Asklemmy

.ml is treated as a bit of a bogeyman around here - most of my interactions with their instance and users has been good. I realise this could be different for others. But, yes, they are Marxist-Leninist so, obviously, their opinions and content will be closely aligned with their political philosophy. In my personal opinion and experience .world seems to have vacuumed-up a tremendous amount of people from the other site you mentioned (Robbit?). Their netiquette seems to have not changed. Also, myself and some others have noticed that on .world it’s not unusual to see comments that express views from outside what the majority believe get deleted. Fortunately the “mod logs” are public record so you can see why comments were deleted, whom by and what the original post/comment was. (I guess with the exception of illegal content that has to be scrubbed) I hope you enjoy your time here. Welcome.

Thank you for posting, OP.

I was thinking about making an account here. Saw this and made one here, to see how the instance would feel like.

it's not sketchy, it's basically a captcha to keep down automated bot sign ups, and they link to that document in particular, i assume, because the devs are marxists and figure folks who are vehemently anti-communist would refuse and thus keep down their moderation load.

Join us at lemm.ee. It’s as neutral as can be, the admin is cool, and they leave blocking to the users instead of just defederating outright.

The fact that each instance can have its own rules and culture is f a b. I love that’s one of the criteria. Mander.xyz should have a ‘identify all the creatures from the Triassic’ image captcha.

lemmy was made by communists. if you don't like it go back to reddit.

Censorship still exists in lemmy. I got banned from an instance just because I said some things that weren't aligning with far left ideas. I was one of the active members of that instance (we were very few) on non political communities.

I made a political post and one of the administrators wasn't OK with it and started insulting me and then banned me from the whole instance.

I wonder if it will be somewhat better here.

If you host your own instance, you have complete control over what gets posted. If not, you have to follow your instance's rules.

one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called "The Principles of Communism" which I thought was very odd for a site to do.

That's just basic bot detection, like a captcha. Karl Marx's works are out of copyright, and Lemmy's lead developer is a communist, hence the choice.

it's part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

In general, instances don't expect you to agree with their mods on politics or religion, but the content hosted on that instance would be somewhat biased towards the mods' tastes. So you go from lemmygrad (far-left) to lemmy.ml (centre-left) to lemm.ee (centrist) to shitjustworks (centre-right) to lemmy.world (right-wing). Personally I'd avoid the first and last, but it's up to each person to decide what's right for them.

Because dessalines is legit in competition for the most cringe person on the internet.

Welcome to the Fediverse! Somebody has probably told you this, but I just realized that I forgot to hit "Post" before I went to dinner. Here it is anyways.

When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

The applications and copying of a particular line is a simple form of spam prevention. The fact that the line is from “The Principles of Communism" is probably because the owners of that particular instance (who are also the main developers) are communist. I believe they also run Lemmygrad, which is full on Marxist, and one of the more commonly blocked instances. Lemmy.ml is intended to be a more mainstream instance but like much of the Fedi leans hard left.

I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here

Lemmy is censorship resistant, but not censorship free. There is a difference. Censorship (or moderation, depending on your view point) happens at 3 levels, user, community, and instance. You can't do much if other users find you obnoxious and decide to block you, but if you find the moderation of a community to be over bearing and if your current instance allows, you can create your own community from your current instance and mod it how you see fit within the guidelines of your instance. If you find your instance's moderation to be overbearing, you can create your own instance and moderate it however you see fit. However, you will still be subject to the moderation policies of the communities (and their home instances) that you subscribe to.

In the Fedi you have absolute freedom of speech, but nobody is required to give you a soapbox or megaphone and nobody is required to listen to you.

To their credit, I think the Principles of Communism thing is partially meant as a floodgate, since the devs really do believe in their project and want to avoid over-centralization from everyone defaulting to one instance. They know many people will go "What the hell? No!" and go somewhere else and that's exactly the point. I'd be surprised if they really thought it would get almost anyone to engage with Marxism with the prompt, especially since you can copy the first sentence of the text and not read anything else (and even just reading it is not engaging with it). I think it's more like a little joke.

Also, copying a sentence of your choice to a pamphlet is not a pledge and I think it's silly to view it that way. If it helps, iirc, one of the sentences that appears is "No." and they will accept that as an answer.

But assuming this was "promoting an ideology directly," would you find it less sketchy for an instance to promote ideology indirectly? Because if you aren't directly doing ideology, that just means you are indirectly doing it (sometimes very deliberately). Personally, I appreciate transparency.

most people have answered your questions so i want to chime in with the information that i wish someone had told me when i first joined:

a lot of people came to lemmy from reddit like you and i both did and also mostly for the same reasons. most of them went to lemmy.world because it was the first search result on the big search engines like google & bing. those people have turned lemmy.world into a mini reddit and ended up recreating the same problems that reddit has plus more; hence the bot check that you ran into when you signed up.

the original instances of lemmy all have a strong leftist bent; i think of it like if r/politics; r/anarchy/; r/communism; r/socialism; etc. went off and created another social media platform and then started discussing everything like reddit does, but from this perspective. instances is the name given to individual servers and all those servers combined is nicknamed the lemmyverse, or lemmy, for short.

the fediverse is the nickname given to the pubg protocol that's shared between all the platforms that use it like lemmy, mastadon, kbin, threads, bluesky, etc and that means that the conversations from all of those platforms are shared amongst each other so it's possible to be on lemmy and have a conversation with someone on kbin, for example. i stick with lemmy because it's doesn't have any venture capital investors pushing the admins to enshitify it to maximize profits like has been happening to reddit and bluesky; i've been moving from one social media platform to another because of enshitification like reddit's since the 1990s (before it was called social media) so this last part matters to me a lot.

i started off on lemmy.world like most ex-redditors did and discovered that they've duplicated the censorship thing that reddit likes to do with defederations so i switched to lemmy.ml since it doesn't defederate with anybody due to fact they're the primary instance where lemmy development takes place. the federation is what makes lemmy decentralized and when you defederate; you cut yourself off from the rest of the lemmyverse, but lemmy.world and some of the other instances that got most of the ex-redditors like the star trek instance use it to try cut off content and people from the instances that they don't like and that's their right since it's their instance. lemmy is decentralized so trying to cut out people & content only serves to cut yourself off and that's intention behind the fediverse; to make it so that no power tripping mod or ban happy admin can stop the conversation like they do on reddit.

everything is done by volunteers and donations and, if you don't like one instance; you can move onto any other one and still get a similar experience. i don't like letting other people decide what i can & can't see and who i can & can't talk to so i mostly stick to the instances that don't defederate with anybody like lemmy.ml and i use the block-people and block-communities features when i feel like i need them for myself.

LMAO that's a "new" (to me) requirement, I guess they're full mask off now. They, along with their sister instance lemmygrad, and their cousin spawned from chapo trap house called hexbear, are rabid authoritarian communists (aka tankies) who want to kill people to enforce their ideals "for their own good." They honestly believe that once they take over and kill all political dissidents the state they install to accomplish this violent goal will "wither" on it's own. Clearly, they're insane and can mostly be ignored, unless the topic is entirely apolitical. Also heads up, .ml (and grad, not hexbear) are the instances run by the devs that originally made lemmy, and jerboa (the app) is made by one of them as well.

Most other instances are cool.

Open source is inherently political and you depend on software being developed by communists. We are here to evade corporate censorship, censor reactionaries, spread agitprop, and discuss raising the quality of life of all working people.

Not just tech workers. Everyone.