to start: after some consideration, we’ve altered our entry question a little bit so that entry is not guaranteed. during the daytime you can basically expect waits of 30 minutes or less when it comes to approval/disapproval, but overnight it’ll be anywhere from 6-12 hours. just FYI
if you’d like to introduce yourself without it getting lost in all the posts already made, i just made a thread for that over here
our sidebar should give you most of the information you’re looking for about us, but to reiterate some: we are pretty relaxed here, but we have a well carved out understanding of what we want to be. if you would like more elaboration on that, you can find elaboration on that at length in the following two posts:
for some less lengthy and more relaxed elaboration, see the discussion in the comments of this post.
as for funding: we are 100% user-funded. if you would like to contribute to our ability to keep the website up, you can donate on OpenCollective, which supports both one-time donations or monthly donations.
a few other questions occasionally pop up like “why do we have the set of communities we do?” and “why can’t people make their own?” (the latter is a feature of lemmy). for elaboration on that, you can see the following post and the discussions here. we are open to suggestions and creating communities as demand sees fit; see also discussion here.
downvotes are disabled on this instance and that’s a thing we’re not liable to change. if you’d like elaboration for why that is, see this comment. this may be a point of friction for some coming from reddit, but i hope you’ll understand why we’re doing it even if you don’t necessarily agree with it.
if you’re interested in our governance to this point and a brief idea of our long term goals, see the comment here.
feel free to sound off on other questions you have; i’ll try to update the OP with those and our ability to answer them as time goes on.
Yeah it’s so freaking weird. Any reasonable person building a reasonable social network would promote interconnectedness and positive social behavior. Yet all the major social networks seem to promote angry behavior and angry people. I’m so glad that more and more people are choosing to “leave the matrix”. I would love to see if future where everything social media is federated and algorithms are optional at most.
my guess is its that way because it drives more attention to the site sure drama can be harmful to the person but for the site its a goldmine of people going to see whats happening and seeing ads and driving up usage metrics