For any UI devs: I’ve starting working on a lemmy front end called
lemmy-ui-leptos [https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui-leptos] using leptos
[https://leptos.dev/], a Rust UI framework with isomorphic support, and tailwind
+ daisyUI [https://daisyui.com/] for the component styling. This could
eventually replace the frankenstein’s monster that lemmy-ui has become. Some
reasons for doing this: - lemmy-ui uses infernojs, which is based on the react
model. IMO is largely superseded by signal-based reactivity in use in android
jetpack-compose, SolidJS, and most new UI frameworks. - I had to hack on
isomorphic support / server-side-rendering to infernoJS, and it’s very messy.
Leptos has isomorphic support out of the box. - All the benefits of Rust over
javascript. - Since leptos is in Rust, we can import the lemmy types directly. -
I’ve been waiting for years for a good rust UI framework, and I think we’re
finally here with leptos or sycamore. - lemmy-ui uses bootstrap, which is
showing its age and limitations. Tailwind (and daisyUI) seem to be much more
future-proof. I plan on leaving the site design and component styling to other,
more skilled UI devs, while I work mostly on the auth, services, params, and
overall back-end structure. - Please use daisyUI classes tho whenever possible
over exhaustive tailwind ones. - I’d also like it if the UI could match that of
jerboa’s (whenever possible), so that a change in one could be represented in
the other, and so that things like badge appearance for admins, could be
recognizeable across lemmy’s front ends. You don’t really need to learn rust to
help out with this, as the components look very similar to JSX. Instructions for
running it are in the CONTRIBUTING.md
[https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui-leptos/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md] . Feel
free to contribute! Right now only the home page, and post pages are working,
but ready to be styled.
Quoting the author
I’ve starting working on a lemmy front end called lemmy-ui-leptos using leptos, a Rust UI framework with isomorphic support, and tailwind + daisyUI for the component styling. This could eventually replace the frankenstein’s monster that lemmy-ui has become.
The fediverse in general is the literal manifest of the means of production owned by the producers. Every denizen can see just about every post.
You would be hard pressed to not find the socialist ethos at play anywhere on the fediverse, not just Lemmy. And really that’s part of what gets hashed out here by broader adoption is just how ground level that gets.
The weird part is that whatever they think of dictators, they would know the model, and that gives me a bizarre amount of trust.
Sure! And I’m sorry in advance for the book, I’m literally around here studying this thing for this reason.
So it might help to understand Soviet as a pre Bolshevik term more resembling ‘council’ than a unitary block like a nation.
In the fediverse this is instances, they stand up, enroll users and give them voices. And if you graph a lot of the ethos it’s 1:1 from the ground up. For instance, you might say your posts here, once contributed are owned by everyone. You might also notice those with knowledge about the platform are maybe operating as a vanguard, you pick top or bottom (users and posts, or instances and software).
Historically part of the problem with distributed systems of independent operating electors is how they’re vulnerable either to local tribalism, warlordism, and a need for some degree of functional central control of core ethos.
The pile of ‘free market’ people mad at the phone company evolved into the modern Internet without a model, just chaos and genius. If the next wave is reactionary communists, we’re looking at something very different, but I’m not convinced it won’t mutate.
if this is communism the platform: I’m genuinely curious what crowd sourced central planning offers. The people who have studied that system, and it’s problems, are the ones in who have started the project. And they started with ‘to each for each’ as it’s core principle, but it’s easy to fork any foss project.
Part of what you learn when you start to read lefty philosophy is that they are (by volume and diversity), their own biggest critics. So there is going to be a plethora of times where we figure out of this is going to go pear shaped, and a ton of good or bad lessons that could come out of the canon.
Software isn’t politics, and the fediverse is also the very definition of a free market. Nobody is stopping you from profiting from the lemmy or ActivityPub project, as you can see from Meta’s interest in the project. I’m libertarian and I have contributed to the lemmy project because it interested me. I certainly don’t agree with the creators politically, but I think they make some decent software that I want to be a part of.
If it is political at all, it’s arguably anti-socialist because no instance has any control over other instances as everything is consensual. However, since everything is open, it does allow government surveillance unless you use a service like Matrix that’s E2E encrypted (and even then, you’d have to control membership).
So no, it’s not communist/socialist, it’s just decentralized and federated. Software isn’t political, so please stop trying to make it so.
I think you misunderstood socialism if centralized control was what you took from it. The are both centralized and decentralized varieties, the operation is in common good (or purpose). Most of the organizing principles at a microlevel you can find in non profits, co-ops etc, none of which demand any market conditions at all. Governments maintaining socialist claims often muck this up.
The phrase “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is definitely in line with the philosophy at play. There’s not a lot of profit motive to be found. It didn’t even have to be divorced from self interest since we all want a better platform.
I can respect a view that software is not politics, but the intentions to it are certainly wrapped in expression. Here the primary controllers were corporations of your bits and they are put sociocratically back in your hands like it or not.
