11mo ago

I just found an old post from reddit of a guy who suggested people to come here in another post saying he was wrong about lemmy and the lemmy devs are bad ?

I have a lemmy.ml account and i didn't know that they were bad . I created this account after seeing that post .( I am not into politics as you can see if you visited the account i have put in my bio ) so is that true ?

-Ca. someone explain like what are the lemmy devs political stance ?

-Is lemmy as whole affected by it because i think the two main guys who hold all the cards are the ones with these opinions ,like do they have any control on lemmy as whole in anyway ? Or just the instance ?( I know if they are really bad we can fork lemmy)?

-Is feddit.ch good in these aspects ?

-Are they even really bad or do everyone have different opinions ? The things i consider bad and not polical stance are : for instance i just don't like trump because he is against t lgbt and being racist etc. Which are geniunly bad in my opinion and not just difference in opinions .

i know this is more than one question but please answer as much as i can and when talking politics talk like you are explainining politics to a five year old .
If this isn't the right sub i apologise please don't just down voat me to hell atleast explain where i should move it and i will do that
Thanks in advance will read each and every reply and updoot and reply as much as i can .

EDIT : And if they are that bad why aren't anyone forking it ? It's not like they are carrying the whole thing . Everyone is contributing .

Also if the dev's want to explain their sides i would like to hear it .

61 comments

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 CCP, 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 .ml 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 )
- What's the point of rewriting to Java from Rust?
  
  I don't know what the rationale in that case is, but I'm sure that there are people who prefer Java to Rust for one reason or another.
  Rust is, I think, generally-considered to be sexier, but then, Java has a hell of a lot of inertia behind it. Lot of code, lot of developers.
  googles
  https://jasongr.im/blog/why-i-started-sublinks/
  It says that the lead dev on Sublinks learned Rust in order to contribute to Lemmy, before he got frustrated with scaling issues and went off to do Sublinks, so I'd guess that he probably had a lot of Java experience.
  I'd personally say that probably both Java and Rust are reasonable languages to use for developing a Threadiverse server. Kbin is PHP, which is probably even less-sexy than Java, but hey, there are a lot of people out there who know PHP.
  
  Way more developers that know and are comfortable with the language.
- Well done
- The link doesn't load for me will try later .
  
  The lemmy.ca link needs to be opened inside a browser so that you see the thread on that instance. If you try to open it on an app like Voyager it will probably try to redirect you to your local instance, but the problem is that some instances purged it, probably because it quotes literal calls to violence.
- 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 dbzer0’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 hexbear/lemmygrad is “tanky” shit, because there are some legitimately great communities in either one (hexbear, 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

I've only been here 6 or so months so it's hard for me to gauge, but saying something like "the lemmy devs are bad" doesn't really mean much.
Each instance has their own users, mods, admins, and developers. As a result, each instance really has it's own vibe.
There is no singular "lemmy", it's a melange of different attitudes all being shared through federation.
When I first joined, I set up a lemmy.one account because it seemed easy to access, but then they had some kind of technical problem that took them offline for a bit, so I spun up lemmy.world and kbin accounts.
Lemmy.world became my main account when I was asked to help out on Mod duties, and Kbin never really got much use since I found at the time I could only use THEIR app to access it and there are better apps out there.
- There is no singular “lemmy”, it’s a melange of different attitudes all being shared through federation.
  OP is very aware...
  This is at least the third time I'm blocking an account with that exact username from a random small instance.
  It's likely a troll mad that one of the big instance banned them, they keep making new accounts.
  
  Getting instance banned is a problem that wasn't present on Reddit.
  On Reddit, sometimes the mods of a sub would be drinking stupid juice and ban people just for disagreeing with them. That wasnt a huge problem because a mod on a power trip only stopped you from posting/commenting in that sub; it wasn't a site-wide ban.
  The problem on Lemmy is that instance admins are essentially filling the role of subreddit mods. Except when they go on a power trip and ban users of their instance, that whole account is suddenly banned from the entire Fediverse because the user can't even log in anymore. That's pretty shitty.
  This is my second account. My first got banned from an instance because I dared question the admins opinion. And no, it wasn't racist or political shit, it was literally about the quality of a show. They graciously offered to unban me if I wrote a long ass apology saying they were right and promising to never question them again; but I felt that was childish, so I moved to another instance.
  Losing my comment history isn't a big deal, but having to recreate my filters and subscriptions list is a pain in the ass. All because some power tripping admin got mad that I didn't like his favorite show.
  
  No i have just two accounts and i have linked each other in the bio. but my new one is made today as i explained in the post unless you kniw something about me that i don't , you are wrong if i have an alt i would link them in my bio . I wish lemmy had a feature where we could transfer accounts from instances like in mastodon . Because i hate having two accs sometimes you scroll in one and have to see tge same posts when you scroll on the others .
- the lemmy devs are bad" doesn't really mean much.
  Ibwas quoting a redditor as i said multiple times i have no knowledge in politics . I just accidentally didn't wanna be on a neo nazi instance or something
  
  Generally what you'd want to do is see which instances get de-federated from, and for what reasons, then skip them.

