With Reddit’s encroaching IPO and their poorly planned API changes, we need a place to keep up with privacy topics that isn’t tied to an anti-privacy, centralized sinking ship site.
Our forum running Discourse has been a great place to discuss website changes and answer questions, but it doesn’t quite provide the same experience as Reddit does for things like sharing news, so we’re trying something new:
[email protected] is our new ActivityPub-enabled community for sharing links and other information from the privacy and security realm. Welcome!
We’re going to be trying out posting to this community for a few months to decide if we want this to replace or coexist with the r/privacyguides subreddit, so we’ll see how it goes. If you want this to succeed, stay active! Our mission is to become the most inviting and friendly place to discuss privacy and security on the fediverse 😎
How do I join the Privacy Guides community on Lemmy?
You can join a few different ways:
- On Kbin.social, a Lemmy alternative with a more Reddit-like UI and instant registrations. I didn’t like Kbin from a hosting perspective because of some missing features, but for just browsing communities and joining ours it’s a great option: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]
- On Lemmy.one, this is the server which hosts the Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, and also the server that I admin myself. You are welcome to create an account, but it might take up to 24 hours for your account to be approved.
- On another Lemmy instance: You can join the community by entering
!privacyguides@lemmy.onein the search box on your instance. There are plenty of servers you could join, or you could host your own relatively easily if you’re familiar with self-hosting. - On another ActivityPub instance: You can also probably join by entering
@privacyguides@lemmy.oneor https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides in the search box of the ActivityPub software you use, although Mastodon does not seem to pull in posts from Lemmy communities properly in my limited testing, so YMMV.
Verification post: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13x7oe3/who_wants_to_try_out_lemmy_privacyguideslemmyone/
I mentioned Lemmy on Mastodon and some people noted some controversy surrounding the “main” instances. I don’t know exactly what concerned people, but I definitely think that more bigger, possibly saner instances like beehaw.org and—hopefully—now lemmy.one can make a better first impression on users.
Also, federation with non-Lemmy platforms seems to be much better than it was last time I looked at this place 6-12 months or so ago.
One of, if not the most active lemmy instance is a Marxist, pro-Russian war, pro-CCP, pro-North Korea community. When I signed up on lemmy.ml a while back, it was almost all you saw.
The problem with reddit alternatives is that, until now, the only people leaving reddit were the ones kicked off. They needed new homes and they found them in unmoderated communities they could host themselves, like lemmy.
Some of us have been waiting for some time for more “average” redditors to make the move, so this exodus is like Christmas coming early.
Know if there’s any way to block entire servers when they’re as toxic and low-quality as the one you mentioned? So far it seems like the only way is to browse ‘all communities’ and get rid of them one by one
An instance can block federation with another instance (an instance admin must do this on the instance server), but for you as a user of an instance, you cannot block the whole server. What I did is exactly what you describe. This way, I have only the content I am interested in my post feed. It takes a while, but it serves the purpose.