But importantly you can’t take your ball and go home. What you contribute here lives in a zillion caches.
I feel like I understand socialism quite well. On one hand you have heavy top-down states like the USSR, and on the opposite end of the spectrum you have libertarian socialism as championed by people like Noam Chomsky (i.e. co-ops and unions in a pseudo-market economy). When I say “socialism” I generally mean the umbrella that covers both the former and democratic socialist states since both benefit from concentrating power into the hands of a few (e.g. look at how Western countries control information dissemination). Libertarian socialism just doesn’t exist outside of universities, so I tend to discount it.
There’s not a lot of profit motive to be found.
If you build it, they will come. Look at all the shilling that exists on SM, such as on Reddit, Twitter, etc.
In its current state, it’s essentially a hobby project. I work on Lemmy-related projects because I find it fun, not because I’m trying to overthrow capitalism or anything like that. Likewise, I use Linux because it solves my problems better than other systems, not because I’m trying to rob Microsoft or Apple of a sale.
I consider myself a pretty laissez faire libertarian, yet my interests align with socialists. If you look around on lemmy, you’ll find people from all stripes here, from anarchocapitalists to tankies, and everyone in between. The only people I don’t see much of here are Trump loyalists and fascists, and I think that has more to do with moderation than the nature of the software.
the intentions to it are certainly wrapped in expression
And it just so happens that people from a variety of political leanings value expression, they just want to filter out expression they don’t like. That’s where moderation comes in. You can have polar opposite instances with the same high level goals, just very different moderation. Look at the difference between Lemmygrad and Exploding Heads, two very different ideologies using the same platform with very different moderation.
And that’s what I mean when I say software isn’t politics.
So I’m stuck on a phone, you’ll have to forgive my lack of quotes since you actually have nice formating!
This is a purely tautological issue, and a product of my pisspoor audiencing. I mentioned ethos and pointed out governance is often bad at implementation, but I don’t think that’s collated well.
So it might help to understand that your references to socialist are looking at the business end of building government of a historians philosophy. Which is to say, a little removed from the ethos.
My chief bone to pick is socialist governance rarely if ever in modern parlance acknowledges what the social is in direct response to. But the much better example here is the most profound socialist institution in all of the United States, your local public library.
So just to back up, Marx’s contention was following capital interests throughout history, and specifically the Habsburg era, was a better indicator for why anything happened than any great man in the time. After all every great man has many powerful (or wealthy) men in his camp. And the Habsburgs were generally the wealthiest, even if their name wasn’t on a ton of letterhead.
The socialism/ist ethos says why not run things to put people over capital interests. Most of what comes next in various local histories tries to figure that out, lots of which I wish I knew a lot less about.
But, to answer the question on the spot about why lemmygrad and exploding heads, common purpose. Both acknowledges having a corporate 3rd party is bad for conversation and is willing to remove the incentive from the platform and leave moderation for how much to put up from the users. But we’re only talking about the platform, they don’t need common reasons for it.
It’s a cause (expression) at the expense of a business model, which in any sense is ‘seizure of the means of production’. Which is all I’m pointing to, solidarity around a goal, or many goals, achieved with the same work. Now if you’re talking about fediverse architecture we get a little more wonky, I made a long comment about how activitypub on Lemmy looks like pre Bolshevik soviets in actual structure that I stand by, but the point is the instances are flat using the same protocols.
Likewise I think if Linux meets your needs you’re in solidarity with a similar if stalled project. The difference is Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to tip over, reddit and Twitter aren’t profitable before they had to complete with a free product, which you’re helping make better.
As someone whose not in any position to do the work and just looks on: I am absolutely not trying to steal your agency, please do not stop because of me! Part of being the dope that studies how people organize is that I’m going to use words like politics and government rest of everybody, but these words are really about how we decide and how we organize at their roots.
I will say part of the dirty secret in socialist thinking is not to divorce the interest you have. The ‘find solidarity’ part of me would point out by keeping these projects in use and alive you make it a possibility for someone else interested later to also contribute or use it. Which in turn could be their own on ramp into future success. If you think something you’re involved with should continue on without you, well… Why?
I’m generally cagey when it comes to putting myself on any political map for reasons that are probably immediately obvious from my profile. But I come from the land of Locke and Mill and would probably still agree the government that governs best governs least as a general purpose maxim, even if the caveats get longer every year.
What wrapped me around the donut hole was noticing Trotsky and Jefferson both had a real axe to grind on entrenchment, and finally sitting down to read Kropotkin and Bakunin. We don’t have anything similar I ever found in the western canon.
I don’t find an ism that rings especially true at all, but I know a decent cause when I see one.
Inter-instance relations are ABSOLUTELY political in their own right.
For example db0 was/is working on some kind of add on to lemmy that would automatically defederate certain servers based on certain factors and a circle of trust or something (better explanation here https://dbzer0.com/blog/overseer-a-fediverse-chain-of-trust/ )
Anyway many of us admins were concerned about who controlled that system, how it could be abused, etc. it got pretty well, political, in the admin group chat.
