this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2022
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Asklemmy
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I don't think the majority joined this server for its leftism. People joined because it's called "lemmy.ml" and seems to be official/ "the right one". I believe many people actually get scared away from lemmy when their feed suddenly gets filled with communism. Who had the glorious idea to build a decentralized network but at the same time give its own server the name of the network ??
I don't have any solid data to back up my 'significant portion' comment above, other than the fact that I see a lot of active users on lemmy.ml who seem content with the leftist vibe on the server. Not a very good basis for making such a broad statement. Whoops!
It'd be interesting to dig deeper into the issue through polling or something similar, but this type of self-sorting is probably hard to capture. People who read the description and choose not to join aren't around to vote in a poll and neither are people who get scared away by what they see. For other 'apps', it'd be possible to catch some data from the second category of people by exit-polling people who choose to delete their accounts.
Your question was probably rhetorical, but I went ahead and did a search since I didn't know the background. From the AMA that I found it looks like two people developed Lemmy from scratch and their only financing was obtained through donations. I don't blame them if they wanted to call dibs on the most obvious server name and make ground rules for it that appealed to them.
I 100% joined this instance because it's left-wing (and seemed less tankie than the other left-wing instances)
The whole point of the fediverse is that there is no "right" or "default" server.
If you think "Lemmy.ml" is misleading people into thinking that the server is official, what about "Lemmy.ca"? Or "Lemmy.pt"? There are plenty of instances that follow the same format. Same with mastodon.social, run by the devs, and the countless other mastodon.* domains.