I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers an the .ml instance. The issue of funding a project with people openly expressing opinions many find distasteful and it being the biggest reddit alternative on the fediverse came up, so here’s a topic to discuss it.
What should we do? What are the options?
Answer: No fork necessary, there are Piefed and Mbin.
The Lemmy platform is just a tool to manage and delivery content. And I think it’s important to differentiate the software from those who manages the software. I can see there’s is a tacit connection and influence there. But unless they start baking inherently bias features into the software and skewing it, I don’t think it’s a big problem.
Also, because it’s an inherently federated platform, if people don’t like the opinions of those who run a specific instance, they can (with the inclination and determination) spin up their own instance and manage that the way they see fit. And that has happened quite a few times over the last couple of years.
So no, I don’t think it requires a fork really. Not unless the people managing the main branch lose interest and the software starts to wither on the vine, or they start corrupting it somehow. But that’s just my opinion.
Is the code good? Are you prepared to make any potential fork viable and useful in ways that Lemmy isn’t so people have a tangible, non-ideological reason to choose your software over Lemmy? Do you have a long term goal for funding and maintaining a fork?
That said, Piefed is already a thing, and it federates with Lemmy. It’s where I’m commenting from right now. It has a better on boarding process and does a better job surfacing things I care about.
I write opensource software, I donate to opensource, I use opensource. I however can’t do everything. That is why the question is “we” not “hey @gerowen@piefed.social why don’t you make a fork, you lazy bastard”. Code is not the only way to contribute to a project and I’m willing to donate to lemmy alternatives while it is still possible for me.
Piefed might be where I start donating. Gotta check it out first.
Usually it is as this point things turn to shit in opensource/community/fediverse/cooperative. The devs are not the product.
Who will go in holidays with 100% of the team for every product one use ?
We already have Piefed and Mbin.
you can block the tankie instances on lemmy, and any community too, i blocked the triad, and politics,.world, and any individual account that are from those tankie instances.
I really don’t like this dangerous trend of condemning actions of people based on wether we agree with them or disagree with them.
Because this behavior is at the base for intolerance and strong polarization.
First of all, I want to judge your actions for what they are, not for what your political views are. So Lemmy is good and I like that full stop. There will be better alternatives (maybe already are) and I will judge them without agreeing with their creators political views.
Second, I prefer to discuss and interact with people who have different views and political ideas than me, because that’s where I grow my ideas and enforce or dispute them. Enough of the echo chamber where the “algorithm” already places us in every social fucking media.
Kids, it’s by enforcing and supporting even the ideas contrary to yours that you grow up. Yes this is annoying and can cause serious brain engagement, but yeah, that’s how we progress.
Even fascists or communist ideas. Zionist or pro-Palestine, pro gender or anti woke, if we start judging peoples actions only for their ideas we become fascists.
I was also tought that what you do is more significant than what you say. Judge by actions, not words.
So I don’t dislike technology because the guy behind it is a fascist or a communist.
Said so, if anybody thinks that can do a better Lemmy by forking it, go ahead and let me judged by the actions.
This is the “radical centrist” position, and it’s serves the fascist power structure.
None of the things you’re comparing to each other are equal or opposite. You’re functionally saying “I consider good and evil to be equal, I tolerate intolerance”.
I’m not sure if you stand behind your examples, because you didn’t really say anything.
For starters…if you wanted to address the topic you would have compared apples to apples ie fascists to tankies. You can’t casually imply fascists and communists are two ends of a spectrum and both have interesting points to make, that’s absurd: the former are evil, and the latter are dreamers. The rest of your examples are similar.
The topic here is “what level of tankie propaganda are we dealing with, and is it appropriate to allow them to control what we read”.
There is Piefed, it’s compatible with Lemmy instances and has a whole load of useful feature for both users and moderators.
Much quicker and responsive development (I’ve been able to get two small feature/improvement requests implemented within weeks of my initial issue post).
One of the Lemmy developers is also an admin on the notorious Lemmygrad instance.
Looks like I’ll be checking that out.
It’s great, a lot better than Lemmy.
The main weakness IMO is that Voyager doesn’t support most of the cool features of Piefed (core interaction works great though). I have yet to try Interstellar. The mobile WebUI is pretty good, albeit in need of some polish and optimisations.
