this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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That feels like complaints about lemmy.ml specifically more than Lemmy as a software. There's a few instances that defederate lemmy.ml out there.
They can do whatever shit they want with their instance and believe whatever they want. The software they make provably doesn't have any more biases than any other software. As long as that's the case, I'm fine.
Maybe there's something in the codebase that sends all our data to North Korea... who knows.
We do, because it’s open source
Have you read all the code though? Everyone assumes that somebody else will read every single file of the source code, and understand it all. Malicious code can be obfuscated.
Personally, no. However the technical lead of our instance has, and in fact wrote and debugged some of it.
Even a technical lead of an instance may not have read every single line of code because codebases these days are pretty large. Typically you might look at the code you're working on, but not necessarily the entire codebase.
Hopefully Lemmy doesn't have anything malicious in it, but it's possible to sneak malware into open source projects. This sort of thing happened to XZ Utils last year.
If you are worried about the Lemmy codebase, there is https://piefed.social/
It's still another codebase you need to trust, but in this case the devs don't have specific political views
Yeah I've heard of that, maybe I should look at it more. Hopefully the Lemmy codebase is fine though. I'm just saying it's possible, even if perhaps unlikely, that something could be lurking in the code which nobody has discovered yet. The XZ Utils backdoor was well-hidden and happened to be discovered, but maybe malicious code isn't always discovered.
Next time, do something like suggesting that vaccines don't work, to entertain me.
I'm not raising a conspiracy theory point, I'm raising what is surely a valid point: everybody assumes that someone else will read all of the source code and understand it all.
Codebases are large, and malicious code can be obfuscated. Hopefully Lemmy's code is fine, but I definitely don't know for certain that it's completely clean. I just hope that it is.
it's complaints about the developer (which are valid) who also runs lemmy.ml.
How much effort do you think Meta, Twitter, and Reddit put into getting open social media people to fight against themselves?
Very little
Yeah, but it’s guilt by association. Think about how X is now. Its owner is an asshole, and that hurts the platform regardless of how many cool people use it.
X is under total control of that person. As long as the lemmy source adheres to fediverse principles, this developer can believe whatever they want and run their instance however they want, and no one else has to care. If his beliefs starts affecting the lemmy source, it's always an option to fork.
If you exclude a branch of the fediverse because of one bad instance, you're missing the point of the fediverse.
And you’re missing the point of my point.
If people who don’t already know how lemmy is run, are curious and read that shit and think the owner/operator of lemmy is a huge douchebag tankie that deletes/bans everything he doesn’t like… it bodes poorly for new people coming to lemmy.
So therefore- the rest of us are guilty as a result of association with the aforementioned douchebag.