Imma scurry back to my radical left safe space. Personally i know all ya’ll 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
Actually, they absolutely should fork lemmy.
Has seen what happens to lemmy/mastodon forks
W-what happens to them
Most of them have died, lol
TBH I won't be surprised is sublinks ends up considerably better than lemmy.
Why is that?
The "considerably" bit is hyperbole on my part, but they have like 3 times the devs, can refer to the existing lemmy implementation, and plan on building more robust moderation tooling.
Where are they getting the funding?
I didnt even notice they started a foundation. As far as I can tell they aren't giving anything to the development of lemmy either.
edit: I was wrong
https://blog.mastodon.world/q4-2023-overview
And they do give some back to the devs, I should have read further.
I feel like one of the "features" Sublinks will have over Lemmy is monetization. I'm just assuming from the original Sublinks dev's politics that it's going to be a lot more open to the idea of serving ads.
Also that they're rejecting the agpl license in favor of the mit license is telling.
I am not a programmer, or license expert, so correct me if I am wrong, but by going to MIT, they cannot use any of the Lemmy code, because agpl is not MIT compatable correct.
also moving TO mit smells fishy to me.
Hence the complete rewrite, here is the reason for why they chose MIT License
https://discuss.online/comment/5643978
So their reason was the exact fear I had in hearing the MIT licence. It is so that 3rd parties can come in and monitize it, or likely a Meta or Reddit can just snatch up the code and use it as their own.
I absolutely love how they talk about how the GPL has protections, but you dont ACTUALLY need protections... and how some how opening up all of this stifles innovation. It does do my heart happy to see people, who are clearly more knolgeable than me arguang aganst this in that comment section though.
Good queation. I have no idea.
They are pretty brazen about wanting people to switch to their software and eventually obsoleting lemmy too https://lemmy.world/comment/6982480
Some investors wanting to build a reddit competitor? Jgrimms has worked at klarna and magento and kgilles works at klarna, cleary both connected to some rich folk.
I really hope that does not happen. even aside from my philisophical considerations on the matter. I think that Lemmy works really well, and with all the dev time that had gone into it I think that it is the best entry into the redit competitor space. I genuinly think a not insignificant amount of this is due to spite from political belifes of the main devs but I could be wrong.
End of the day ... my postion and it will be for the long run is Long live Lemmy