Squabblr now officially a "free speech" cesspool, admins removed or forced out by owner

Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 310 points –
Post from jayclees | Squabblr - Social Discussions
squabblr.co

So I mean, most of us knew this beforehand and being on the fediverse we probably do not really care, but what was always on the horizon has no happened, the owner of Squabblr finally had enough having to be a decent person and has decided that his site is now "free speech purism", so he gets to continue to insult LGBTQ people like he always does.

Seems from the comments that some other admins disagreed with the decision (so there were some decent people on that site!) and either left or were removed.

Not entirely surprising the whole thing, granted.

(edit)
Also, apologies as this isn't truly reddit news but Squabblr was one of the sites frequently brought up in /r/redditalternatives so I figured this might still be relevant?

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A ton of people flocked there because they think the Fediverse is too confusing, so now they're going to Discuit.

I have accounts on both out of curiosity, but I had a feeling something weird was going to go down on Squabblr. I just got a weird vibe from that place at first. I am not sure about Discuit yet, but it's yet another centralized service people are using because the fediverse is "too confusing"...

Yeah I've literally made accounts in squabbles and lemmy at the same time. At first squabbles was great, but somehow there's something there that I couldn't describe. I continued to go to lemmy but I've stopped going to squabbles for weeks now. And suddenly this!

Sometimes our instinct is spot on and we got to listen to it more often.

The commitment to tweet-like self posts is what made me leave. I don’t like posting an image or article without being able to provide a title.

Way too much drama on there. It's like every week you have to catch up on what happened.

I honestly prefer fediverse remain as that complex open source alt, because it's one of the few filters we have for users here.

I honestly don't believe rapid growth is healthy for any platform, and we've even seen it here with how comments and memes are getting increasingly vitriolic and offensive. Fuck, antivax memes are starting to appear on lemmy.ml's meme community.

I'm starting to think Beehaw had the right idea with vetting users, because there people here who think Lemmy should be another 4chan.

I disagree. There are lots of good people out there who are not technical.

ok but then theh might lose their cool kids club and we wouldn't want to not feel special and smart for... making an account on a website

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How is make an account on an instance, got to all, subscribe to interesting places, hard? It’s almost the exact same formula as Reddit

When the majority of the world has been using centralised platforms that don't have the complexities federated platforms do, it's understandable that there will be people that get confused over why there are several "Lemmy" servers, or why they can't sign into a Lemmy server when they signed up on another, or why when they try to find a Lemmy community on their server they can't see it, but they can in Google.

Somehow email providers have avoided this problem, I think because they are pre-installed on devices as the "Email" app.

Sometimes it's all about laziness, some people are just too lazy to put more effort to learn new things. I felt it too, I wanted the familiar, but the death of 3rd party apps finally pushed me to learn hot to lemmy. And I'm glad that I did.

It's not laziness per se. It about the barrier for entry being too high. If they wanted to enter (as you did) they would find a way (as you have). However most people have other higher priorities and don't really know if they want to enter so they do nothing. If the entry barrier is lowered (maybe by adding helpful pic/vid explaining how it works/where to go, a platform walk-through, people/celebs/influencers talking about their experiences, simple sign up requirements, easy searching, etc.) many more people would easily come in as it's wouldn't be as confusing to join.

You maybe correct. But I think that barrier you are saying is both am advantage and a disadvantage. For the long term it is a disadvantage since it prevents our site from growing. But in the short term it is an advantage in a sense that it helps our currently small insular group form our own identity and prevent our bidding lemmy culture from being drowned out.

In short it keeps the "normies" numbers to an acceptable level.

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We need more topical instances. Nobody found PHPBB's confusing. Let people sign up for an account on the blindness instance, and the cooking instance, and the gaming instance. Eventually they'll discover that they can use one account for everything, and it's just easier to do it that way. But in the meantime they're not confused. We're probably going to market rblind.com that way; a spot for blind folks to network. Eventually they'll discover the federated communities on there own, without us pushing it on them.

Those boards didn't share any information though. People had different usernames often. The fact that all of this federates makes it more confusing. I've already clicked a link, gotten redirected to an instance I don't have an account but looks visually the same and am confused why I got logged out. Luckily I have a password manager that doesn't autofill or that kind of system is going to be a treasure trove of phishing.

Except going to "all" only provides content from other instances that people on your instance are subscribed to. That is not well understood nor well explained. Whereas "all" on reddit is actually "all."

As a counterpoint, "all" on reddit isnt "all" of reddit. Its an algorithmic concoction of things that you, or people like you, have spent large sums of time engaged with. Its designed only to keep you on the site, by any means possible.

It seems direct, but it's actually secretly limiting. The fediverse seems limiting, but you can actually access "all" here.

It doesn’t really matter if it’s from other instances though, you can still see and look at it so who cares where it sits

No, it does matter. You can't see it in all unless others in your instance are subscribed and it's copied the server. You don't see everything from other instances by default. Although there are tools to aid this issue, it's not "easy" to discover smaller communities by browsing all.

It's identical to Reddit. I don't get it either. Federation is completely optional but people act like it's forced upon them.

Federation being optional is the entire problem. It's a pain in the ass to have to use multiple accounts because petty shitlord admins defederate everyone they don't like.

People can’t seem to compute the fact that each Fediverse site is basically like email in reddit/twitter form.

It's much better now, but at the first I gave up because I couldn't figure out how to even sign up due to the rather poor web design. And I'm a programmer.

The first step is choose a server. On reddit you sign up for reddit, on Twitter you sign up for twitter, but on Lemmy you sign up for an instance that functions as a copy of the site that talks to other copies. And the choice of instance does matter because the admins run that instance. Already, the vast majority of normies are out.

It's even easier on kbin since it shares pretty much the same general layout as Reddit.

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Not only is the Fediverse puzzling, but it also struggles to clarify its essence; the majority lack an understanding of its functioning

My only complaint about it right now is that most instances only know about communities that are hosted there or that their users deliberately subscribe to. Which works fine for huge instances like lemmy.world, but small instances that aren't running federation helper bots just don't have much of an All feed, and initiating federation requests to remote communities you heard of through a directory or elsewhere is a confusing process.

"The fediverse" is puzzling, but Lemmy is simple. I find it weird people get so off put by sites just because they allow Federation. Like- are those same users going to quit Threads when it enables Activitypub? Just seems like a really weird place to draw the line.

With name like "Squabbles", I knew it was only a matter of time, lol.

I went there because it was simpler and more like reddit. Once this shit started to brew a few weeks ago I noped right out of there. Lemmy ftw

The people who think making an account on Lemmy.world is "too confusing" but think making an account on Reddit or one of these other random sites is somehow simpler really surprise me.

I get that federation is a new weird concept but it's not like anyone needs to know what it is to sign up somewhere and start posting.

I'm sure it doesn't help that people are complaining that lemmy.world is a huge instance. That only adds to the confusion.

Proponents of Lemmy: "Just join the instance that has the content you like!"

Also proponents of Lemmy: "OMG WHY IS THERE ONE HUGE INSTANCE"

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