Startrek.website put out a similar post yesterday, and I thought it might be a good idea to do the same.

Note: We were originally planning to be a regional instance, but interest never really took off. While we haven't re-branded from that (yet), we are now allowing signups for anyone who is interested in a different / better / less-toxic fediverse experience.

About Us

DubVee is not your typical federated link aggregator.

In order to achieve our goals, we have to do things a little differently compared to other instances. We want the "default" experience to be positive, welcoming, and non-toxic without requiring new users to discover and deal with the toxic parts on their own. We want everyone to be able to go to the homepage without the default experience making them say "what the fuck?!" and turn away. (That's literally what happened when I tried inviting a few Reddit colleages to the fediverse).

Some people may disagree with that; that's fine and is part of the beauty of the Fediverse. There are plenty of other instances that let you rawdog everything (and everyone) the Fediverse has to offer which you can then curate on your own.

Dubvee is not such an instance, and that is a feature we're proud to offer.

As an instance, we're pretty heavily moderated, including federated content, in order to maintain a welcoming atmosphere that fosters civil discussion. We don't "tone police" everything (nor is that our goal), but we do expect users, local and remote, to behave themselves and act in a rational, civilized manner. Those who cannot, local or federated, are quickly shown the door.

We also expect people to be here because they want to be here (the Fediverse) rather than being here because they're too toxic and/or have been banned everywhere else.

Much of our philosophy and guiding principles were drawn from Beehaw. In a lot of ways, we're "Beehaw, but with downvotes enabled and federated with LW and SJW".

You can read our full site info here.

Highlights / Goals

Here are the main things that we feel set us apart from other instances. Unless otherwise stated, these apply to federated content as well as local.

Non-Toxic Atmosphere by Default

I'm just gonna be blunt with this one: a non-insignificant portion of the fediverse is made up of people who are simply too toxic to be platformed anywhere else. That has always been the elephant in the room for alternative platforms, so I'm just going to point it out from the get-go.

Unlike the Lemmy software itself and the instances run by its developers, DubVee was not created because the admins got banned from Reddit. Like many of the instances that came online around the same time as us, we created this instance because of enshittification at Reddit that crescendoed during the API debacle. We exist because we want to provide something better and NOT because our views or personalities were too toxic for "mainstream" services.

DubVee's mission is to be a chill space to read/talk about cool stuff, stay informed, etc. Toxic people ruin that experience, derail otherwise productive discussions, and generally "stink up the place". We feel no obligation to platform everyone in the world, every voice, or even every opinion. We take an "allow by default" stance, but accounts that get in the way of our mission of providing a safe, chill environment are unceremoniously shown the door.

With the exception of outright trolls, the expectation elsewhere is to just block those people and move on. That's fine, but for new users, there's the daunting task of having to first identify / find the toxic parts and then deal with them on their own. At DubVee, we want users to have a non-toxic experience by default.

There's also the osmosis factor: seeing toxic behavior in the wild often sets a bad tone or otherwise "rubs off" causing more toxicity. We try to prevent that here.

Accounts that have been identified with a pattern of toxicity are generally banned (either from the communities where they're most toxic or from the site, whichever is most appropriate). If a member here notices an account that fits that criteria, they are free to report it to us (via a post/comment report or a DM), and we will review the account.

We also strive to identify new alts of previously-banned toxic accounts and dispatch them as well; the worst part of the fediverse is its so-called "censorship resistance" which in practice just means it's a revolving door of trolls.

Quality Over Quantity

We tend to take a "less is more" / "quality over quantity" approach to content. That is to say, we don't have content just for sake of having content. The instance only subscribes to (or remains subscribed to) communities our members actively engage with. If communities have no engagement (posts, comments, votes) from local users over a period of time (roughly 3-5 months), then the community is unsubscribed.

We rely on Tesseract's remote community browser as well as external tools (Lemmy Explorer, etc) for discovering new content. This reduces resources on our own infrastructure by not hosting content no one here cares about.

