I’ve been trying to make people aware of Lemmy on discord and Mastodon, but it’s always met with resistance citing “the devs are pro authoritarianism tankies.” Kbin seems to be picking up steam because of the developer baggage.
Do you feel like this negative perception will hamstring Lemmy’s growth?
im just shooting that down outright, what about the devs or the server they run matters? as far as I can tell the software works fine, we can fork and run what we like, its a protocol not a proprietary system.
why are people saying the culture must match the devs? do you adopt the culture of all the devs that make the software you use?
do we all need to list the OS’s and software stacks we use so politics are clear?
this is silly.
I think it’s become an issue because the type of person to actively leave and protest Reddit will be sensitive, even if overly so, to issues like this.
if they can’t come to understand the nature of the opensource software that powers thier lives we might not be able to help them but we can work on messaging and education.
the tankies, if that is what they are, dont matter.
Oh I don’t disagree with you. It’s frustrating trying to explain this to this type of person though because they’re typically dead set on hating Lemmy by that point.
remember its a type of pre-poisoning thats being done there, people dont generally care until someone comes over pearls pre-clutched. We need to do better marketing mainly IMO.
RE: decentralization and control, we should likely be running forks for our instances rather than actual. There should at least be a few major forks to choose from too.
This. I grew up considering myself to be on the lunatic fringe of the left. It drove my conservative mother crazy. Then I got banned from WhitePeopleTwitter because apparently I’m a fascist.
elaborate lol
It matterd because the servers those devs run with their heavy pro authoritarian red fascist moderation and cultural bias were the two largest instances, the flagships, both by virtue of their size and their official nature. That size means they influence users’ overall experience of the lemmy network’s culture and atmosphere via posts and comments and votes, so yeah, you can sign up for a different instance and that local community won’t have that atmosphere and those moderation problems but you’re still connected in the network to the tankies and the tankies have the largest and most dominant instances so they have the most effect on the content of the network, and you can’t completely avoid them except by deferating and basically hamstringing yourself by separating from the two largest instances.
Thanks to Beehaw and especially lemmy.world though, I think this is rapidly changing and won’t be a significant problem for much longer, although there is the remaining concern that the developers’ biases will show through in how they develop the underlying lemmy server software. For instance, unlike Mastodon, right now there is no way for you as an individual to block an entire instance, and I foresee it possibly being difficult to convince the lemmy developers to allow that, since one of the hallmarks of Marxist-Leninist ideology is a focus on mass movement building where everyone is forced to interact and join this one giant movement, even with people they don’t like or can’t get a long with, which could make them hostile to allowing more freedom of association in the fediverse. I’m already seeing tankies from lemmygrad accusing instances that defederate from them of sectarianism and endangering the “movement”, in fact.