Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate this paragraph:

In particular, I would like to see someone (or a group of people) create a mainstream, or liberal instance. That should help to avoid further drama, and avoid attempts to turn lemmy.ml into something that it is not. @dessalines and I would certainly be willing to help with any technical problems that such an instance runs into, and include it on join-lemmy.org (just like any other instance that meets the code of conduct).

One of the concerns that FediTips raised was that they weren’t sure whether Lemmy developers/admins would condone a “mainstream” Lemmy instance. This is a relief to read.

Having no moderation is definitely a non-starter, since the community would eventually devolve to something like 4chan. I’m just wishing for a Lemmy instance where center-left and center-right folks could interact and discuss general topics, some of which may be political. Politics intersects with so many areas, so having strong political restrictions would really limit the type of discussions that the instance could have.

The Lemmy developers have no obligation to create such a space, you’re right about that. But the Lemmy software is pretty great, and it would be nice to be able to point interested newcomers to an active Lemmy instance where they can talk about a variety of common topics, without alienating a large chunk of these people.

A DNS check indicates that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml are hosted on the same IP address, so I think your hunch is right:

https://dnschecker.org/all-dns-records-of-domain.php?query=lemmy.ml&rtype=ALL&dns=google

https://dnschecker.org/all-dns-records-of-domain.php?query=lemmygrad.ml&rtype=ALL&dns=google

I totally agree that it’s healthier for the fediverse to stay decentralized. But instances don’t have to restrict participation to a certain section of the political spectrum to achieve that. I think there’s space for multiple general-interest instances in the fediverse without needing any one of them to dominate the community.

Frankly, I’m just not accustomed to what Lemmy (lemmy.ml) is. When you look at most of the services in the fediverse, the “main” instance (usually the biggest one maintained by the developers) is not explicitly political in the way that Lemmy (lemmy.ml) is. For example, in Mastodon, that would be mastodon.social and its successor mastodon.online.

mastodon.online has rules restricting the discussion of egregious topics such as discrimination of protected classes, Nazi symbolism, holocaust denial, etc., but does not declare a broad political position for its entire community. In general, it tries to be a “big tent” and only limits what is necessary to keep the environment non-toxic.

I or someone else could create a libertarian instance of Lemmy, but what I’d really love to see is a “big tent” instance of Lemmy that doesn’t restrict political discussion near the center of the Overton window.

(And to clarify, I understand that alt-right groups have tried to appropriate the term libertarian and misuse it to describe things that are not libertarian at all. I strongly disagree with them. The alt-right is not libertarian, but very much the opposite in most cases.)

FediTips and the commenters in that thread make some good points. The fact that this Lemmy instance federates with Lemmygrad (which, if you look at the front page, is full of denialism about the Uyghur genocide) is an atrocity.

And yes, https://lemmy.ml/modlog does indeed have some questionable entries, such as:

• Removed Community conservatives reason: No conservative communities
• Removed Community Libertarian, in the pursuit of a free society reason: No conservative communities allowed
• Removed Community Conservatism reason: No conservative subs allowed

I created the Conservatism community, not knowing that Lemmy (lemmy.ml) became a leftist instance. (Lemmy was not explicitly leftist when I made my account in July 2020. Look at this archive of the front page from November 2020, which does not include the word leftist in the sidebar.) Fine, whatever. But, removing the Libertarian community with the rationale “No conservative communities allowed”? I don’t understand that. That’s not even politically accurate.