In any situation where there’s a power dynamic- it is political. Software maintainers absolutely have some degree of power.
That’s not software being political, that’s admins using software for political goals. That same web of trust (or whatever it is) isn’t political, it only gets political when you choose who or what is in that web. It can be used to limit spam, or it can be used to silence opposing views.
A far left and a far right person could use the same software for opposite political ends. You can see precisely that with Lemmygrad vs Exploding Heads, both use the same software stack, the main difference is in the moderation. Lemmy itself isn’t really political, it’s just that the people admining the original instance have a certain agenda.
Some software is more compatible with certain ideologies than others (e.g. decentralized tools like blockchain is near useless for an autocratic regime), but even then you’d probably be surprised how your tool is being used (e.g. Tor was created by the US military, and now it’s largely use to subvert law enforcement and international espionage). It just so happens that humans are really good at molding tools to different purposes.
In your analogy, where does Fast.ly fit in by being the only entity capable of handling mastodon.social traffic?
In your analogy, what do you make of mastodon.world and lemmy.world, which is a private company offering the service for “free”?
In your analogy, what do you make of the numerous cases of instances shutting down because the admin could not keep with the growth, or got run over by freeloaders who pissed on the well?
If “the fediverse in general is the literal manifest of the means of production owned by the producers”, does this mean that its “economic output” will always be inferior to other economic systems that are driven by profit motive? IOW, does this mean that the Fediverse is always going to be a small thing who will never be able to replace Big Tech?
The fediverse to me will always be an expanding niche, I don’t think the network effect social growth works without cash. If your looking to measure by quality of dialogue instead of growth I think this presents the best option. There’s plenty of economic benefit beyond ad sales from good discourse.
Instead you’re looking a million AOL install disk moments until ubiquity, if it doesn’t fall apart first.
Instances shutting down is actually markedly like the way famine, war or anything else beyond my control as your average user would have pushed us to other reps. You can pick up and move, but how much of your stuff? Open question. Long term it should be feasible for your own instance to fire up, fetch messages and close again, so in theory you could keep all of it.
Now hardest: scale and cost, which I’d really contend are the same problem. If you look at how such systems are introduced you find advocates for vanguard, reps, workers tribunals and nothing quite ever sticks without some lingering problems. And the reality is the web of our modern universe isn’t going to independently operate with anything.
I don’t think anything but a charitable model gets it off the ground, the same way I don’t think the Internet is a thing without the crazy good folks running BBS boards. But it should be institutional as broadly as possible if you want long term success and trust in platform.
I think perhaps you may be confusing nobody to assert ownership of the bits, with the supposition that there is no cost on delivery.
the supposition that there is no cost on delivery.
The absolute opposite, actually. There is a cost to content distribution and for the maintenance of the service beyond the servers. Moderation, system administration, bug fixing, security research, optimizations in storage…
Putting up a server is the easy part. Ensuring that it can serve its users well, not so much. To do it properly, it becomes a part-time job. Now that there is an element of novelty to it, we will see many people sticking around to this work, but as the novelty wears off, they will either treat it like work or stop doing it altogether. We can see that happening already with Mastodon.
The reality is you already know there are people to do much of that job. A local ran a BBS for a town of 15k where I lived growing up. The moderators at Reddit were never paid, but they did it.
Point taken they whether they will do it here, but I think the descent from ubiquity to hobbyism again might do social media some good.
I’ve been through the collapse of the last vestiges of both Usenet and independent message boards, so I’m familiar with the perils of funding, and the deceptive costs of free. But wikipedia lives, hell even headfi still lives, there is a place within any market to be carried by it’s enthusiastic.
Then they’ll certainly have a lot more centralized control in mind than I would. But I’ve been too too many punk concerts and heard poser, and seen too many misplaced lobs of entryism to dismiss anyone behind a pejorative. Especially while the free speech instances are running the same software right along with beehaw.
And more importantly some people can be smart at one thing and dumb elsewhere, just look at Ben Carson.
It’s still not great. Programming is a form of communication, and the platforms you design will reflect the kinds of messages you want to nurture and propogate. I made terms with it, electing to use lemmy in the fediverse on an instance they don’t manage (theirs are lemmy.ml and lammygrad.ml), because kbin wasn’t quite prime time ready yet. But if I were going to keep using Lemmy once kbin is more mature, lemmy would need to be developed with a decentralized governance committee or there would need to be a hard fork
But nothing it stopping you from running your own instance or joining one with moderation you agree with. You can even modify the source code to remove the slur filter and go 100% Nazi if you want.
I don’t have an account at lemmy.ml and I doubt I ever will. I also don’t sub to all that many of their communities, and those I do have very low likelihood of ever triggering that filter.
