On the other hand, it has some weirdly opinionated features:
Hiding downvoted comments (mob rule)
Marking people with many downvotes as "low reputation". I get it, getting many downvotes is a bad sign but I don't think the software should try to make a ruling here, I think human moderators should look at the whole picture. It doesn't make you a bad person that people disagree with you.
Communities organized into "topics" - I'm not certain if these groupings are decided by the dev or the admin? Either way I find it a bit problematic.
Marking certain communities as "low effort" and not counting "reputation" for those. I don't feel like the software should be making this kind of value judgement.
Hmm okay. I do think we have something similar here where there might be meetings that we call "citizen meetings" where anyone is invited to come and hear about a current political topic. It's mostly informative and people can ask questions and stuff, not related to campaigning or elections mostly I would say. So yea I don't think that is too weird honestly.
Well the map includes Canada, US, UK and India, and some african territories that I imagine may have been UK colonies at one point (I could be wrong), hence english-speaking world.
I think those are particular examples but if you look at most of the EU, I think there are more political choices than just 2. Here in Denmark there's sometimes a discussion that there are too many political parties. We currently have like 12?
The weirdest thing, the thing that I have the hardest time understanding, is how many people vote for Trump. There was just a survey here in Denmark asking how many would vote for Trump. It was 8%. That number I still find a bit high but I can understand it a little bit. 8% of people voting for something very harmful seems almost inevitable I guess. Some people just aren't educated or informed enough.
But the fact that close to 50% of americans choose to vote for Trump, and that in some states, it is even more than 50% - that I don't think I will ever understand. That is madness.
most of the cost of [anything] goes to publishers, not the creators
My edit obviously. It does feel like that though. I pay Netflix, not the people making the movie. For games it is at least a bit better - I pay Valve (Steam) and the publisher but at least some of it goes directly to the devs. But it could be better still I suppose. But I'd honestly be okay if we got a Steam-like platform for series and movies where I could buy the ones I want without any subscriptions.
Uh, how? I mean you'd need to make it legal I feel like. But that's never going to happen and I honestly don't think that's fair either. If piracy is legal, how would content creators actually be paid?
I get the sentiment but this is not really an option most of the time if you want to stick with lawful methods. For instance, I cannot watch most movies or TV series these days without a subscription to some service.
No it doesn't? There is only one Lemmy implementation. There are some similar alternatives like PieFed and Mbin but those are separate implementations and are not in any way related to Lemmy, aside from using the same ActivityPub extensions.
There is really no such thing as a "platform type" - it's all ActvityPub under the hood.
A big one is "How does an instance change their underlying implementation?". Like how could a lemmy instance decide to migrate to become a Mastodon instance?
Currently that's just not possible, but it seems important for the long term survival of an instance. It seems naive to think that an instance will stay the same implementation forever. But ActivityPub basically makes this impossible.
As long as the reason for the ban says that it was personally requested, then I don't see why it would be a bad thing. Obviously being banned from another instance for legitimate reasons is a cause for concern and could lead to trouble in your own instance, but if it is clear that it was only because you requested it yourself, then it's fine.
On the other hand, it has some weirdly opinionated features: