After the (temporary) defederation announcement of earlier i checked the Lemmy repo to see if there was already a ticket on the federation limiting option like Mastodon’s that people mentioned Lemmy doesn’t yet have. Not only i didn’t find it, i also saw that there’s about 200+ open tickets of variable importance. Also saw that it’s maintained mostly by the two main devs, the difference in commits between them and even the next contributors is vast. This is normal and in other circumstances it’d grow organically, but considering the huge influx of users lately, which will likely take months to slow down, they just don’t have the same time to invest on this, and many things risk being neglected. I’m a sysadmin, haven’t coded anything big in at least a decade and a half beyond small helper scripts in Bash or Python, and haven’t ever touched Rust, so can’t help there, but maybe some of you Rust aficionados can give some time to help essentially all of Lemmy. The same can be said of Kbin of course, although that’s PHP, and there is exacerbated by it being just the single dev.
Honestly I’m casting my support with KBin after hearing about the political affiliations of the main Lemmy dev. It’s worrisome because at this time of volatility, the community is going to be very fragile and stuff like that can really cause a massive problem when the community starts hitting critical mass
First, I respect you doing what you feel you need to.
That said, I think we need to be careful about how we decide what products to use or support based off the politics or history of their development. That seems like a risky game to me. How much slave labor was used in creating the very products we’re using right now, for instance?
I get that, there’s a bunch of unethical associations with everything we use. But right now the main developer of Lemmy has his profile setup with Chairman Mao as his background, his Github repo avatar is Che Guevera, and he has an entire repo filled with propaganda copy-pasta. In the past people have also pointed out that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml resolve to the same IP address although this is no longer the case. Lemmygrad supports the DPRK and transitively one of the most horrific dictatorships in the world, and yet it’s advertised on the “Join-Lemmy” website.
Even if the software itself is apolitical and we can see through the open-source nature of it that it is not going to be abused to further those agendas, there’s no doubt that as that knowledge becomes more commonly known that it could severely impact the whole idea of a Federated Reddit alternative.
I guess the most important thing to consider is that the software, being open-sourced, can easily be forked if this ever becomes a problem.
Ignoring all the human and political aspects, I find Lemmy is a nicer piece of software, technically. Forking is always an option, and thanks to ActivityPub, things will remain compatible as well.
Lemmy itself seems neutral upon usage, I have not been subject to any political biases from the software itself, ever.
That’s an important question to ask. For me (and I want to make very clear that this is exclusively how I handle things for myself) there is a huge difference between things I use (or what I call passive association) and things I work on or contribute to (or what I call active association).
While im ok-ish with using their software if they don’t really profit from my usage, I wont be actively helping them. Given the state of the world and western society, I can’t really escape using products that are unethical and as a software developer working for a company I can’t really decide who gets to use my paid work and since I very much like having a bed and a roof and food and even some comfort in that, I’d rather stick to my job, but I can make a choice on who I support with my free time.
We all have to draw our own lines in the sand on issues like this and I respect yours, I’d argue on the other hand the open-source nature of Lemmy means the author’s politics shouldn’t make a difference to groups like BeeHaw which use it. A good example of this would be TOR which was developed by American naval intelligence of all organisations yet many drug dealers routinely gamble their freedom that it will protect them.
Also I’d argue as loathesome as your average tankie is (I really can’t stand them at all) they’re still a step up from the literal nonces that inhabited early Reddit.