I consider myself a free market libertarian and I have contributed to the lemmy project. There are certainly things I disagree with, but in general I think it’s an interesting project worth spending my time on. And none of my complaints have anything to do with politics, but are more technical in nature (i.e. I have serious concerns about scaling). So I’m working on something lemmy adjacent that I think is interesting to address my specific concerns (basically fully distributed like BitTorrent), but I continue to use and contribute to Lemmy in the meantime.
So no, it’s not communist, socialist, or any other form of political ideology, it’s just a federated social network.
@sugar_in_your_tea@NotAPenguin I think I agree with you in general and I’m really not worried about some set of words I might not see, but it is a very strange position from the project runners to make this decision in this way imo. I just don’t love seeing FOSS owners tossing a constraint in like this; particularly hardcoding the thing. It makes me anxious in a somewhat slippery slope kinda way that they might flip some other ideological switch on people
But the fact that we’re talking about it means the system is working as intended. Someone noticed something odd in the code and raised a concern to discuss it. I also disagree with the maintainers on this, but from a different angle (i.e. I don’t think built-in filters actually work, we should instead be relying on moderators and moderation tools).
At the end of the day, the maintainers get to choose what changes to accept, and contributors can decide whether to contribute. If contributors are annoyed enough, they can easily fork the project. That’s how open source projects work.
It’s not a democratic system, it’s a consensus system, and the community can choose which fork to follow.
@sugar_in_your_tea yeah I think we’re in agreement here. And I agree it does mean that FOSS works. Nice thing too is the protocol isn’t at all locked down. They could entirely lose the plot and hardcode some insane stuff into their #activitypub implementation and we could still more or less play from another instance of another service from what I understand
Yup, and there are some good examples of projects that have done something similar, such as GrapheneOS which broke from CopperheadOS. Open source can be messy, but at least there’s the option to fork the project.
The Lemmy developers can do good things and increase net wellbeing while being complete morons. There is nothing in Lemmy’s license that says that by using their software you need to support their ideologies.
The Christian teaching of “hate the sin, love the sinner” is the best approach here. Showing support for what the lemmy devs are doing while showing how despicable are their beliefs and stating where are your differences will always work better than trying to boycott their (non-stupid-belief-related) work.
Exactly. I consider myself libertarian and I enjoy hacking on lemmy-related projects. I’ve contributed to some, and started building others. I think it’s a cool project.
I also 100% disagree with the creators ideologically. I think it’s really cringy that one of the main devs has a public set of communist/socialist essays, but that doesn’t impact me in any way. I’m a huge fan of free and open source software, and I enjoy working on lemmy projects, so I’ll continue as long as I find value in it.
The problem is giving their project support also gives them a bigger platform and more influence which could lead to more people being exposed to their beliefs or them having a bigger impact
No, one does not follow from the other, especially for open source projects. Quite the opposite: for the project to grow, it will need to attract more people. To attract more people, they will need to dial down their extremist positions. If they don’t they will end up having their project forked.
Also,
being exposed to their beliefs
Great. Let more people be exposed to their beliefs so that they can learn how stupid they are.
Imagine if we did this for large companies owned by billionaires. Why is nobody talking about a board of director (Thiel) from Meta literally being one of the top donors for the republicans, supporting many of those congressional candidates that claimed there was voter fraud going on in 2020.
Perhaps we should flock back to Reddit instead, partly owned by a Chinese company. Who also support Russia and deny human rights violations.
Or why not head over to Twitter owned by the worlds richest man using it as is very own playground, supporting Trump and DeSantis, censoring Turkish dissidents and journalists writing about him in negative light.
So… That’s an overly simplistic view of the situation. Remember, there’s also the fallacy fallacy, which states that just because someone commits a fallacy doesn’t mean they are wrong. Whataboutism isn’t just a fallacy, you can use it to see your own inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
What he’s saying is that Reddit isn’t any better, Billionaries are terrible and own everything, and all platforms censor. Open source/decentralization is the best alternative, no matter who the devs are. Is Lemmy so much worse than other platforms? Or even… bad at all?
Statement: Lemmy is bad because the developers are ML and support CCP
Response: Reddit is bad because its partly owned by a Chinese company
->Whataboutism!!!<-
Or… simply understand that just because X developers have an opinion you don’t agree with, or a platform is owned by someone you don’t agree with, you can still engage on that platform for various reasons…
What’s your point? I understand that you don’t sympathize with the devs political position but so what? Either you see some point in lemmy despite this like most people on here who don’t agree with them, or you don’t and then you should just log off.
I’m not particularly interested in seeing this argument being hashed out anytime lemmy development is mentioned so please stop making this comment on unrelated threads.
