Lemmy.ml has long had some political conflict among the userbase, especially in communities like worldnews. This is because the instance is composed of both leftists (anarchist/communist) and liberals (those who agree with the mainstream political views in western countries). Additionally, the instance admins all belong to the former group.
Recently we made an announcement offering free Lemmy instance hosting for one year, for non-politics instances. We are hereby making a similar offer to host a liberal or mainstream political instance, which can accomodate those who are unhappy with lemmy.ml moderation.
This has many advantages. Instance admins have full power to set the rules, block federated instances (like lemmygrad.ml), or remove unwanted content. An administration team that is closer aligned politically would certainly be an improvement for some of the users here.
So if you are interested to host such an instance, send an email to contact@join-lemmy.org some relevant details about yourself. You will also have to buy a domain. We will only host one such instance, so if multiple people are interested, you should coordinate among yourselves. As in the original offer, the hosting will be limited to one year.
On a side note, we would also like to help with the creation of a general-purpose instance that is less focused on politics than most of the existing instances. This is fully within the terms of the initial “free instance hosting” announcement, so if you are interested, send us an email!
Why don’t liberals just spin up their own instance? Wasn’t that the point of making the code base open?
That’s the idea, I think this is just an offer to temporarily host it to see if it attracts sufficient users to transfer to dedicated hosting funded by the users later on.
Unfortunately they still just prefer to stay on reddit, and none have wanted to do the very small amount of work to set up their own instance.