this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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The Lemmy developer is a bit of a "Tankie", which put me off joining.
I'm not sure that should really matter much though. Lemmy is federated, open-source, and makes zero revenue. It's not like the developer has much control over instances other than his own or even the code it runs on, ultimately.
It's not super surprising that communists would be drawn to the fediverse's design philosophy and while I might think he's misguided politically the software isn't really his at the end of the day, even if he is the lead maintainer.
It's not the same issue as closed platforms have like Facebook+Zuckerberg or Reddit+Spez. If he starts messing with the project the community can take it and leave.
Not only that but the design encourages that the majority of the community not be on the instance he controls from the outset.
You're 100% right and I completely agree with you.
But to play devil's advocate: people are saying that drawing attention to Lemmy will mean more donations to Lemmy's dev team, which in turn supports them.
I personally don't care what the politics are behind a good piece of software. I don't know Linus Torvalds' politics; I don't know the politics of the folks behind Mastodon; I don't know the politics of Jimmy Wales. I can guess, of course, but regardless of their politics they've made a good product and that's found success.
While that may be true - and I can't stress how highly I disagree with genocide denial and Stalin apologetics - it's not logically consistent with how people treat basically anything else.
Reddit is backed by Tencent and Peter Thiel. Tencent is a massive Chinese company, and therefore has close relations with the Chinese government. They are Tankies in practice, whether the executives are ideologues or not. And Peter Thiel is an isolationist, white supremacist, and fascist.
But who the the people who support capitalist endeavours support never really gets brought up as a reason to avoid those endeavours. And that's even when just using those products and services directly financially supports the fascists and the people who happily take their money. Using Lemmy doesn't directly support the project maintainers.
I agree - I actually made a bit of a longer post originally, but I realized I was ranting a bit so I cut it down. But I suppose I can rant a little bit.
The thing is... actively denying a genocide is a bad look. Standing against so-called "imperialism" while simultaneously supporting Russia's imperialistic invasion of the sovereign country of Ukraine is a bad look. Taking down posts critical of China for so-called "orientalism" is a bad look (and shows you don't really understand what orientalism means - I took a whole-ass class on orientalism in college, and the definition is definitely not "anything critical of China").
It's true that most people can overlook Tencent being part of the PRC. You'll see some grumbling, but nothing huge. People don't like it, but they also don't see Tencent or TikTok as actively doing the worst that the PRC can do. And you see that same grumbling with the bad actors of capitalism - Nestle gets a lot of hate (rightfully!).
But at the same time, Nestle isn't calling for a return of Nazi Germany the way Lemmygrad (and those affiliated, e.g. Lemmy's maintainers) calls for the return of the Soviet Union. Peter Thiel wants a fascist ethnostate, but Peter Thiel isn't the CEO of Reddit and his influence over Spez/Reddit's board is likely minimal.
Again, there is absolutely the point of "the maintainers of open source are not the project". I completely agree with that. I fact, I will even give an example:
You know Truth Social, right? Do you know what Truth Social is built on? Mastodon. Do you know what protocol it uses to communicate? ActivityPub. Truth Social is part of the Fediverse, same as Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc.
Does that mean the people behind Mastodon agree with Truth Social? Absolutely not. They are completely independent of each other. Mastodon has no influence on Truth Social and vice versa.
Lemmy is the inverse of that. The "main" instance is distasteful politically, and there are child instances (like Beehaw) which are more neutral/progressive. Beehaw can fork if they wish and be fully independent of Lemmy; but they are of the same mind as me that good software is not political, and it is impossible to only use that which is morally righteous. Lemmy is a tool fit for their purpose, and while forking is always an option... they don't see the point in abandoning good software just because they disagree with the maintainers politically.
The issue... people get squicky when they find out the platform they use is associated with tankies. It's turned a lot of people off, because they see "Stalin did nothing wrong" or "China is the true beacon of democracy" and don't want to be affiliated with that group. Knowing that they're contributing their effort to making that platform better - and thus elevating the developers to a spot where they can more easily get donations and improve it - just doesn't sit right with some folks.
If Peter Thiel started his own open-source project and everyone started flocking to it, I'd reject it on principle. I don't care how open it is or how good everyone says it works; if he's actively running it and making day-to-day decisions there's zero chance I'd support that. Just like I don't support Truth Social.
I joined Lemmy back in 2020, when it was a little babby project. I watched the tankie community bud and fester. I'm left-leaning myself (but not that left-leaning), and originally I thought I had found a group of like-minded folks... until the masks started coming off. And then I realized that Lemmy was so small that there was no choice but to interact with them. I spun up my own instance for a hot second where tankies (and fascists) were banned... before just giving up and shutting it down because the only people on Lemmy were people I didn't want on my instance.
So I returned to Reddit. I didn't like Reddit much, either (hence why I tried Lemmy), but at least the worst parts were segmented into T_D and PCM and GenZedong etc., where I could pretend they didn't exist.
When the protest started, I was hesitant to come back to Lemmy. I knew at some point the userbase was going to discover that fact and have the same reaction I did when I realized how far down the rot went. I returned reluctantly, hoping that when the drama started people would at least go to another Lemmy instance instead of back to Reddit.
I'm glad I found Kbin, though. Kbin seems nice and friendly. The most drama is due to a tech issue (Cloudflare), which is totally solvable and something I can live with. It feels a lot more like Mastodon here than it does on Lemmy.ml. (Lemmy.world seems alright too, if people must use Lemmy.) And at the very least if the Lemmy guys pull something shady and people start leaving en masse there's https://fedia.io/ (another Kbin instance) to point them at.