This user is already getting ratiod, but for anyone who thinks this is a reasonable comment…
So… Twitter is now owned by a dictator that now claims that ‘cis gender’ is a slur. Seems like he is barreling towards fascism to me. Facebook is owned by, maybe not a fascist, but someone that allows fascist content on their platform in order to increase revenue. They even admit that it is good for business. The AI researchers at Facebook trying to reduce fascist content were fired because they were actually effective, but would loose the company money. They also own threads, the twitter alternative. The Reddit CEO has used authoritarian methods to undo protesting on the platform. Sounds like it’s going in the wrong direction…
Even so, the united states performs human rights violations all the time, inside the US, and outside using the military. You don’t see CEOs and politicians denouncing the USA after committing human rights violations, do you? Do you know all of the Chinese politician opinions on the matter?
If you want to avoid all forms of authoritarianism, you could live under a rock. The fact of the matter is that open source and decentralization is the absolute best way to avoid authoritarianism, no matter who writes the code. Fork it if you don’t like it.
It’s not closed off no, try this link instead, it’s the same link but in a different format: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/47012/Update-from-Lemmy-after-the-Reddit-blackout-From-the-Lemmy#entry-comment-196579
Ive removed this comment due to being unrelated to the actual topic of the post which is the new lemmy frontend. Reminder to keep talks here about rust rather than politics. Theres a ton of other communities for that and the lemmy dev politics have already been discussed heavily
It’s always relevant when the dev of what is being discussed denies human rights violations by authoritarian governments, why is that something you want to hide?
The core dev of said software put it in a position where it can be forked at any time. If they decide to go crazy in the future and affect how we use the platform were just going to make a fork here and then continue on that. Until then there’s just a separation of the developer and the software
(Especially since this is a community for discussing the software due to being c/rust/)
Theres also way more contributors than just dessalines and nutomic for things relating to lemmy now after the wave of people from reddit
Removed by mod
It’s not like they are programming communism into Lemmy.
The fediverse in general is the literal manifest of the means of production owned by the producers. Every denizen can see just about every post.
You would be hard pressed to not find the socialist ethos at play anywhere on the fediverse, not just Lemmy. And really that’s part of what gets hashed out here by broader adoption is just how ground level that gets.
The weird part is that whatever they think of dictators, they would know the model, and that gives me a bizarre amount of trust.
Can you explain this more?
Sure! And I’m sorry in advance for the book, I’m literally around here studying this thing for this reason.
So it might help to understand Soviet as a pre Bolshevik term more resembling ‘council’ than a unitary block like a nation.
In the fediverse this is instances, they stand up, enroll users and give them voices. And if you graph a lot of the ethos it’s 1:1 from the ground up. For instance, you might say your posts here, once contributed are owned by everyone. You might also notice those with knowledge about the platform are maybe operating as a vanguard, you pick top or bottom (users and posts, or instances and software).
Historically part of the problem with distributed systems of independent operating electors is how they’re vulnerable either to local tribalism, warlordism, and a need for some degree of functional central control of core ethos.
The pile of ‘free market’ people mad at the phone company evolved into the modern Internet without a model, just chaos and genius. If the next wave is reactionary communists, we’re looking at something very different, but I’m not convinced it won’t mutate.
if this is communism the platform: I’m genuinely curious what crowd sourced central planning offers. The people who have studied that system, and it’s problems, are the ones in who have started the project. And they started with ‘to each for each’ as it’s core principle, but it’s easy to fork any foss project.
Part of what you learn when you start to read lefty philosophy is that they are (by volume and diversity), their own biggest critics. So there is going to be a plethora of times where we figure out of this is going to go pear shaped, and a ton of good or bad lessons that could come out of the canon.
Software isn’t politics, and the fediverse is also the very definition of a free market. Nobody is stopping you from profiting from the lemmy or ActivityPub project, as you can see from Meta’s interest in the project. I’m libertarian and I have contributed to the lemmy project because it interested me. I certainly don’t agree with the creators politically, but I think they make some decent software that I want to be a part of.
If it is political at all, it’s arguably anti-socialist because no instance has any control over other instances as everything is consensual. However, since everything is open, it does allow government surveillance unless you use a service like Matrix that’s E2E encrypted (and even then, you’d have to control membership).
So no, it’s not communist/socialist, it’s just decentralized and federated. Software isn’t political, so please stop trying to make it so.
I think you misunderstood socialism if centralized control was what you took from it. The are both centralized and decentralized varieties, the operation is in common good (or purpose). Most of the organizing principles at a microlevel you can find in non profits, co-ops etc, none of which demand any market conditions at all. Governments maintaining socialist claims often muck this up.
The phrase “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is definitely in line with the philosophy at play. There’s not a lot of profit motive to be found. It didn’t even have to be divorced from self interest since we all want a better platform.
I can respect a view that software is not politics, but the intentions to it are certainly wrapped in expression. Here the primary controllers were corporations of your bits and they are put sociocratically back in your hands like it or not.
But importantly you can’t take your ball and go home. What you contribute here lives in a zillion caches.
