this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Free and Open Source Software
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Do you know what topic brought you here?
"Hey guys, let's not use this free software, because of their views."
"Maybe we shouldn't use this other free software because of their views."
"Why are you guys worried about which free software you use based on their views?"
"We can all tell you aren't new, why are you complaining about our unofficial pastime?"
It's almost like the philosophy behind a software matters to its long-term stability. Like, as if devs might find reasons to, I don't know, reject PRs, ignore bugs, and trash their users when they come to them for help.
Weird that the content of someone's mind might affect their actions or be an indicator of what level of trust they should be extended!
Programming is a form of communication. When you develop a piece of software, it will intrinsically be biased to boost the kinds of messages you believe in. This is both because you as a person think about problems a certain way, and because the code you write is meant to convey to others how you were thinking about the problem you were trying to solve. Who heads projects and how they communicate with their community matters to what the product produced will become, not just because of how the leads will think about the problem, but also because people who don't get along with them won't wind up contributing. Beehaw requested moderation tools that the lead lemmy Devs didn't view as valuable. The result is beehaw, reasonably, gave up on getting PRs merged and issues tracked in the issue tracker, instead choosing to look at Sublinks which was explicitly started in response to Lemmy's devs not behaving well with their own development community.
And for anyone saying Sublinks is splintering the Lemmy Dev community, no, lemmy's devs did that themselves
I wasn't making any judgement on this, although if I were, I would point out that one of the benefits of open source is the ability to fork projects and move away from the elements you have a philosophical issue with, such as what the OpenOffice developers did when Oracle purchased Sun and started imposing their unplayable rules. What I was half-jokingly pointing out was some guy coming in deep into the conversation of highly opinionated people and acting like the conversation wasn't about their various opinions.
People talk about forking open source projects as if you just push a button and it happens on its own. I mean, okay, that's the first step, but maintaining an repo is a whole thing. Saying 'well just fork it then' is only a viable solution if you have the the means, the time, and the inclination. It isn't really an exclusive alternative to criticism, but another, much narrower, potential additional path.
It would certainly be good if people would fork all the useful projects made by devs who are interested in promoting social conservatism masquerading as 'apolitical actions' that attempt to reinforce the existing status quo of power. I'm not sure how likely it is, though. Certainly less so than bringing criticism to the table.
If this is provably the case, then I agree, we should stop using Lemmy. If not -- and I say this as a proud supporter of the vast majority of seemingly-pointless ideological bullcrap -- it is nothing but pointless ideological bullcrap.
Yeah. We probably should.
Changing our behaviors isn't a binary, though. It takes effort. Sometimes it takes changing the world around us first to accommodate new behaviors, or waiting for the right opportunity. And given all the other things we should also be changing, prioritizing matters.
Finding a Lemmy alternative is somewhere on that list. Is it anywhere remotely near the top? No. There are a great many other things to do. It's probably closer to the top of alyzaya or Chris's lists than mine; close enough, it seems, to be carried out even.
But it isn't about trying to figure out who's a shit and point fingers at them while loudly demonstrating non-shit behaviors. If we actually want to make the world better, we need to figure out how to work together rather than just glue everything in place.
People are so defensive about being wrong. And why wouldn't they be? Whether you look at how things are set up in school or the cruelty and corruption of the prison system, or the poverty-reinforcing measures set about in our banking and credit rating systems, the elements that we need to grow past push this tendency to categorize people and sort of socially compartmentalize their various experiences.
End up in the right categories and you don't really have to worry. Companies will throw free cellphones at you just for breathing. End up in the wrong categories, and you're going to have to struggle against a system that's built to keep you from getting back up.
We can spend eternity playing with the categories, moving around between them or building or diminishing their relative social power. We can change the criteria that we categorize people by, or try to keep them the same. But in the end we're not really going to make much forward progress until we let go of thinking we know the potential of every human being at a glance. We don't.
What we can do though is be patient, speak our minds honestly, set boundaries, allow others their own autonomy, and try to help ourselves and other humans open up and grow rather than close off and shrink.
In any case, the world is complex. It's silly to try to boil it down into absolutist binaries. It's also probably really bad for your cortisol levels.
I don't understand at all where you're going with this. Either Beehaw uses Lemmy on the backend or it doesn't. Either you're using Ladybird or you're using a different browser. These are pretty binary choices.