How Lemmy's Communist Devs Saved It

Just throwing this out there before I forget
Also keep in mind the context of this is before Reddit's "APIpocalypse"

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There are various reasons Lemmy succeeded as a Reddit alternative where others failed. One of the underappreciated ones, in my opinion, is as follows. Keep in mind these are entirely my observations. I have no scientific evidence or anything to back them up.

I joined a few different Reddit alternatives over the years, observed a few more and gathered the history of a few more. One common thread I noticed among those that gained any amount of traction was: most were overtaken by a far-right userbase. This eventually led to most of their demise.

Which isn't entirely surprising. A lot were billed on ideals of "free speech" which tended to attract the type who thought they were being unfairly censored. Most people who had trouble with mods or got kicked from Reddit, in my experience, were heavily right wing (excluding trolls/spammers). Take that as you will. Anyway, as a result, alternative platforms were built for them and filled by them. They were usually most of the active users in r/RedditAlternatives.

Once they were filled with right-wingers, the platforms tended to be doomed. In some cases their hosting provider, upon realizing the content they were hosting, would kick them out. In other cases the developers/admins upon realizing what they were facilitating, shut it down themselves. Many were never explicitly killed, but once they got an audience like that they tended to stagnate. Any new users coming in would see the front page, and immediately close the tab and never go back again. This happened on lemmy too, a little bit, but not enough to kill it, because...

What Made Lemmy Different

...was that it was explicitly left wing from the start. The devs are communists, as mentioned in the title. Not bad people or anything, but definitely very leftist*. There were no vaunted ideals of free speech, if the admins saw something messed up, it was gone, with your account probably soon to follow. I never had the chance to take part in forums on the "old internet", but from my understanding it was similar to them, where the moderators knew a troll when they saw one, generally didn't take much shit, and the members mostly were fine with it.

This, as you can guess, scared off most right-wingers. I saw plenty of people from r/RedditAlternatives go there and come back complaining about censorship or commies.

This probably saved Lemmy.

It also hurt it a bit. Especially after the tankie migration, there were definitely some people who saw the front page and clicked away. But not as much. Instead of going to the front page and seeing a comic with an extremely racist caricature of a black person, you would maybe see a text post of someone mocking western reporting on the Uyghur genocide. Regardless of your opinions on these, uh, issues, you can understand how one definitely hits quicker and harder than the other. It wasn't enough to stop Lemmy's momentum, fortunately enough. And there were other instances, and open source and federation and whatever... that's a different story.

There was one lemmy instance that ran on ideals of free speech. Aside from the terrible name (wolfballs.com, not I'm not joking), it also got defederated from the main instances pretty fast. Honestly the owner, though definitely right wing, was a pretty chill guy, and he believed in federation and stuff. Kinda unfortunate the instance died, considering people still complain about lack of ideological diversity on Lemmy.

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But yeah, that's how Lemmy's devs, through no fault of their own, probably saved lemmy.

(I know that's a weird statement, considering they built lemmy)

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* from the point of view of many leftists, they're not very far left, and liberals are, in fact, right wing. I'm going with a more average definition here