I haven't followed the drama closely, but from what I understand, the main devs of Lemmy and many of the older instance admins (including lemmy.ml) are tankies - basically pro-authoritarian, pro-violence, communists getting their name from support of the use of tanks against protesters. From what I can tell, lemmy.ml is pretty hands-off with their moderation, so there shouldn't be too much of a problem with this, but you can always move if you feel you need to. While individual instances do have a significant degree of freedom, there is still potential issues with the lead developers being supporters of authoritarian ideologies, if only because that mindset will impact their understanding of how moderation/administration should work in their software. That said, again, I haven't followed all this closely, so this might be outdated or incorrect information.
Really, this is more of a polling and discussion community rather than one for providing factual or diffinitive answers to questions. If you want better answers, you'd be best off posting somewhere like !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
- Lemmy.ml admins are not hands off with their moderation. They regularly delete any opinion they don’t like claiming it is hate speech. The modlog is chock full of it.
- I find this argument unproductive, though.
  It's open source. If you don't like the people making it, make your own. Otherwise, what's the alternative? Stick with the shitty corporate internet? I don't love Tankies, but I think anarcho-capitalists like Musk are definitely worse.
  Let's grow Lemmy, and hopefully the politics of a few early developers won't matter in the long run.
  
  Let's grow Lemmy, and hopefully the politics of a few early developers won't matter in the long run.
  I mean, I'm still here. I agree. Even with my concerns, I still think its in a better place than most of the competition. That doesn't mean it isn't worth acknowledging the current problems, and the risks it may carry going forward. It's better to be aware and vigilant so action can be taken early if needed.
  
  You're right when it comes to the source code, and of course the protocol, but then it will be quite hard to fork both and then get a new community running on top of that.
- I really wonder where this thing about calling us tankies started, and why people still spread this nonsense. I certainly don't support the use of tanks against protestor, and never have. However I think that the working class and average people should get more power, and rich people shouldn't rule over us. Not sure how that is considered authoritarian.
  In fact this is the reason why I work on Lemmy: to give average people more power, and not let a couple billionaires like zuckerberg or musk control over our online lives.
- Woah ! That's what tankies means huh.
  While individual instances do have a significant degree of freedom, there is still potential issues with the lead developers being supporters of authoritarian ideologies, if only because that mindset will impact their understanding of how moderation/administration should work in their software.
  -so how much power do they have over everything ?
  
  They only have power over the instances they control. I haven't seen their ideology creep into development of the infrastructure at least.
  
  It dates back to the Soviets sending in the tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution and later Prague Revolution, though I think most people using it today are intending to invoke Tienanmen Square imagery, which is still totally on-the-nose.
  By definition, fediverse mods only have power over their own instances, so their power grows with their own userbase and shrinks any time another user/instance refuses to do business with them. Admins have vanishingly little power except where admins are ALSO mods of major instances.
  And if you still want all the same content with even less lemmy touch, kbin (or kbin-based instances) are an option -- the one I use for that very reason. Interoperability HUGELY hardens a platform against toxic personalities. Plus ernest seems to be very fucking low-key and chill.
  
  Not much. Are there a lot of communists on Lemmy? Yes. Is that because non communists were pushed out by the creators? No. I’m a syndicalist who blames the USSR for stabbing us in the back in Spain and giving the country to Franco. I also stand by Nestor Makhno’s stance against both red and white armies. Does that mean the creator of Lemmy dislikes me? Maybe. Am I afraid to express those positions on here? No.
  We have a strong left bent in part because open source software is popular with queer and left wing nerds. Also because there’s other alternatives that the far right prefers
  
  Instance admin only have power over their own instance (IE lemmy.ml mods cannot do anything on lemmy.world). Their power is fairly limitted as you can always move to a new instance if you're unhappy with them.
  The Lemmy developers have more power, as they develop the tools everyone uses, so they act as a sort of "director", being able to reinforce behaviours they want by improving tools and UI in areas they care about and vice-versa. That said, ultimately, its an open source project so if they piss-off too many people, someone else will split off their own version of Lemmy and effectively replace them - Kbin being a current competitor, for example.

