In the beginning, it was just me. When I joined Lemmy what I really missed about reddit was the 'curated twitter' subs where every post was just a nice little thought someone had had. There were meme communities already but nothing quite right, it was mostly deep-fried shitposting. I think this was even before the new WhitePeopleTwitter started on sh.itjust.works but I'm not sure.
I didn't want to start a new WhitePeopleTwitter, for three reasons - it wasn't my sub on reddit so it didn't feel appropriate to stage a "take over" of that name here; I didn't want to specify "white people" in the title, and I also didn't want to reference "twitter" because microblogging is bigger than twitter now and I didn't want to contribute at all (even if a little bit) to the idea that twitter is the default option for microblogging.
So MicroblogMemes was born! In the early days it was just me posting a bunch of screenshots every day and we didn't need any rules. I didn't want to act like this was some big formal endevour and add a ton of detailed rules for everyone to follow, and since then I've only added rules when I've had to moderate something and someone complained.
The reason I'm making this post is because we have a new rule - no advertising. I personally am not interested in seeing posts from brands pretending to be people. The likes of Wendy's, KFC, Microsoft, etc have advertising budgets that run collectively into the billions and I just don't want adverts disguised as content here.
Yesterday someone posted this:
To me this is pretty much just advertising. A member of the community reported it, and I removed the post with the comment 'hail corporate'.
For fully transparency this exchange then occured (read from the bottom):
I've basically explained my reasoning for this approach already but, in short, I have tiny, tiny amount of power on the internet to create a space with fewer adverts and that's what I'm going to do. Be the change and all that.
I often think about this quote from Banksy:
Not really sure why I felt the need to post all this but there you go. If anyone disagrees with any of this please let me know in the comments and we can work it out :)
Just to say, I massively prefer the name 'microblogmemes' over 'whitepeopletwitter'. That was always a weird one - posts didn't always involve white people, didn't always come from Twitter (which - technically - doesn't even exist anymore) and seemed based on a petty misunderstanding of what Black People Twitter was.
FWIW, I agree with you about the Denny's post. I'm also the moderator of a community that Stamets has quit, so I know that losing him is a blow, because he posts a lot of content. But I also know that he's a complicated human.
Eh no worries, not really a loss when most of the posts were a deluge of low quality content. My feed instantly got better after that block..