Imma scurry back to my radical left safe space. Personally i know all yaβll are based, though. Communism and marxist-leninism is still a bad word in centrist lemmy spaces, apparently.
Original post: https://feddit.ch/post/4129197
Original comment:
Can someone explain like what are the lemmy devs political stance?
They're tankies, ie radical communists who support authoritarian regimes like North Korea and the CP, and fully support Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The devs also onboarded someone who openly said many times on October 8th that "all Israelis are valid targets", "anything that moves and isn't Palestinian is a valid target" and "there's no such thing as an Israeli civilian" and he's still in their team. On their own instance lemmy.ml (their choice of the mI TLD is a reference to Marxism-Leninism), if you mention the Tiananmen massacre you get banned for "orientalism", and if you say that Hamas are terrorists you also get banned for "bothsidesing (sic)".
Does that leave a stain on Lemmy, the open-source project? Yes, for sure, it leaves Lemmy with a very questionable governance, and weird decisions like the absence of any prioritization of work on moderation tools and the very weird and completely random fact that they suddenly disabled sign-up captchas last summer leading to a bot infestation of most instances. Coincidentally, tankie instances like lemmygrad and hexbears rely on brigading, bots, and cyber-harassment to spread their poison, and strong moderation tools would hinder them a lot. Now does that make it impossible for Lemmy to succeed? No, it's again an open-source project, and it can be forked away from the tankies at any time. In fact, there's even a highly credible rewrite in Java currently whose goal is to be 100% API-compatible with Lemmy: https://sublinks.org/ (see the announcement here: https://lemmy world/post/11005411 )
Reply:
I don't think forking lemmy is a good idea honestly, let's stick to what we have and what currently works well. The beauty of lemmy is that, you can make an account on a hexbear/lemmygrad instance to see what's up, and switch back to your main instance with more reasonable, less extreme content. But also I vibe with some of lemmygrads less delusional communities. I'm on dbzero's server who federates with hexbear but not with lemmygrad and i find that to be a nice balance of content. I find it reductive to say that anything on hebear/lemmygrad is "tanky" shit, because there are some legitimately great communities in either one (hebear, for instance, has communities about socialism and marxist philosophies, which I find to be intellectually stimulating and not at all radical, though some would disagree. And chapotraphouse has got some spicy leftist memes)
True, sympathizing with terrorists and supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a bad look, but there's good info on the radical leftist corner of the internet. Of course some people post insane shit to get attention and that's unfortunate. But I believe these instances at its heart safe spaces for Marxists, Marxist thought and the growing global leftist movement which I personally believe is a harbinger for change in the world
I say let's cut the bad shit and preserve the good bits instead of throwing out the entire block of cheese
Under the current definition of FOSS, disallowing companies that collaborate with genociders from using your code is considered bad. A few years ago the maintainer of some library decided to change their license to disallow companies working with ICE from using the library. The "FOSS community" freaked out.
"Blocking Microsoft from using your software to organize concentration camps on the border is discrimination, actually."
He didn't even have to go with that angle. Rules 1, 2, and 3 are already about not prohibiting anyone from using your software for whatever they want in whatever way they want. Also rule 6 is "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" which effectively amounts to "nooooo, you have to let them use your software for genocide".
So yeah, we need a major redefinition of the term.
Side note: I wonder how they would feel about an official bad guy using their code. How would they react to "the ebil see see pee" using their code to manage the "Uyghur genocide" (de-radicalization program in which zero people have died)?
Absolutely abhorrent. But yeah, those libertarians can't go two sentences without undermining their own "ideology".
This seems to happen to all organizations of the kind. Back in the day Mozilla was solely a non-profit focused on promoting open and free software. Now it has people with very silly large salaries, a desire to promote 'commercial collaboration' and literally forces ads into its browser.
Every single one gets creeped into and taken over by capital, and consequently made utterly pointless. The way capitalism neuters its own productive forces is a continuing internal contradiction.
Look I don't disagree FOSS nerds suck and were probably pitching a fit too but Eric Raymond's a misogynist randian lolbertarian and the OSI is a capital-friendly recuperation of open source software from copyleft (FOSS) radicals.
I had no idea who he was, but that sounds about right.
But even copyleft requires you to allow anyone to use it for any purpose, including concentration camps and genocide.
Absolutely and I'm sure there were copyleft zealots backing Raymond on that point as well.
I try to avoid those discussions (besides calling out the bad actors and their interests), because at the end of the day licensing relies on a jurisprudence system set up for the benefit of the boug to have any effect, whether that's enforcing copyleft or provisions preventing use in harmful industries. Master's tools and all that.