TL;DR: Please search and subscribe to !homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org on your instance to cache it on your instance so we can get visibility. We’re moving to our own hosting. Thanks for everything Ruud!
I’m excited to announce some big changes for our Vegan Home Cooks. As many of you know, Lemmy has been our platform of choice and we are hosted on the largest Lemmy instance lemmy.world. However, it’s time for us to evolve and move to our own instance. Let me explain why.
Lemmy.world, while a significant player in the Lemmy universe, has diverged in its vision and management from what we seek in a platform. The admins there have different political and operational views that don’t align with our goals. This is no slight against them; it’s just a matter of different paths.
It’s important to recognize that Lemmy is, at its heart, a passion project. Developed by talented individuals driven by their ideals rather than corporate goals, it operates on a scale that’s more hobbyist than mass-market. This has its charms, but it also means that development isn’t as rapid as one might expect in a more commercial environment.
The thing is, this approach works for many in the Lemmy community. The developers, supported by donations, have been content with this pace and scale. Even major instances have been okay with this grassroots, community-oriented approach. For a platform born out of a communal ethos rather than a corporate one, this isn’t surprising.
However, things started shifting when Reddit made some API changes. Suddenly, Lemmy was thrust into the spotlight as a potential drop-in replacement for Reddit. This influx of users, many with expectations shaped by the slick efficiency of corporate tech, put an unprecedented strain on the platform and its developers. Imagine, a small, community-funded team suddenly dealing with the demands of 50,000 new users. It was a clash of cultures and expectations.
Lemmy.world stepped up during this influx. Run by volunteers, they took a more corporate approach to manage the surge. Their rapid growth brought them under the spotlight, attracting both hackers who exposed major flaws and users who demanded rapid scaling and development.
This brings us to the crux of the matter. There’s a growing rift between the Lemmy developers and the team at lemmy.world. The developers, whose political views differ significantly from many in the Western tech sphere, run lemmy.ml with a distinct set of principles. The arrival of a large number of new users, many with different viewpoints, led to tensions and even bans.
This situation has led to a split within the community. A group of developers, frustrated with the direction and pace of Lemmy, are creating Sublinks – a Lemmy-compatible platform. Their plan? To eventually replace Lemmy, particularly on large instances like lemmy.world, effectively outmoding the original platform.
So, where does this leave us? We’ve been observing these developments and have concluded that the best way forward for our community is to establish our own Lemmy instance. This move will allow us to build a space that aligns with our values and needs, free from the external pressures and conflicts affecting the larger Lemmy ecosystem.
This is a big step, but it’s one that opens up exciting opportunities. We’ll have more control over our platform’s direction and be able to create an environment that truly reflects our community’s spirit and needs. Please search and subscribe to !homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org on your instance to cache it on your instance so we can get visibility. We’re moving to our own hosting. Thanks for everything @ruud@lemmy.world, you and your team have been a gracious host.
100% behind this decision. What plans do you have for the instance in terms of communities?
I still miss the r/shittyveganfoodporn subreddit. Maybe we’ll have to establish one there.
I don’t like calling anything porn personally but this is a pet peeve, maybe just shittyveganfoodpics
Fair enough. Or even just ShittyVeganFood.
Not sure if you’re familiar with the subreddit, but there was definitely a little bit of overlap between it and VHC. (No offence intended ;) It was mostly extra-low effort meals sometimes falling into meme territory. It was kinda the diametric opposite of VeganFoodPorn, with VHC somewhere in the between the two. Basically anything people were too embarrassed or insecure about to post here. Or if they wanted to meme about eating a block of tofu straight with a splash of sriracha.
To be honest I do find it kind of offensive calling peoples food shitty (not taking offense from you dw. just explaining my thought process). This community is just to showcase what real vegans eat and to celebrate it and show non-vegans and struggling vegans what real food looks like and that it doesn’t have to be “gourmet” and take a long time. It really isn’t shitty and I am frankly tired of the reddit tier bullshit. Bigger picture is also carnists have no idea what we even eat or what real food is.
The biggest problem with veganism is recidivism so this is really a showcase for a discord server of friends with a ephemeral community to ask questions with and share something we have to do every day. It isn’t about “porn” or visual fluff to look at and no one should be insecure about posting anything here as I think. Further, I’m of the opinion that instagram and instagramability is toxic to peoples mind and on the other hand the really beautiful food-blogger tier photos are designed to sell you something not teach.
