The linked post shows how most non-tech people’s understanding of email is very very different from most of the people here.

  • OpenStars@piefed.social
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    19 days ago

    I just checked, it is local indeed

    How very interesting… beyond lemmy.cafe then, this is probably how Lemmy implements “local-only” in general, restricting access purely to those who have accounts on that instance. I would have hoped for a more nuanced take than simply seeing an error screen for me who lacks that, but it is what it is.

    The .ca domain and the logo could deter non Canadians by giving the impression that the instance is geared towards Canadians

    Yeah, I get that and thought the same, but otoh at least it is a straightforward and easy-to-understand bias, explicitly stated outright (unlike e.g. “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”). If we were to follow that logic though, the rather high predominance of the German language over and above the English one, the latter of which in particular often is left out, is also quite off-putting to me. e.g. see this page: https://feddit.org/c/fediverse, which does not have a German explanation first and then an English one, but instead offers purely a German one and then… that’s it, it stops there. English-speaking people are not only after-thoughts, but often not thought of at all. Which to be clear is fine btw - it’s their server and they can do as they please with it - but I would not want to use it as the front face for all for all of Lemmy, for that reason, especially if that is a kind of signal that they are sending that similarly to lemmy.ca others are “welcomed” but they aren’t the primary focus. And then the default sort being set to Local rather than All just compounds the issue all the more - other instances are again an after-thought, rather than the primary focus.

    In contrast, “Canadian” is at least North American, but more importantly so long as it is using English rather than French, lemmy.ca is not as off-putting as feddit.org is, imho. Also, after the elections, A LOT of more liberal/less conservative (including “centrist”) minded people I bet are going to be okay with a Canadian social media rather than a “murica” one.

    Especially when the choices are so limited.

    • lemmy.sdf.org has only a single admin
    • beehaw.org has very restrictive moderation practices, and they do not want a wider audience increasing their workload further
    • Lemmy.today does not defederate from… anything it would seem (and I confirmed that I can access ChapoTrapHouse from it, so it is not merely missing a Blocked tab in its instances list, it’s real)
    • startrek.website is themed and consistently has many federation issues, probably stemming from hardware ones (its uptime is not ideal)
    • ttrpg.network similarly and significantly worse reported uptime
    • discuss.online is quite nice actually, and I still use it as my primary “Lemmy” instance, though it only has 2 admins, who were balancing running it and trying to develop Sublinks, though it does not defederate from hexbear and that’s a dealbreaker right there (imho), much less lemmy.ml
    • and then everything else after that, sorted by MAU and restricting country=United States on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, is at least half as small as lemmy.cafe

    I think we should keep Discuss.Online in the back of our heads moving forwards - although otoh it might become an unstable/experimental instance if it were to suddenly shift over to use Sublinks ahead of any other Lemmy instance. Otherwise, the only advantage of e.g. lemmy.ca or feddit.org is that they both defederate from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, which lemm.ee has a firm resistance to ever doing.

    It looks like you have an account at lemmy.ca - did you like it? It seems to offer roughly the same uptime as feddit.org.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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      19 days ago

      Discuss.Online

      They don’t block hexbear: https://discuss.online/instances

      One other aspect against recommending lemmy.ca as the one recommended instance is that some Canadian users would prefer the instance to stay local: https://lemmy.ca/post/23600231

      Which makes complete sense to be honest, speaking English does not mean that any English speaking user should come to their server while it’s specifically country-named and focused.

      • OpenStars@piefed.social
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        19 days ago

        If you aren’t too annoyed at a much too long comment, here is part 2 of 2.

        I get that you are frustrated with lemmy.cafe, and I whole-heartedly concur that it is for good reasons, but in case it helps, I do think that, based solely on what you’ve told me here and what I can see, CA might be a significantly better fit to Americans than FO would be. Not that either would be horrible ofc:-), I’m just talking about absolutely minimizing any potential friction.

        Though DO would be so much more amazingly a perfect fit, and now that I’ve found that previous post, I do strongly think that it will happen (even if lemmy.ml is too much to hope for, though neither FO nor CA defed from it anyway). So if I were you I would use CA for now, but then be ready to switch to suggesting DO very soon? :-D And I hope that I’m helping by saying all of this, rather than coming on too strong like I’m trying to tell you what to do? Rather, I’m trying to emphasize that it is my strong recommendation, as a non-German-speaking American myself perhaps that gives me insight.:-)

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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          19 days ago

          Thank you for that post on Discuss.online, let’s see what the admins say.

          Between feddit.org and lemmy.ca, both have their issues indeed. Let’s hope Discuss.online can become “the one”, but it would be a bit ironic to recommend the one instance managed by people who created an alternative to Lemmy

          • OpenStars@piefed.social
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            19 days ago

            I am more fearful that as the USA grows more towards fascism that any USA-based instance may become less stable. e.g. if Project 2025 really does outlaw porn, can all of Lemmy be labelled as “porn” due to the presence of a NSFW post or two, and thereby be taken down? Perhaps people wanting to be admins can volunteer their time to help out other instances across the world without owning any instances within the USA borders? Though the need to have spaces where left-leaning people can communicate with one another will grow all the more as a result.

            • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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              18 days ago

              To be, the issue was never that no major instance was USA-based, location of the servers doesn’t mean much nowadays. It was more about the fact that no large instance was geared towards USA citizens (a la Lemmy.ca, as we discussed), with a message such as “a USA instance, for USA citizens, but everyone is welcome”. That hypothetical server being hosted in Canada or Europe wouldn’t have that much of an impact, it was more to be able to have politics, finance, news discussions related to the USA in one place

              • OpenStars@piefed.social
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                18 days ago

                Oh yes, totally agreed there, I just presumed that such would most naturally arise from inside the USA itself. Then again, isn’t feddit.uk based in Germany? All it would take would be for someone to start it up, and begin attracting new users to it - though neither of those are small tasks, even if it could share hardware with another instance, such as feddit.uk? So if Discuss.Online were to step up instead, that does seem wonderful news!:-D