I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ...
As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.
I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.
This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:
Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say?
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance."
The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there's nobody to discuss anything with.
I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
Great list! One thing I notice is wrong though: lemmy.ml is not merely not appearing among the top, most active ones (communities or instances), but I also don't see it anywhere, even in the list of all instances when clicking Show All? So its true popularity is unknown to that list.
Edit: I see both hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, it is only lemmy.ml that does not show up there.
Maybe your instance has defederated from it?
Also I think the activity level is measured as activity from your instance, not globally.
No, my instance (discuss.online) has defederated from lemmygrad.ml but not hexbear.net or lemmy.ml and yet I see the former two but not the latter, so it definitely is something special wrt just it alone.
Also with the URL being to https://lemmyverse.net, I don't see how it would even know which instance is "mine"? e.g. I have an alt on startrek.website, which does not block any of those three instances, and another old one on Kbin, but how would it pick?
I suspect rather that there was a network hiccup or other problem obtaining the activity data. But in any case, it's not like "activity of lemmy.world > activity of lemmy.ml", and rather more that the latter is unknown to that website.
Btw I nominated your discussion to the BestOf community at https://lemmy.world/post/16213730 - since you cannot do that yourself, someone else needs to nominate it for you. I hope that helps spread the word some more bc this is a very valuable discussion that needs to happen imho. Thank you for your efforts to improve things for many people in the Fediverse:-).
Hm, good point, I never noticed. I'm pretty sure they were around a few weeks ago, probably a network hiccup indeed.