Again, I know where you are coming from and I appreciate you taking the time to comment and participate. I know when I write out thoughts people get super duper mad and think that I am mad (I’m not I’m bored at work lol) but this is something I thought a lot about and even wrote about in the sidebar here.
I’m not against setting up a vegan food meme community in the big picture but calling things porn makes me want to vomit lol. I hate reddit.
Oh, I totally get where you’re coming from. VFP ended up being mostly influencers trying to drive traffic to their website, as did most of the non-adult-themed “Porn” subreddits. And honestly their names were kinda apt, as they did often have a somewhat exploitative vibe.
SVFP, on the other hand, was pretty tongue in cheek, and very much the opposite of that. A lot of it was depressed people sharing their self described “shitty” struggle meals, certainly not ragging on other people’s food. (Although I suppose there were the occasional “I was at a conference and the vegan option was a piece of toast” type posts.)
I’m personally a bit of a perfectionist at times, and having a place that specifically celebrated mediocrity was very cozy and encouraging when I’d worry that my food is too boring or not good enough. If I feel my food is shitty, regardless if I should or not, it’s nice to have a home for it.
In any case, I understand why the name might raise some eyebrows, so I’d be more than happy to drop that.
I’m not seeing all the comments yet on the new community, just the posts, federation is weird!
My understanding of the architecture is that we should keep it simple and basically have a 1:1 relationship for instance to communities so that each instance would host a community then there would be larger “identity” instances with user accounts that would access all the federated communities. This would build a lot of resilience into the network so that if any community instance goes down, its cached on the identity instances and not require them to be online all the time and the hardening would need to be on the identity instances. This is I think never going to happen, so I probably will host a few more communities on my new site
Hey, congratulations! That’s a big step.
Did you guys consider slrpnk.net? Seems like it might be a better fit than lemmy.world . My main concern would be getting defederated by admins with anti-vegan sentiment if you’re alone on your own platform. Of course, ethically, there’s not a 1:1 match between veganism and the solarpunk movement, but it does still seem to fit fairly well.
(I suppose if that were to happen, it’d be a good indicator for any vegans to abandon ship, anyways.)
Otherwise, sounds great! Look forward to see what y’all are cooking there!
I don’t want to make a lateral move to an instance managed by someone else again
Commenting mostly to check again later if this community is visible to the lemmy.blahaj.zone instance.
Thanks for the quality posts and good content!
There’s a growing rift between the Lemmy developers and the team at lemmy.world. The developers, whose political views differ significantly from many in the Western tech sphere, run lemmy.ml with a distinct set of principles. The arrival of a large number of new users, many with different viewpoints, led to tensions and even bans.
What are the different viewpoints, or if you don’t want to say, is there somewhere that these differences are explained? Just curious.
I’ve subscribed to the new community on the new instance - thanks for the heads up!
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Yeah, the Left is dead in America. Most people here don’t understand basics about politics or history, and the language almost feels intentionally manipulated to prevent understanding. “Liberal” only means “the left” to most people, and the idea that liberal could mean anything else is suspicious and considered wrong. The idea that “conservatives” are also under the banner of liberalism is also not commonly understood here.
Anyway, interesting. Thanks for the articles!
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Yes, I’m also a “left of liberal” person, and also not a tankie (not a “Marxist-Leninist”, Maoist, etc.).
Generally I like labels like “libertarian socialist”, or what Lenin would have pejoratively called “left communist”. I find inspiration in Chomsky, Bookchin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, etc.
In the U.S. I get the sense that most vegans are liberals (in the American sense of generic social liberalism, rather than the broader global sense of seething reactionary capitalist, though they are often more similar than not), but it’s not uncommon to find a consistent radical niche among vegans in the U.S. (sorta like in the punk subculture, though less so with vegans).
Chomsky isn’t far from a “tankie” given his support for Putin’s narrative regarding the invasion of Ukraine.
Sorry, I haven’t heard about this; do you have a source where I could follow-up?
Generally I think of “tankie” as a pejorative for those supporting the Soviet Union in their authoritarianism (literally supporting the Soviet tanks that crushed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution). “Authoritarian” Marxism is rather broad, so maybe I would feel a Maoist, Leninist, or Trotskyist could be a tankie depending on how they relate to those views.
It is strange to me that tankies stan for Putin, considering Russia is no longer even pretending to be Marxist.