bad
I don't know if you can reduce politics to "good" and "bad", but the main dev, dessalines, is enthusiastic about Stalin and was unhappy that the Soviet Union went away and such.
You can read some of his stuff here.
https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md
You have stuff like:
Ukraine now has a pro-US, nazi-glorifying government with ultranationalism, anti-semitism, neo-nazi pogroms, and attacks on LGBT groups.
It is a take that many, including myself, strongly disagree with, particularly given the context of the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia. I'd add that the "ml" in "lemmy.ml" was chosen to refer to "Marxist-Lenninism".
Is lemmy as whole affected by it because i think the two main guys who hold all the cards are the ones with these opinions ,like do they have any control on lemmy as whole in anyway ?
Well, they have a lot of influence, as they make the calls on how the software is developed. The software is open-source, though, and could be forked. I have seen some statements that concern me, like "we want to make it hard for right-wingers to use lemmy", which I don't think is a great take for forum software that would -- at least as I would like to see it -- become widely-used in a content-agnostic way for many forums. But thus far, I don't think that I've seen political policy decisions baked into the software package. Policy on lemmy.ml, sure.
If you don't like lemmy and want to avoid the developers, there's another software package, kbin, which can also communicate with the Threadiverse. It's done by some -- as far as I can tell -- pretty ordinary Polish guy. Note that I don't know what the state of the mobile clients is -- they were behind lemmy a few months back when I last looked, as they were still working on the API to expose to clients -- though the Web UI is fine. It also has some additional functionality, can interoperate with Mastodon as well.
The instance that Ernest, the lead kbin dev, runs is here:
https://kbin.social/
If you just want to use a lemmy instance that is content-agnostic and want to avoid lemmy.ml, lemmy.world is a large, popular one. It does defederate with some instances, though, which may or may not be okay with you. I use lemmy.today, which is on the US West Coast, and has specifically stated that they aim not to defederate with other instances.
EDIT: I'll add that I have both a kbin and lemmy account, since generally, if something breaks on one, it's working fine on the other, and it can be nice to have that as a backup. One of the perks of having a federated infrastructure with different software packages that can talk to each other.
EDIT2: If you're looking for a different lemmy or kbin instance to call home, I'd recommend the Fediverse Observer, which can help find a lemmy or kbin instance near you.
For kbin:
https://kbin.fediverse.observer/
For lemmy:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/
- I moved from kbin over to Lemmy when kbin was having some uptime issues a few months back. But I can confirm wholeheartedly that Ernest is a super genuine and nice guy, at least as far as any content he's ever posted to the internet.
  
  pretty ordinary Polish guy
  Ernest is a super genuine and nice guy,
  Oh, totally, no disagreement. When I said "ordinary", I wasn't trying to ding him -- he seems to be a great guy and all. I just mean that he isn't going around doing controversial political advocacy in conjunction with his project.
  I initially used kbin, hopped over to lemmy when it had a couple days where kbin.social was having some issues, then hopped back when the problematic 0.19.x lemmy releases caused a lot of problems on lemmy.today, and am currently back on lemmy.today.

the things i consider bad and not polical stance are : for instance i just don’t like trump because he is against t lgbt and being racist etc. Which are geniunly bad in my opinion and not just difference in opinions
I haven't run into anyone with a racism or anti LGBT stance on .ml, or grad or hexbear, unless you include shittalking white people. The only time I've seen Trump come up is to mock him, they just hate Joe Biden for his long list of crimes too.
Those instances have been the quickest to remove transphobia, meanwhile in other places it will often get straight up ignored/denied.
- Yeah hexbear, lemmygrad and lemmy.ml have been the most pro-LGBT and anti-racist lemmy instances in my experience, along with blahaj.zone

They aren't "bad", it's just that most people coming from reddit are liberals and as such won't agree with their leftist/communist takes.
Just join any general instance really. feddit.ch which you're on is one such instance.

The devs on Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml are proudly Communists which is no secret, but they are particularly pro-China and pro-Russia. Saying something that could be criticism of those countries often can get you banned for "Orientalism". This happens most often on news threads about Ukraine, but can happen anywhere there if they catch it.
That said, because they released the software as FOSS, they don't really dictate how to run communities not on those two sites, so everyone benefits.
There are various development pains and issues that slowly are being addressed. I'm most hopeful for Sublinks, the Java reimplementation and extension of Lemmy in development.

And if they are that bad why aren’t anyone forking it
There's more than one piece of software that is interoperable with the "Threadiverse." Kbin is known best and also has microblogging features (like Mastodon). There's a new one too, but I can't think of the name.
- The newer ones are:
  Mbin, a recent fork of /kbin - fedia.io is the largest server,
  PieFed
- disroot.org just set up a scribe server not so long ago
  
  First time I hear about scribe, I'll look it up

The instance you are on doesn't really matter that much unless the owner decides to shut it down.
Nobody's going to assume you're a Nazi.
- Wait so are they nazi's ?
  
  Nah, pro-authoritarian communists. They like to glorify Stalin if that gives you an idea of what they’re into.

I don't know if this is what you mean by forking Lemmy. but there are a ton of Lemmy instances that aren't lemmy.ml or ran by the .ml admins
https://join-lemmy.org/instances
There's also kbin instances as well!
https://fedidb.org/software/kbin

If you dislike an instance, you are free to make an account somewhere else and block that instance. There's nothing inherently bad with lemmy.ml; but check instance rules to see if you'd fit in it anyways.
- I have this is my second account main was on lemmy . I have linked the main on bios .

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