https://lemmon.zerobytes.monster/index

it's not just you, the stats bear it out. LW has the worst uptime of any major instance. 92% so far this month according to their own monitoring and worse on bad days. They see a lot of load and have not scaled up enough to resolve it, nor have they restricted user signups at all to spread out new users across the lemmyverse. Seems like a very growth oriented mindset, which I don't love to see spreading to the fediverse.

it does basically boil down to what other people have said but I'll elaborate.

The reasons are political disagreements from the admins of lemmy.world, and them taking the site's zealous left-wing opinions and shitposting culture as prima-facie evidence that hexbear users cannot be trusted not to break lemmy.world rules (unstated which rules) by pushing "their beliefs and ideology". It almost sounds reasonable until you think about it like, at all. It's an explicitly political instance (though honestly >50% of the posting is just news of the day and banter), so of course the users will by and large have those political opinions and post them. As long as they do so within the rules of lemmy.world I don't see the issue personally.

It's fairly big relative to other lemmy instances because it's been around for over 3 years, and it was a lifeboat site for people that frequented r/chapotraphouse before it was banned from reddit (which was a relatively huge sub).

Over the past year or so they worked to switch from a heavily modified fork of lemmy back to a more modern upstream version of lemmy, mostly by redeveloping and contributing features that were missing, like custom emojis, to upstream lemmy. So now there's more attention being paid since it is now using a federation-compatible version of lemmy and intends to actually federate with a limited subset of the lemmyverse

guessing this doesn't include hexbear.net because they aren't federated yet but they have 270k posts and 3.6 million comments on their own, mostly well before the start of this graph, so it ought to start at more like 500k

But I'm so glad to see lemmy taking off properly, not just used for some niches. FOSS internet infrastructure that is accessible to end users is so important, it safeguards a lot of important freedoms, etc.

I mean they can't and don't try to stop you from lying, or even setting it to "none/use name". All it does in reality is filter out transphobes who get triggered by the requirement, and provide a practical way of knowing what to call someone, rather than the reddit approach of always defaulting to "he" (or maybe they in some more liberal subs)

The original phrasing was flawed, yes, but blahaj.zone isn't ideologically neutral.

They are a queer instance, but they aren't just a queer instance, are they? They don't merely accept anyone who is queer (queer racists, or TERF lesbians, for example, wouldn't be welcome), nor do they ban people who aren't queer at all. So the dividing line is ideological.

The line is more like: support for queer rights. They even specifically outline a philosophy of inclusion and empathy in their sidebar. But we wouldn't ban them for trying to spread their ideology

The majority of the chat is about liberation.

honestly the majority is probably news of the day and personal chit chat in the megathreads. But after that you've got a lot of posts about liberation too

tbf all costs (besides probably labor, which isn't insignificant, but harder to quantify from the outside) are paid by donations, so it isn't just the kindness of their hearts opening their servers to us. They also chose to present their server as a general purpose one where everyone is welcome (within reason)

Yeah, there's an "algorithm" here but rather than a black box of trade secrets and manipulation it's entirely open source, and mathematically simple.

mastodon idk, it probably has a similar algo for its Explore page but I think the user feed is just made up of posts from people you follow in chrono order.

Well if you're going to be so specific as to say "genzedong-style", maybe pay attention to the "zedong" part? Presumably they believe in socialism-with-chinese-characteristics as a path towards communism.

Putin idk, in my experience they usually only support russia insofar as it undermines the hegemony of the United States, whose consolidated power over global affairs has been a major blocker of left wing movements worldwide since ww2. But there are some who seem to take it more seriously than that and either are too caught up in the memes or legitimately don't understand that modern russia is a capitalist hellscape.

They're literally financed by the EU, via NLnet grants. They aren't CCP agents, they're just communists, who tend to have a more nuanced view of china because they've actually read the history and theory of the chinese state.

There are tons of commies who have major issues with modern china, though idk if the lemmy devs are in that camp or totally onboard with dengism/modern chinese policy, but typically their (communists') issues aren't as surface level as "but tiananmen square! uyghur genocide!". because they see those issues as being 99% used as western propaganda and heavily distorted.

It has an impact. If threads algorithm heavily promotes something inflammatory, and that thing gets a bunch of upvotes from threads users, said post will dominate our feeds too.