I don't view lemmy as I did voat.

When I saw lemmy my first thought was that I wanted to host my own instance of this once federation works.

I'm already hosting mastodon and synapse instances for the community. I believe strongly in hosting small federated community instances. This hobby costs me about 80USD/mon.

Their first rule would block most of that and seems to make it pretty clear they don’t want to host those communities:

> No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.

Code of conduct links to https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUC...

Their rules are a lot stricter than Reddit’s. I’m not sure how that in practice works with it being federated, but assuming their rules are enforceable and enforced it looks like they’re just not interested in that content.

Some subreddits were banned because other disliked the content. Like watchpeopledie. While the sub was disgusting banning it was for me the last nail in the coffin of social networks which decide what is the best for me. While I still use Reddit I'm looking for an alternative without the built-in censorship.

It's probably not possible in the current universe of the web, at least not without significant attention spent solely on this issue. In general a larger social network has more value if it can help you find people who share each of your interests, e.g. there is a subreddit for all things. There will always be a group of people who are drawn to new tech, but it needs to somehow actually solve a real problem that the old website didn't for most people to try it more than once.

New platforms do solve the "oh no I've been deplatformed from Reddit" problem for... people who've been deplatformed from Reddit, so certainly it has real value for them. If Reddit swings the moderation hammer too hard, that could be certainly become a draw, but as it stands Reddit has actually banned very few communities, considering.

Getting people to use a new website in any significant numbers is really hard, and there aren't that many examples of communities that have managed it in the time the internet has been alive. It's impressive that any have managed to stay relevant for more than a couple years.

heck, how is it going to avoid reddit's toxicity as well ? Some of the echo chambers on Reddit itself today are still very disturbing.

It can work - compare Mastodon to Gab or Parler, for example.

Voat went out of their way to welcome banned communities.

If you find yourself collecting them too, ban them.

Because Lenny has a unique offering besides escaping the current Reddit regime: owning your own data. That’s a completely different motivator.

To me those interested in an alt-reddit are interested because they want an alternative to the echo-chamber that is reddit. Those you mention could be found on any site & just have to be banned.

I believe this is more of a problem for centralized services - federation gives freedom to the user to choose the level of moderation/censorship they want - if you find certain communities distasteful, you can just join servers that block these communities.

I think it is important however to have a strong emphasis on the separation of the servers from the protocol though - no one seems to care that Nazis could use email to have their own mailing lists.

Nothing can prevent terrible people from using an open source project. Meanwhile, Reddit doesn't do much of anything about this problem either. For, example /r/metacanada exists, and white supremacists from there are also moderating /r/canada subbreddit, Reddit hasn't taken any action on that. At least the developers of Lemmy are very clear [1] about their stance regarding nazis, that's more than I can say for Reddit. It's also worth noting that Mastodon has millions of users now, and it clearly isn't attracting the worst people. In fact, I find it's a far healthier and friendlier community than Twitter.

[1] https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/34286

Nothing wrong with communities like that as long as you keep them segregated like reddit does with each of its subreddits.

If those start creeping into your politics, memes, and video game subreddits, then yeah you’ve got a rough problem.

Gab has similar problems. The thing is Reddit is making the definition of objectionable broader and broader. At this point it includes basically anyone with mainstream conservative political views. They have gone (way) too far and people are looking for alternatives anywhere and everywhere where they won't be banned, shadow banned or quarantined. I just got text from a high school friend inviting me to something called Parler. I have no idea if it's worth while but I am happy to see that people are pushing back.