Alo you 'orrible lot, another year is almost at end end. Can you believe we launched this ship one and a half year ago? And we’re still going strong! Our instance keeps growing even with the “stringent” application instructions we have, with a good mix of pirates, anarchists and other weirdos joining. All according to plan!
Communities
Last year the waters have been fairly calm, with our three top communities continuing to get more traffic
- [email protected] continues to upset libs whenever it brings up electoralism, while getting highly upvoted on everything else
- [email protected] hitting the frontpage with almost every post and getting a regular mix of rule 1 violations and people self-realizing.
- [email protected] being of course the most popular safe harbor outside of corporate shark infested waters
At the same time, our new communities seem to be finding ample traction
- [email protected] allowing people to air their grievances and striving to keep mods and admins in check, in lemmy and out.
- [email protected] fills in the gaps leftymemes leaves and provides a shiposting spot for anarchists while being unapologetically anti-tankie.
- [email protected] continuing to bash disinformation wherever it appears.
- [email protected] uniting and organizing all the image sharing comms together
Do mention your favourite new comms in the comments
Moderation
Generally y’all seem to be playing nice enough. We haven’t had to issue that many bans instance-wide except for some dedicated trolls. The application instructions seem to be working quite well at stopping automated spammers and stupid bigots from getting in, in the first place.
Likewise there’s been very few, if any appeals in our matrix channels and 0 [email protected] callouts.
Moderation load is manageable but do let us know if you think there’s areas of improvement.
Fundraising
As always, our instance is completely donation based. We don’t want to sell anything or advertise anyone. The plan is to avoid giving any incentives to enshittify this instance, or otherwise to give any ammo for anyone to claim trying to spread disinfo. The goal is to provide a truly communal space for people to express themselves (mostly how much they hate copyrights and capitalism 😅).
Our ko-fi page has managed to almost completely cover the server costs until the end of the year and anything extra will go as buffer for the next year. I’m also working on creating something official to enhance this whole process and hopefully I will announce it soon.
Given our costs and our monthly active users, each euro being donated, is currently supporting ~10 other active users in this instance, so do consider everything you donate as mutual aid to those needing a digital home!
(If you have any ideas on how I can reward sponsors to this instance, do let us know. I already offered custom emojis, but people don’t seem to be interested)
Users
Just for fun, I decided to see what kind of answers people have given for our application. The tool to compile this took me way longer than I would have liked and I still have around 1500 answers that need improved parsing, but I’m out of time so here’s what people answered for their favourite character
Historical Pirate: 447 (9.5%)
Digital Pirate: 1021 (21.7%)
Fictional Character: 479 (10.2%)
FOSS advocate: 1338 (28.4%)
Free Software: 400 (8.5%)
Anarchist: 480 (10.2%)
Other: 46 (1.0%)
Total Answers Analyzed: 4712
Answers matching multiple categories: 632
Top Mentions per Category:
---------------------------
Historical Pirate: Blackbeard (248), Anne Bonny (40), Zheng Yi Sao (25)
Digital Pirate: Fitgirl (183), Aaron Swartz (173), Empress (96)
Fictional Character: Captain Jack Sparrow (215), Luffy (73), Dread Pirate Roberts (43)
FOSS advocate: Linus Torvalds (888), Richard Stallman (332), Luis Rossman (97)
Free Software: Lemmy (304), Gnu (30), Github (23)
Anarchist: Kropotkin (86), Emma Goldman (78), Chomsky (53)
Other: John Oliver (15), Tim O'Reilly (15), Bernie Sanders (6)
Epilogue
I’m very proud of how well this instance, and the threadiverse in general (lemmy + mbin + piefed) is going. This feels like a fairly active forum from the good ole days, which cannot easily be taken away from us by shitty admins and corpos. Here’s to one more year!
I feel like you have the impression I lean towards a radical view of free speech, but I have not alluded to that. So hold your horses. I simply stated I was hesitant to donate to an instance that banned users based on the use of the r-word. I wasn’t looking for an alternative, I simply talked about an idea I have had.
I have no particular opinion of you one way or another. I just think you’re being overly dramatic.
Since i have no context for how the use of retarded ended up getting someone banned, but i can imagine, im not speaking to that.
However what i am speaking to is your mentioning of free speech and ‘free exchange of ideas’ in relation to using disparaging terminology towards a group of people. Which is generally in my experience online code for ‘im an asshole nazi trying to play off peoples moral sensibilities.’ it also happens that I cant imagine a single instance were using the word retarded directed at someone is useful to the free exchange of ideas. In fact it sounds like that person was being an asshole and got what was coming to them.
Now enjoy you stay and be cool to people and you wont have a problem and no worries on the donation, because its just that a donation.
Way out of line dude. Stop imposing your morality as the gospel. And you again misinterpret what I said. Who is gonna be the arbiter of what words are harmful? That line can be a slippery slope.
And the use of retarded was directed at something, not someone, in case you missed that.
There seems to be a pretty universal consensus view in leftist spaces that pejoratives based on marginalized groups are a form of microaggression and/or discrimination towards that group and should therefore be avoided. I’m wondering if you disagree with that general principle, or do you just have a problem with the word “retarded” being included in the set of problematic pejoratives?