Edit: ‘r’
I feel like I understand socialism quite well. On one hand you have heavy top-down states like the USSR, and on the opposite end of the spectrum you have libertarian socialism as championed by people like Noam Chomsky (i.e. co-ops and unions in a pseudo-market economy). When I say “socialism” I generally mean the umbrella that covers both the former and democratic socialist states since both benefit from concentrating power into the hands of a few (e.g. look at how Western countries control information dissemination). Libertarian socialism just doesn’t exist outside of universities, so I tend to discount it.
If you build it, they will come. Look at all the shilling that exists on SM, such as on Reddit, Twitter, etc.
In its current state, it’s essentially a hobby project. I work on Lemmy-related projects because I find it fun, not because I’m trying to overthrow capitalism or anything like that. Likewise, I use Linux because it solves my problems better than other systems, not because I’m trying to rob Microsoft or Apple of a sale.
I consider myself a pretty laissez faire libertarian, yet my interests align with socialists. If you look around on lemmy, you’ll find people from all stripes here, from anarchocapitalists to tankies, and everyone in between. The only people I don’t see much of here are Trump loyalists and fascists, and I think that has more to do with moderation than the nature of the software.
And it just so happens that people from a variety of political leanings value expression, they just want to filter out expression they don’t like. That’s where moderation comes in. You can have polar opposite instances with the same high level goals, just very different moderation. Look at the difference between Lemmygrad and Exploding Heads, two very different ideologies using the same platform with very different moderation.
And that’s what I mean when I say software isn’t politics.
So I’m stuck on a phone, you’ll have to forgive my lack of quotes since you actually have nice formating!
This is a purely tautological issue, and a product of my pisspoor audiencing. I mentioned ethos and pointed out governance is often bad at implementation, but I don’t think that’s collated well.
So it might help to understand that your references to socialist are looking at the business end of building government of a historians philosophy. Which is to say, a little removed from the ethos.
My chief bone to pick is socialist governance rarely if ever in modern parlance acknowledges what the social is in direct response to. But the much better example here is the most profound socialist institution in all of the United States, your local public library.
So just to back up, Marx’s contention was following capital interests throughout history, and specifically the Habsburg era, was a better indicator for why anything happened than any great man in the time. After all every great man has many powerful (or wealthy) men in his camp. And the Habsburgs were generally the wealthiest, even if their name wasn’t on a ton of letterhead.
The socialism/ist ethos says why not run things to put people over capital interests. Most of what comes next in various local histories tries to figure that out, lots of which I wish I knew a lot less about.
But, to answer the question on the spot about why lemmygrad and exploding heads, common purpose. Both acknowledges having a corporate 3rd party is bad for conversation and is willing to remove the incentive from the platform and leave moderation for how much to put up from the users. But we’re only talking about the platform, they don’t need common reasons for it.
It’s a cause (expression) at the expense of a business model, which in any sense is ‘seizure of the means of production’. Which is all I’m pointing to, solidarity around a goal, or many goals, achieved with the same work. Now if you’re talking about fediverse architecture we get a little more wonky, I made a long comment about how activitypub on Lemmy looks like pre Bolshevik soviets in actual structure that I stand by, but the point is the instances are flat using the same protocols.
Likewise I think if Linux meets your needs you’re in solidarity with a similar if stalled project. The difference is Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to tip over, reddit and Twitter aren’t profitable before they had to complete with a free product, which you’re helping make better.
As someone whose not in any position to do the work and just looks on: I am absolutely not trying to steal your agency, please do not stop because of me! Part of being the dope that studies how people organize is that I’m going to use words like politics and government rest of everybody, but these words are really about how we decide and how we organize at their roots.
I will say part of the dirty secret in socialist thinking is not to divorce the interest you have. The ‘find solidarity’ part of me would point out by keeping these projects in use and alive you make it a possibility for someone else interested later to also contribute or use it. Which in turn could be their own on ramp into future success. If you think something you’re involved with should continue on without you, well… Why?
I’m generally cagey when it comes to putting myself on any political map for reasons that are probably immediately obvious from my profile. But I come from the land of Locke and Mill and would probably still agree the government that governs best governs least as a general purpose maxim, even if the caveats get longer every year.
What wrapped me around the donut hole was noticing Trotsky and Jefferson both had a real axe to grind on entrenchment, and finally sitting down to read Kropotkin and Bakunin. We don’t have anything similar I ever found in the western canon.
I don’t find an ism that rings especially true at all, but I know a decent cause when I see one.
Inter-instance relations are ABSOLUTELY political in their own right.
For example db0 was/is working on some kind of add on to lemmy that would automatically defederate certain servers based on certain factors and a circle of trust or something (better explanation here https://dbzer0.com/blog/overseer-a-fediverse-chain-of-trust/ )
Anyway many of us admins were concerned about who controlled that system, how it could be abused, etc. it got pretty well, political, in the admin group chat.
In any situation where there’s a power dynamic- it is political. Software maintainers absolutely have some degree of power.
That’s not software being political, that’s admins using software for political goals. That same web of trust (or whatever it is) isn’t political, it only gets political when you choose who or what is in that web. It can be used to limit spam, or it can be used to silence opposing views.
