It’s too bad they won’t allow funding to go towards development of just the software itself, separately from the moderation and other costs of maintaining Lemmy.ml. As it is, Lemmy is a tankie platform first and foremost, and only secondarily offered for use by the rest of the world. You can see this in the development philosophy even: like even Reddit offers a modmail, notification upon moderation events, and ability to see deleted posts (PieFed offers some of this too), though Lemmy offers strong rights to instance admins, and somewhat lessened ones for moderators, but significantly weaker privileges to mere users (who I guess they feel don’t deserve to be told upon e.g. being banned from an instance, and instead merely have to find out the hard way?).

Adding to this: a lot of the most heinous, truly “problematic” stuff ended up being demonstrably false accusations - like a feature may be opt-in, or at worst opt-out, but either of those is a far cry from being hard-coded as was claimed.

That said, the software truly is “opinionated”, pushing its own agenda even if you can opt-out of most of it - an instance admin still has to be wary of each new feature added, especially with the lack of transparency surrounding the announcements.

Although personally I think Lemmy is equally opinionated, just more in the sense of what features it decides not to implement at all.

Both platforms have their advantages, and it seems more important for an end-user to pick a good admin team that reflects their values more than picking a platform, especially if using a 3rd-party app than replaces the UI anyway. (Though secondary to that, I do think PieFed has the strongest edge, especially right now before the release of Lemmy 1.0.)

Of course it looks that way to you, since your instance already defederated from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net and other toxic cesspits - see recent example (Lemmy.World’s statement and reasoning for defederation from Lemmy.org). The LW admin team does a lot of work to keep things this chill.:-)

To add to what Vicinus said, it’s like when people get divorced - it’s a breakdown of communication between instances, a means of last resort. Here is a recent example when your instance defederated from Lemmy.org:

due to lack of moderation on their side. This instance has open registrations, seemingly zero abuse prevention on signup, including not requiring emails. This leads to a small number of people constantly creating new disposable accounts for various types of abuse with zero consequences. Their admin is the CEO of an ad company, which surely doesn’t affect incentives. They do virtually zero moderation, allowing all these abusive accounts to rampantly harass other instances…

We, as well as other people, including at least one admin of another instance, have attempted to reach out to them about their lack of moderation, but we haven’t received any response at all. At this point there isn’t really anything left besides defederating them, which several other instances have already done as well.

Or here is the historical statement about defederation from Hexbear: https://lemmy.world/post/2498330, though those links are very old and probably not functional anymore.

It’s like when someone repeatedly sends you unsolicited spam, even after you beg and plead with them to stop, and so as a last resort you finally block them. Incels arguing against it claim that their right to speak should triumph over your right to not have to listen but… that is simply not true.

Including OP’s too:-). Except lemmy.ml, obviously.

Oh.

The Internet itself surely will continue, but yes the “free and open” version is already gone (how to test this: attempt to self-host a website now, like a Lemmy instance, and see how long until AI scrapers bring it to its knees).

Slaves?