this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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The history is that Lemmy was originally created as an independent forum for communists. Later, the devs experimented with ActivityPub federation and created the first federated Reddit alternative. The software itself is neutral and can be used by anyone, but the original communist users of Lemmy before federation was implemented are still around. The politics of Lemmy's original community scared off a lot of potential users from exploring federated Reddit, but bringing more users and awareness to Lemmy will also attract politically neutral developers who can maintain a good alternative.
An alternative is not even necessary if the devs are able to leave their ideologies out of the software's design, which I believe they are doing well.
And from what I've seen, the core devs have always supported and encouraged more instances to be created so that there's a diversity of communities ... I don't think want everyone to be just on here (lemmy.ml) and I'd guess they especially don't want to conflicts to erupt over communism (where in the past some facist or neo-nazi brigading happened and that's why sign-ups require approval).
The answer is for some people to get to work and put up new instances. That's what happened at mastodon and it's what allowed the platform to absorb the twitter migration. We really shouldn't expect whole new open-source and free platforms to just be waiting for us to get tired of our corporate for-profit big-social-platforms. It takes a little bit of work from us ... either understanding a little bit about how things work, helping others, engaging, and if we're able, putting up instances, starting communities and contributing back to the source code.
Well, that's just not the case. Lemmy's devs have always been highly ideological. The case in point here is their handling of the slur filter.
The basic guiding principle of GPL software has always been freedom. Free software has always been explicitly political, but when you put out free code, you have to accept that it might be used by people you don't like. Adding DRM, such as the slur filter, is against the freedom and openness of the free software, even if the DRM is so half-assed as a slur filter that any half-competent dev could easily remove.
When doing local development, I noticed there was an option in the admin screen to configure the slur filter. Perhaps the slur filter isn't hardcoded anymore like it was in that old github issue? Could an instance admin confirm/deny this?
Didn’t know about this.
But, from the cited comment on GitHub:
Fuck yea! This is awesome. Even if not terribly efficacious (I didn’t look into that).
And just to be clear: I talk about principles of platform and instance diversity … and you counter with ”what about racial slurs”?!
I love when anticommunist concern-trolls step on rakes like that.
Yeah, since the only true diversity is which particular flavour of a tankie you are.
If you've got a problem, you can just say it directly instead of presenting this non-sequitur like it's an own. If anti-racism is "tankie" to you then I'm a T-90.
lmao those damned "statists". Did I ever say you advocated for racism? What do slur filters have to do with communism? This is reply seems to be very confused.
Yep. Like there's a good point there from a software standpoint and whether this measure makes sense once the user base and spread of instances and cultures goes past a threshold (especially on the language barrier, but not as persuasively as they think I suspect given the grassroots origin of the software). It's probably at, past or near that threshold now, but similarly with the point at which friendly forks make sense.
But, "lets just resist racism as much as possible even with weird software kludges" being a problematic "ideology" that undercuts any claim to fostering diversity? ... LMFAO!
Maybe put the software freedom and free-speech flags down for a second, look around and touch some grass.