Locked.

The article you linked is about Reddit. We aren’t Reddit. If it was drawing direct comparisons between us and Reddit, I’d allow it, but it’s just about Reddit and there are other more Reddit-centric communities where this would be a better fit.

and has at least three contributors, give or take

You can't make a minimum approximate. Does two contributors count? Just for some, but not others? This just gives them more leeway to include bias in the decision to ban someone

There’s a block button for made for just this thing.

Or just visit Lemmy.ml without an account and browse as an anonymous user for an hour, perhaps counting the number of times you see calls for the guillotine and wonder if they will make a distinction between those truly deserving or settle for anyone that they can more readily get their hands on.

I for one had no desire to join the “tankie Lemmy” originally, but came here for Kbin.social, then after it fell apart I realized that I could block more stuff personally like Ernst used to do for us collectively in order to make my experience more similar.

This is about coddling your feelings not what the majority of people feel or what the politics of the majority of people are and it is very telling that you are only focused on policing the behavior of people you perceive as more leftwing than you.

I for one had no desire to join the "tankie Lemmy" originally, but came here for Kbin.social, then after it fell apart I realized that I could block more stuff personally like Ernst used to do for us collectively in order to make my experience more similar.

Most others that have come here seem to not realize that, or just don't want to have to put in that kind of effort. Even when they decry how bad Reddit is. They don't see what you and I see. We realize that some aspects of (corporate) Reddit are unfixable, hence this place is worth something, mainly bc it is the ONLY way to move forward (other than decentralized systems like truly old-school forums). So we put up with whatever pain we need to, bc nothing else is going to work out, in the end.

However, not everyone is willing to do so. Another very worthwhile comment in that post has a very neat summary of what I extremely often see across many subs whenever I've looked: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1wavhh8/comment/p8mqgrm (I don't go there like daily, but I do specifically enjoy reading about what people say about us here, perhaps monthly, or whenever a post here references the subject, so I guess that qualifies as "often").

Perhaps I am summarizing incorrectly, but I am talking about comments such as this one at https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuest

There is a wide range of reactions there and given the current state of reddit why should I believe these are all human responses?

Ironically I am not the one who downvoted your comment here. People on both Reddit and the Threadiverse overall seem more negatively predisposed these days than say, prior to 2015, which is when people (in that exact Reddit post, in the comment section) are saying turned all political.

And yes, I imagine that from that perspective, of a more or less average Reddit user - even one who was here for two years - is going to be more right leaning on the spectrum than let's say a tankie or anarchist.

Remember that we who use (Arch?) Linux btw are more tolerant to needing to fiddle with the controls on something in order to tune it towards our liking - in this case figuring out what people, and in particular from what instance, to block, so that we can stand to visit this place on a daily basis.

YOU, who are capable and tolerant enough to figure out how to do so, do not represent the mindset of an average Redditor (thankfully! or I would not be enjoying talking with you here!:-). THEY are... um... different. And they (report that they) do not feel welcomed when they visit here.

Student projects such as note-taking apps and PDF viewers

Are PDF viewers a common student project? I always assumed the file standard must be a labyrinthine mess given all the features they've crammed into it over the years. Or is there some popular library that takes 99% of the work out of it?

This is a belief that is not necessarily grounded in reality.

Besides, there are many versions of people, if this one invites in the best versions of people that is fine by me but also no one controls this, the burden is on people to realize they need to leave corporate social media.

If we want others to come here - and there's a good most likely >50% here who do NOT want that, mind you! - then we would have to entice them to do so, which practically speaking I simply do not see happening. e.g. if Lemmy's instance block tool would actually function to "block" all the content from an "instance" then yeah that would be just great. Or if Dessalines would allow donations to the codebase separately from the maintenance costs of specifically Lemmy.ml. Or if Rimu would listen to community feedback instead of... whatever the opposite of that is. And so on, ad nauseum.

YOU may want people to come here. However, keeping in mind that they would primarily be right-wing or at most centrist Christians from the USA, or centrist Muslims from the UK, etc., note that others here are the polar opposite of welcoming to such an influx of users.

So they stay there. Or go to Bluesky. It's their choice. Again, if we want to make coming here more of a viable option, then we would need to put in some actual effort into making this a more receptive place to be for them.

People picking Bluesky over Mastodon when Mastodon already existed and was easily functional enough for people to choose as an alternative is a perfect example of what you are saying but also... Bluesky is a vaporwave brand that will eventually strangle itself into obscurity in the pursuit of monetization and Mastodon will keep chugging along... so people will have many many chances to learn why ActivityPub and the Fediverse are the future, and those learning opportunities will only start coming quicker and quicker.

For one, they could make a new sub, which people have been doing for like a decade, long before Lemmy was even thought of. Most of us know of at least one sub that got its start this way, before we had ever heard of it (or rather, we used to, before we collectively chose to forget all that!:-P).

For another, people can migrate off of Reddit entirely. There are multiple options to choose from, the top ones being Discord, Bluesky, even X, and as always Facebook, Insta, Tiktok, YouTube, etc.

All of these are exceedingly poor choices for various reasons or another... however, if history shows us anything, it is that people will do ANYTHING other than come to the Fediverse. Just read pretty much any Reddit post discussing Lemmy and you will see words like "leftist trolls", "extremists", "toxic AF".

Also remember that even Reddit offers more freedoms in some ways than Lemmy. Examples include the ability to ask questions of the mod team via modmail without having to individually DM each (most often inactivated) account in turn, the ability to continue conversations begun on a post that is later removed by a mod from the sub's feed (Lemmy instead gaslights you, pretending that it never existed and you are crazy for attempting to return to it), and the ability to not continually receive notifications via DMs or comment replies from toxic trolls (ahem hexbear ahem lemmygrad ahem, cough), without having to individually used-block each account one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one, and truly almost infinitely since they keep spinning up alts all the time.

If we offered a VIABLE alternative, then perhaps they would come here. But when faced with man vs. bear, they chose The Man (we here are the bear, I am sadly coming to realize).