I have seen Chomsky provide some pretty bad arguments on various issues, and I don’t entirely agree with him on everything. I have noticed Chomsky consistently takes an antagonistic position against the U.S. and the West that I broadly agree with, and it’s a complicated position to take because in global conflict there is a notion that there are two sides and one of them is good and the other bad. To go against the U.S. is often to appear to be supporting the “wrong” side. In some interviews during the pandemic Chomsky condemned the U.S. and the West for hoarding vaccines and praised China for working to provide vaccines for the countries in the Periphery.
There is something to be said about Putin responding to U.S. violations of previous agreements and needless antagonizing of Russia that doesn’t require we agree fully with Putin’s narrative. This isn’t just a tankie position, as it is a position I have heard articulated in peace conferences by professional philosophers who were clearly critical of the Ukraine invasion but still wished to contextualize the conflict in the broader post Cold War world where the U.S. had a chance to sustain peace but choose needless provocation anyway. It seems unfair to not to call out the U.S. for those provocations, and the predictable resulting conflicts, but that’s not the same as saying Putin is justified or that his narrative is worth supporting.
I also admit I just have not done the kind of reading on the situation to be able to properly evaluate or defend these kinds of claims, so I apologize for not being able to speak with any real substance on the issue. I know it’s an important conflict, but a lot has been going on with me personally and there is only so much space I can dedicate to education, especially education on difficult topics such as war.
Either way, when I say Chomsky is an influence, I mean this broadly and not specifically that I endorse all of his viewpoints.
Chomsky has spoken against the gay rights movement as creating too much division among the working class, for example, while my life personally has been deeply impacted by the gay rights movement and I think his evaluation might be a bit off. I can be sympathetic to the point he makes, but I think he is too quick to dismiss the significance of these social movements.
I am an ethical vegan and Chomsky has responded to questions about ethical veganism with fallacious whataboutism reasoning, essentially arguing it’s not a cause worth engaging in critical consumerism and boycotts over because there are larger and more pressing issues. I used to be caught in that whataboutism thinking myself, but what I eventually realized is that being a vegan for me did not take away from any other cause or purpose, and was in most cases not even an inconvenience, and is something that increases enjoyment and health in my life as well as being a minimally better choice ethically. Maybe it’s not that way for everyone, since I already cooked most of my meals, but I can say being a vegan seemed most impossible right before becoming a vegan. After a month or two I realized veganism wasn’t much of a sacrifice at all, but to the contrary resulted in a kind of renaissance in my cooking (translating to more enjoyable meals, and much better health).
Authoritarianism is what it is no matter the label, so that’s what I meant by comparing him to the tankies. Putin’s views often revolve around the idea of the greatness of the Soviet Union, which also explains his intent to rebuild it by force. Chomsky’s position on Ukraine is easy to find with a simple search for “Chomsky Ukraine”. Personally, I like this response to his talking points which echo Putin’s.
As noted there, the agreements you mentioned are essentially made up. A dictator like him doesn’t need to be triggered to act. Look up the role of the Russian FSB in the 1999 apartment bombings that helped his rise to power, shortly followed by his hostile takeover of the independent media station NTV. Another highlight of those years was the inaction and censorship related to the Kursk disaster, clearly showing that from the very beginning, Putin cared only about power, not the people. We can go on and talk about the 2002 hostage crisis in Moscow, the 2005 and 2006 killings of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya and others to no end, but let’s just focus on the first year. Would you argue that in the first year of Putin’s presidency or even before it, the US managed to somehow wrong him and turn him into a dictator? That would be wild, especially given that Yeltsin reportedly picked Putin as his successor specifically over his work in the KGB in order to protect himself and his family. Then if you really want to attribute any of it to the West, go farther back, into Putin’s own memories from his KGB work in Dresden and his reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He expected order but that was ruined by the demonstrators, resulting in the revolution. Even from this event alone, it’s easy to explain his reaction to all the revolutions in the post-Soviet countries, be it Georgia or Ukraine, which were his first targets for the invasions.
Nice! I’ve updated the sidebar on !vegan@lemmy.world to reflect the new community. Hope the change goes well :D
Thank you!
Will my posts be moved also?
What about the posts from other people that I saved/favourited to see later? How can I keep them
Unfortunately this isn’t a feature of lemmy. For a while I will cross post between the two then just lock this one going forward. Lemmy.world should keep this up hopefully. The posts as they exist have been federated already and exist on the new instance (and other instances people access this from)
