#LemmyWorld is in Cloudflare’s access-restricted walled garden. It’s an asshole instance that not only excludes some people from access but it hoards people who are in the included group, creating a perversely centralized power imbalance that rewards elitists. To non-assholes, Lemmy World communities are parasitic because they rob the fedi of the decentralized balance it needs. To participate in Lemmy World communities is to either be uninformed/out of touch OR to be an informed asshole.

That said, lemmy.ml is not a great place either. At least it’s not excluding people on the basis of IP address, but it’s still disproportionately large and has a history of political baggage by admins who are very trigger-happy with the censor button. You could have chosen a better instance, like Sopuli, but then your sidebar acknowledges the apparent past existence of a Sopuli AITA community.

NTA for giving refuge from a destructive instance. If it were reversed, and you were to create a community on Lemmy World that already exists in the free world, it would be a YTA case. Poaching users from a bad instance is a good semaritan move.

How to fix this

Promote the most digital rights respecting venue in the sidebar, which is !amitheasshole@discuss.tchncs.de. Encourage cross-posts to and from discuss.tchncs.de. Make no mention of Lemmy World and other centralized nodes.

I would not normally post in lemmy.ml but thought this thread was worthy of an exception.

NTA.

A community existing on a separate independent instance shouldn’t be a factor in deciding if an aita community exists on this instance. Even though !aita@lemmy.world will have more traffic, this community should still probably exist because a local lemmy.ml option isn’t a bad thing, and we’d have an established alternative should we ever need to defederate lemmy.world for whatever reason.

YTA for setting the community language settings to disallow specifying English as an option though 😜