Subscribe to what interests you, but we also ask that if you lose interest in a community, please unsubscribe. As communities without local engagement will eventually be unsubscribed at the system level, we also encourage users to at least vote in the communities they subscribe to in order to help boost engagement.

No Bot Spam

Building on "Quality over quantity", we also disallow bot spam. Bot spam covers things like all of the various Reddit repost bots, bots that spray links from RSS feeds, and other instances / accounts that just indiscriminately spray out content in an automated fashion. We de-federate from instances dedicated to spamming out re-posted content and ban content bots as they pop up.

The only bots that we allow here are ones that do not spam out indiscriminately and/or are ones that simply post from a queue managed by a human.

If you just want endless content to mindlessly scroll through, then this probably is not the instance for you.

De-Federated from the "Tankie Triad" and Other Problematic Instances

To facilitate several goals (non-toxicity, agendas, misinformation, and extremism), we do not federate with "grad", "ml", or "hexbear".

We also tend to de-federate from any instance that is poorly managed and causes too much moderation overhead (spam, trolls, etc).

You can view and search the instances we've de-federated from here.

Lemmy-UI is Not Our Default Interface

Lemmy-UI is something of a dumpster fire in so many ways. We use Tesseract as the default UI, so you never have to see the garbo one unless that's your cup of tea and go out of your way to seek it out. Lemmy-UI is available at https://lemmy.dubvee.org/if you insist.

Bonus: The main admin here is also the developer of Tesseract, so if you make a feature request, and it's doable, you're likely to get it.

No Porn

No judgement from us, but that's just not our focus here, and we don't want to see or moderate it. Aside from the occasional spammer/troll slipping something through (which is swiftly dealt with), you should be able to safely browse "all" without having to disable NSFW content (which is used for a variety of things including spoilers, language, etc).

Our default UI allows multiple accounts on different instances, so you're free to add a secondary account on a NSFW instance for that.

No Agendas or Misinformation

Well, except for the agenda of having no agendas.

Accounts that are here on a mission are generally not welcome. There's a huge difference between someone posting what interests them and beating everyone over the head with their pet cause.

We also have a strict misinformation policy when it comes to news source credibility, conspiracy nonsense, etc.

Our misinformation policy is covered under Rule 6 in our site info, and our Agenda policy is outlined in Rule 7.

Extremism of any Form is Prohibited

This is a big one. We're not here to platform anyone's digital lynch mob, revolution, or whatever. Any accounts found to be frothing at the mouth for violence are quickly and permanently shown the door. Well intentioned extremism is still extremism, and I would dare say that all extremists consider themselves well-intentioned. We've had to ban more accounts for this than any other rule/reason, and we make no apologies whatsoever.

It's okay and natural to feel upset about current events. It's not okay to start spewing out calls to violence and/or praising it if it happens.

For our definitions of extremism, see Rule 8 in our site info.

Mass Downvoting Accounts Get Banned

While there's no concept of "karma" here and everything's made up and the points don't matter, it's still disheartening to put thought into a submission only to see it rack up downvotes. Sometimes those downvotes are warranted (which is why we do not disable downvoting), but other times, they're just the target of people who do nothing but downvote indiscriminately (while frequently contributing nothing themselves).

We run reports to detect accounts that do nothing but downvote (or downvote more than they upvote by a significant margin). When those accounts show up on the report, they're verified and, 9.9 times out of 10, banned.

That applies to any account, local or federated. For local users, do not hesitate to downvote whatever you want, but also be sure to throw some positivity out into the world as well.

No AI Generated Slop

We don't care what you asked ChatGPT et al or prompted some bot to make for you. We don't waste resources hosting that slop or your time having to scroll through it. If that's your jam, then this probably isn't the instance for you. If you don't want to see that kind of thing, then you'll be right at home.