Too long password
All three cause "spinning forever" problem without any notification what the problem actually was.
Yeah, not the best sign up experience, I'll tell you that much. Apparently other people around here have noticed other ways for the signup process to fail.
p.s. checking out beehaw I realise that lemmy can be run either as a reddit alternative (with lots of subreddits communities on different topics) or as a discourse type forum (with categories). thats good flexibility to have, but for easy discovery it needs to be managed somehow
The reality is that discovery is terrible right now and you can't browse a feed of all Tech/Music/Art threads from all federated instances. Hopefully this is being worked on.
So if you join a general instance (like reddthat.com #selfplug) you can search in the communities and find any other community and subscribe to it.
browse.feddit.de is the current place that searches every fediverse instance, and indexes all the communities. So your can find any community, even if the instance has not federated yet
Which is both good and bad. Good because federation of course. But it also ends up fracturing the community. Say all the r/python people decide to move out from Reddit to Lemmy. They are probably going to go to different Lemmy instances each with their own c/python community. Yes you can follow any c/python from any instance but let's be honest, how many such c/python communities are you going to follow?
* Cryptocurrencies who's sole reason to exist is to justify its own existence. "We need token X to perform operation Y. Operation Y is important to facilitate the trade of token X". Seriously, how many tokens exist for the only purpose of being "gas" for its own network?
* Social networks that only discuss itself and its own existence.
* Programming languages where the largest project written in that language is its own compiler.
Solutions in search of a problem, is what they are.
Federation is already successful, since email is federated (you can register on gmail.com and send an email to an account at yahoo.com, or even run your own email server, although the ecosystem has evolved/commercialized to make that more difficult than it strictly has to be).
But Lemmy, we'll see. Maybe a better-written competitor emerges, or maybe they get their act together, or maybe the world doesn't want a federated Reddit clone (although my personal bet is that it does and subreddits are sort of the centralized prototype of that). But there's no question that federation itself is useful in certain applications.
This is a phase that every single new platform/tech passes through. All of them.
(Yes, fediverse isn't new, but it's new to many right now...)
Apart from languages which never bother self hosting, this seems backwards. It could be considered a sign of failure of a language if it never attracts projects beyond its own compiler, but it isn't true that a project which has its own compiler as the largest project is doomed to failure. For example, this was once true of Rust and Go but no longer is.
As far as I've noticed those politics discussions boil down to different degrees of reverence for Deng Xiaoping, and if one is slightly to the right of Bernie Sanders you get banned.
I can't read Chinese so I don't know what this person is saying online, but whether they're pro or anti China, getting blocked shouldn't be that hard with some of the userbase.
Normal people don't care, this is all too complex and the community politics are mind numbing. It's no wonder centralized systems continue to win. I'm a technical person and I don't even want to bother with this kind of stuff.
Might as well just google "best internet forums" and do the same.
Lemmy’s type of social media is mindless, timing filling. Having to figure out the nuance of federation defeats the entire point.
Further, the primary reason for federation seems to be anti-censorship. While there are absolutely cases where censorship is applied to destroy/control, most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship. It seems like the only people that care about “avoiding a central authority” are those looking to stir hate and trouble on social media.
How would you know that?
There's plenty of censorship on many large Reddit subs already. Just look at the difference between r/worldnews and r/anime_titties (which is also world news, name is misleading).
There's already a ton of posts on HN about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28318521
No, see, since it hasn't effected them (yet?)there is no good faith reason to be against censorship. The only ones effected by it or worried by it are the wrongthinkers and bad people and who cares about them?
Apologies for not being more clear but I was actually agreeing with you from the sarcastic viewpoint of the person you were replying to.
Just to be clear, I think there are bad forms of censorship. My point is simply my use of social media tends to not overlap with the places where those bad forms of censorship occur.
The problem here is the developers. Federation developers don't seem to be interested in UX. They aren't focusing on adding the polish and ease-of-use users expect out of a social media platform.
90% of the issues with Lemmy isn't because of federation. It's because of basic UX:
- Error messages silently discarded everywhere. Stuff "loads forever" when in reality some error has happened and the operation has already failed.
- Links to other instances are not handled properly (WTF? Links to other instances are a huge part of federation, how could you not handle this properly?)
- To follow a community in another instance, you have to search the community? TWICE! (The first search loads the community asynchronously in the background). WTF?