A far left and a far right person could use the same software for opposite political ends. You can see precisely that with Lemmygrad vs Exploding Heads, both use the same software stack, the main difference is in the moderation. Lemmy itself isn’t really political, it’s just that the people admining the original instance have a certain agenda.
Some software is more compatible with certain ideologies than others (e.g. decentralized tools like blockchain is near useless for an autocratic regime), but even then you’d probably be surprised how your tool is being used (e.g. Tor was created by the US military, and now it’s largely use to subvert law enforcement and international espionage). It just so happens that humans are really good at molding tools to different purposes.
In your analogy, where does Fast.ly fit in by being the only entity capable of handling mastodon.social traffic?
In your analogy, what do you make of mastodon.world and lemmy.world, which is a private company offering the service for “free”?
In your analogy, what do you make of the numerous cases of instances shutting down because the admin could not keep with the growth, or got run over by freeloaders who pissed on the well?
If “the fediverse in general is the literal manifest of the means of production owned by the producers”, does this mean that its “economic output” will always be inferior to other economic systems that are driven by profit motive? IOW, does this mean that the Fediverse is always going to be a small thing who will never be able to replace Big Tech?
So in reverse order:
The fediverse to me will always be an expanding niche, I don’t think the network effect social growth works without cash. If your looking to measure by quality of dialogue instead of growth I think this presents the best option. There’s plenty of economic benefit beyond ad sales from good discourse.
Instead you’re looking a million AOL install disk moments until ubiquity, if it doesn’t fall apart first.
Instances shutting down is actually markedly like the way famine, war or anything else beyond my control as your average user would have pushed us to other reps. You can pick up and move, but how much of your stuff? Open question. Long term it should be feasible for your own instance to fire up, fetch messages and close again, so in theory you could keep all of it.
Now hardest: scale and cost, which I’d really contend are the same problem. If you look at how such systems are introduced you find advocates for vanguard, reps, workers tribunals and nothing quite ever sticks without some lingering problems. And the reality is the web of our modern universe isn’t going to independently operate with anything.
I don’t think anything but a charitable model gets it off the ground, the same way I don’t think the Internet is a thing without the crazy good folks running BBS boards. But it should be institutional as broadly as possible if you want long term success and trust in platform.
I think perhaps you may be confusing nobody to assert ownership of the bits, with the supposition that there is no cost on delivery.
The absolute opposite, actually. There is a cost to content distribution and for the maintenance of the service beyond the servers. Moderation, system administration, bug fixing, security research, optimizations in storage…
Putting up a server is the easy part. Ensuring that it can serve its users well, not so much. To do it properly, it becomes a part-time job. Now that there is an element of novelty to it, we will see many people sticking around to this work, but as the novelty wears off, they will either treat it like work or stop doing it altogether. We can see that happening already with Mastodon.
The reality is you already know there are people to do much of that job. A local ran a BBS for a town of 15k where I lived growing up. The moderators at Reddit were never paid, but they did it.
Point taken they whether they will do it here, but I think the descent from ubiquity to hobbyism again might do social media some good.
I’ve been through the collapse of the last vestiges of both Usenet and independent message boards, so I’m familiar with the perils of funding, and the deceptive costs of free. But wikipedia lives, hell even headfi still lives, there is a place within any market to be carried by it’s enthusiastic.
There’s a difference between a tankie and a communist, and they are tankies.
Then they’ll certainly have a lot more centralized control in mind than I would. But I’ve been too too many punk concerts and heard poser, and seen too many misplaced lobs of entryism to dismiss anyone behind a pejorative. Especially while the free speech instances are running the same software right along with beehaw.
And more importantly some people can be smart at one thing and dumb elsewhere, just look at Ben Carson.
It’s still not great. Programming is a form of communication, and the platforms you design will reflect the kinds of messages you want to nurture and propogate. I made terms with it, electing to use lemmy in the fediverse on an instance they don’t manage (theirs are lemmy.ml and lammygrad.ml), because kbin wasn’t quite prime time ready yet. But if I were going to keep using Lemmy once kbin is more mature, lemmy would need to be developed with a decentralized governance committee or there would need to be a hard fork
I mean they kinda are, they run one of the biggest instances which of course will get a lot of attention because it’s run by the developers.
On that instance they censor criticism of china and other such topics.
There was also the weird case of the hardcoded slur filter
But nothing it stopping you from running your own instance or joining one with moderation you agree with. You can even modify the source code to remove the slur filter and go 100% Nazi if you want.
I don’t have an account at lemmy.ml and I doubt I ever will. I also don’t sub to all that many of their communities, and those I do have very low likelihood of ever triggering that filter.
I consider myself a free market libertarian and I have contributed to the lemmy project. There are certainly things I disagree with, but in general I think it’s an interesting project worth spending my time on. And none of my complaints have anything to do with politics, but are more technical in nature (i.e. I have serious concerns about scaling). So I’m working on something lemmy adjacent that I think is interesting to address my specific concerns (basically fully distributed like BitTorrent), but I continue to use and contribute to Lemmy in the meantime.
