Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ?
quinacridone@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
This is something that that bothers me… I joined lemmy.ml around 3 years ago as one of the pirate subs on reddit made a backup community there in case they were banned.
Fast forward to the api debacle, I started to use lemmy as a permanent alternative, and made 3 of my favourite art communities- abstract photography, collage and printmaking
It’s always been in the back (and sometimes the front of my mind) whether to move them elsewhere, partly because people commenting on their ‘blanket ban’ of lemmy.ml, and the fact that I sometimes feel that I’m on one of the ‘pariah’ instances.
It’s interesting reading the comments here, especially considering the art communities are laid back, without politics, and haven’t had any issues (so far)…
For me it was a blanket ban that finally caused me to unsubscribe from every ml community. If it wasn’t for that then it might be OK to keep hosting a non-political sub but the censorship over there is so aggressive and widespread that it’s very difficult to avoid.
I would say think about migration because if anything the problem is getting worse over time.
I do agree that art subs in general are among the most politics-free areas of lemmy, (speaking as a moderator of traditional art)
I have mostly refrained from posting political art, even though I do really like a good caricature (I grew up on Spitting Image, and other British satire progs), and also political art is, well… art
But, people come to see the nice pictures and chill out for a bit, which is fair, and it’s good to have that as a community
Although if other people either get banned as a result of saying something about China or Russia etc., or they choose for themselves to defederate somehow, then over time that is an increasing number of people across the Fediverse who cannot enjoy that artwork.
It’s like… what if the Library of Alexandria had made some copies and sent it out to remote places, before being (accidentally?) burned down by Julius Caesar during his civil war?
If that artwork is important to be seen by people everywhere, then why allow it to be held hostage by an admin team that could at any moment add still more things to the unnamed list of topics that are forbidden to be discussed on that instance? China, Russia, Uyghurs, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Taiwan, and… what else will it be tomorrow?
You might even say something that gets taken out of context and be banned from the entire instance yourself. “Killing Uyghurs is not the best work I have seen” - no no, I meant that killing them isn’t happening at all, I was referring to the title of the painting!?
Well, it’s something to consider. I hope I am not coming across here as being too extreme, just trying to offer some thoughts along the lines that you mentioned that you have already started, in case it would be appreciated.:-)
Blaze@feddit.org 3 days ago
Moving communities is always an option.
We moved !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee a while ago, it worked fine, it’s even more active now that it used to be as there is no delay due to LW size
quinacridone@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Yep, it’s something that has occurred to me, I’ve got an idea of which instance and all that, but I’d probably need to speak with the admins. I don’t know whether communities can migrate over posts/comments etc and part of me is reluctant to leave all that behind… BUT, I’ve done it once from scratch, so it’s not impossible