Is this Yet Another Lemmy Instance due to Reddit mass migration?

Yes, we have to admit it. But we have been self-host hobbyists for while and we decided to give Lemmy a try after using the main instance for a while. Because of the DIY nature of Lemmy, and small instances overall, we’d like to let you know what to expect if you consider signing up.

Philosophy

Federation is good, but having your user data being controlled by someone else isn’t. Bigger instances have a lot of content, but leaving your data there means you can’t control what happens to it. We didn’t make Whiskers to play God, we made this to reduce dependency on others, and in turn also reduce load on those instances.

Therefore, the intention is to keep Whiskers small, userbase-wise and community-wise. We index what we want to see at the moment, so content may be skewed, and we haven’t banned anything, with the exception of disabling NSFW content, because moderation is hard already, no need to make it harder.

On banning non-NSFW content or activity, we hope to not have to do such a thing. But this isn’t a neutral community by any means (no platform is bias-free), so take a look at what’s already being indexed to make a judgement. We prefer like-minded individuals with similar interests for fruitful discussions, and any non-political topics not found here yet is also welcome too. Just be mindful we will never tolerate racism and bigotry.

Okay, so should I make an account here?

It depends. We pay out of our own pockets, and our server is minimally equipped for busy traffic. However, you can turn in a registration application, and we’ll consider it. Rule of thumb is that you must be able to trust us with your data, and be ready to migrate if our server goes offline (although we have no intention of doing so as we use Whiskers ourselves to interact with the federation).

Also, there is no email verification on this instance, and we won’t enable it. On principal, that is giving away too much personal information. We simply don’t want to handle that.

Plans

Some communities might be created if we don’t find an existing one already, but feel free to discuss if you want to host one here.

Focus for future communities

Overlapping communities are unnecessary, but to spell out what areas we care about to keep the focus narrow: a community for a self-hosted service, or a video game. Other general topics include open-source software, Linux, security, digital privacy, and the likes. None of these are niche on Lemmy, but if something comes up that needs an instance to host it, we’re willing to.

Beyond that, there can also be elements of lifestyle, philosophy, science and politics.