Got what I needed, thanks to those who responded in good faith!
This isn’t my main account but after poking around Lemmy for about half a year, this seems to be what people are saying (and my general impression)
- Lemmygard, Hexbear - Ultra Tankies
- Lemmy.ml - Commies and Tankies, the gateway to the above. Users can and will use every opportunity to drown others in Marxist rhetoric
- Beehaw - Highly sensitive lefties who are blocking both lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works on Instance level because of open registration policy (as if registering to any instance takes effort).
- slrpnk.net - Hippies who like cyberpunk
- lemmy.dbzer0.com - Anarchists who hate tankies and any rules except their own, which are different and therefore better
- lemmy.blahaj.zone - LGBTQ+ folk who hate tankies
and lefties(i meant to write rightoids) - various regional instances - left leaning but according to above, not enough and therefor fascists and nazis
- lemmy.world - open instance, therefor if you ask anyone above regional instances, basically fascists and nazis
- sh.itjust.works - anything goes, therefor if you ask anyone above lemmy.world, basically fascists and nazis
- programming.dev - nerds and therefor suspicious to everyone
- piefed - no idea but judging by how people talk about it, Lemmy is clearly becoming too mainstream so some people feel they need to move into further obscurity.
anything else: either nazis or tankies depending on who you ask.
I really like Lemmy on paper but good god this instance drama is off-putting. Also it’s hard to find out which instances are blocking which instances - which I find silly altogether because people are specifically hyping fediverse because “iTs AlL coNnEcTeD” and “you are in charge of your feed”. I’m contemplating running one or two communities (and I’m totally fine with them being small and slow) but I don’t know where I dare to make them because apparently I’d have to be paying far closer attention to the nitty gritty of every bit of instance drama to make sure I’m not on “the wrong side”. Or if I make the communities on some instance with banhappy admins who decide that I’m a tankie/nazi because I allowed someone to post content from someone who said something vaguely wrong on Twitter 10 years ago.
Is there like a guide document somewhere that lists the features, vibes and general content policy, and banned instances and all that of at least the major instances? Because this is like walking on eggshells.
No. Piefed is simply another piece of software with different tools that reads lemmy instances. It’s not an instance in itself. piefed.social, which I am posting from - is the largest piefed (and original) instance.
You barely notice if you don’t follow certain communities.
What are the communities you’re wanting to make?
Philosophy related stuff. Which is exactly the kind of thing that’s risky to talk about in the wrong instance.
I don’t think it matters as much as you think it does. However, for actual humanities subjects probably mander.xyz may be the best fit, as they’re the instance dedicated to nature and science and AFAIK nobody defederates them.
mander.xyz states that the main focus of the instance is the natural sciences, and the scope encompasses all of the STEM fields but do already have !philosophy@mander.xyz, !history@mander.xyz and !linguistics@mander.xyz (although those comms aren’t very active) so I agree it seems to be a good fit.
Thank you!
Lemmy.world, piefed.social, lemmy.zip are all perfectly fine fits here. Hexbear and lemmygrad are blacklisted by most of the fediverse, beehaw does not allow new community creation by randoms anyway iirc