- They decided to rewrite the entire UI using websockets causing bugs everywhere? WTF? Over-engineering at its finest. At least they are trying to undo the rewrite currently...
- Searching for communities should search through all communities that the instance is federated with. It should feel like there's only one instance. Right now search shows only cached communities. WTF? Are we expecting users to understand caches?
I'm hoping that the influx of new developers (who are more UX focused) is enough to polish the platform for end-user use by June 30th. It's going to be difficult, but it's possible.
You still can't migrate posts in Mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423 It's been 4 years...
every Lemmy instance has a /c/technology, a /c/anime, a /c/funny, and a /c/linux, and all those community are entirely distinct.
That's no federation, that's the definition of silos. That's my experience using HN and Reddit today, or Facebook and Twitter.
To verify, I've taken the top entry, lemmy.world, and looked at the 10 most recent posts, and they're within the last 10 minutes. One post per minute isn't awesome, but well. Then I took 10 of the 0 user instances, and lo and behold, one instance had one post, the rest zero. So the number of users does seem to predict activity (atm).
...that said I expect that the future is going to be much more based around whitelists because open federation means easy trolling/bots... but the current theory is to think of instances like email providers.
But that's still almost empty... I've been visiting for a week, and I think the posts I saw a week ago are still there on the first page, with just a couple new articles showing up every few days :(
I am in desperate need for something to replace reddit.com/r/programming, if anyone has a hint where people are moving, would love to hear it (at least some reddits like /r/lisp are still going - but they never had a lot of traffic in the first place - still more than Lemmy).
Decentralization is already causing fragmentation and echo chambers, as everyone is learning the hard way... unfortunately.
Any advice for a conservative Christian trying to find a reddit alternative or Lemmy instance that also doesn't want to be moderated or banned into oblivion (or de-federated because of trolls which I do not represent)? As many conservatives know, even joining /r/conservative and not posting on reddit was enough to entirely be banned from many communities that have nothing to do with politics. Walking into another similarly prejudiced social network (but at a platform level) doesn't sound like fun to me.
1. I appreciate open and friendly discussion with people who don't think like me. The atmosphere, even of /r/conservative is very different than something like truth social. I don't want to be in an echo chamber, and the content from the echo chamber seems tailored to click-bate. i.e. "Watch X DESTROY Y with Logic", or conspiracy theories. I read a variety of news, and I don't need another source for it, but would rather watch discussion unfold about different topics by people who may have different opinions as well.
2. I use Reddit primarily for tech, gaming, programming, gamedev, and programming language related topics or other unrelated things like woodworking or bushcrafting. I like the community-based paradigm to social media for that reason, and that content is almost entirely lacking on conservative social networks.
3. I'm not really a Trump supporter. Truth social I believe is also relatively dead, but I've never joined so I can't verify that.
4. Free speech is extremely important to me. Trolling, hating,etc, should be moderated, but a dissenting opinion written respectively should not be, in my opinion. I'm not sure that Truth Social has reputation as a free speech platform. Reddit as a platform has largely been a free speech platform. Independently moderated subreddits have not. But Lemmy instances seem like they're going to take a stance against any communities or instances that don't fit the ideology.
There is value in open debate and conversation, but it does seem like Lemmy is intended to be a walled left echo chamber. I'm curious if your question is reflective of others' opinions as well, in that they'd prefer people not like them ideologically would just go to their own spaces and leave others alone
I think there's a lot of value in seeing differing opinions even if you don't agree with them, as long as the discussion remains civil. That goes for myself as much as anyone else, I'm human, but I'll tend to cut off once personal insults are flowing.
I got the domain jump.red a while ago, to make a more conservative/libertarian community... may throw a lemmy instance up this weekend there. Won't necessarily fit the bulk, but I think there's room. Was also thinking on putting up one on the bbs/tech related domains I have.
I'm thinking of joining fmhy, which isn't the most active but is clear about their federation policy and has only defederated from lemmygrad (which seems to be a major source of posts from the group you're referencing)
I have my share of problems with Reddit, but most of the stuff I read about the big Lemmy instances make it seem like the mods of some instances are teenagers on acid. Marxism is in the history books, and "deconstructing our privilege" sounds like something their therapist told them they needed to do and they're projecting.
It all feels a bit fake.
On Reddit I always felt like the naive utopian change the world stuff was confined to a few subs.
But I might work some more on it if anyone is interested.