So no, it’s not communist, socialist, or any other form of political ideology, it’s just a federated social network.
@sugar_in_your_tea @NotAPenguin I think I agree with you in general and I’m really not worried about some set of words I might not see, but it is a very strange position from the project runners to make this decision in this way imo. I just don’t love seeing FOSS owners tossing a constraint in like this; particularly hardcoding the thing. It makes me anxious in a somewhat slippery slope kinda way that they might flip some other ideological switch on people
But the fact that we’re talking about it means the system is working as intended. Someone noticed something odd in the code and raised a concern to discuss it. I also disagree with the maintainers on this, but from a different angle (i.e. I don’t think built-in filters actually work, we should instead be relying on moderators and moderation tools).
At the end of the day, the maintainers get to choose what changes to accept, and contributors can decide whether to contribute. If contributors are annoyed enough, they can easily fork the project. That’s how open source projects work.
It’s not a democratic system, it’s a consensus system, and the community can choose which fork to follow.
@sugar_in_your_tea yeah I think we’re in agreement here. And I agree it does mean that FOSS works. Nice thing too is the protocol isn’t at all locked down. They could entirely lose the plot and hardcode some insane stuff into their #activitypub implementation and we could still more or less play from another instance of another service from what I understand
Yup, and there are some good examples of projects that have done something similar, such as GrapheneOS which broke from CopperheadOS. Open source can be messy, but at least there’s the option to fork the project.
The Lemmy developers can do good things and increase net wellbeing while being complete morons. There is nothing in Lemmy’s license that says that by using their software you need to support their ideologies.
The Christian teaching of “hate the sin, love the sinner” is the best approach here. Showing support for what the lemmy devs are doing while showing how despicable are their beliefs and stating where are your differences will always work better than trying to boycott their (non-stupid-belief-related) work.
Exactly. I consider myself libertarian and I enjoy hacking on lemmy-related projects. I’ve contributed to some, and started building others. I think it’s a cool project.
I also 100% disagree with the creators ideologically. I think it’s really cringy that one of the main devs has a public set of communist/socialist essays, but that doesn’t impact me in any way. I’m a huge fan of free and open source software, and I enjoy working on lemmy projects, so I’ll continue as long as I find value in it.
The problem is giving their project support also gives them a bigger platform and more influence which could lead to more people being exposed to their beliefs or them having a bigger impact
Why are you posting on lemmy if you don’t think we should support lemmy?
No, one does not follow from the other, especially for open source projects. Quite the opposite: for the project to grow, it will need to attract more people. To attract more people, they will need to dial down their extremist positions. If they don’t they will end up having their project forked.
Also,
Great. Let more people be exposed to their beliefs so that they can learn how stupid they are.
Imagine if we did this for large companies owned by billionaires. Why is nobody talking about a board of director (Thiel) from Meta literally being one of the top donors for the republicans, supporting many of those congressional candidates that claimed there was voter fraud going on in 2020.
Perhaps we should flock back to Reddit instead, partly owned by a Chinese company. Who also support Russia and deny human rights violations.
Or why not head over to Twitter owned by the worlds richest man using it as is very own playground, supporting Trump and DeSantis, censoring Turkish dissidents and journalists writing about him in negative light.
I will take “What is a good example of Whataboutism?” for $400, Alex.
So… That’s an overly simplistic view of the situation. Remember, there’s also the fallacy fallacy, which states that just because someone commits a fallacy doesn’t mean they are wrong. Whataboutism isn’t just a fallacy, you can use it to see your own inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
What he’s saying is that Reddit isn’t any better, Billionaries are terrible and own everything, and all platforms censor. Open source/decentralization is the best alternative, no matter who the devs are. Is Lemmy so much worse than other platforms? Or even… bad at all?
Statement: Lemmy is bad because the developers are ML and support CCP Response: Reddit is bad because its partly owned by a Chinese company ->Whataboutism!!!<- Or… simply understand that just because X developers have an opinion you don’t agree with, or a platform is owned by someone you don’t agree with, you can still engage on that platform for various reasons…
We all think Meta is shit.
People complain about tencent all the time.
We also all think twitter is shit.
Oh no we better stop paying for their software…
Oh wait
What’s your point? I understand that you don’t sympathize with the devs political position but so what? Either you see some point in lemmy despite this like most people on here who don’t agree with them, or you don’t and then you should just log off.
I’m not particularly interested in seeing this argument being hashed out anytime lemmy development is mentioned so please stop making this comment on unrelated threads.
This user is already getting ratiod, but for anyone who thinks this is a reasonable comment…
So… Twitter is now owned by a dictator that now claims that ‘cis gender’ is a slur. Seems like he is barreling towards fascism to me. Facebook is owned by, maybe not a fascist, but someone that allows fascist content on their platform in order to increase revenue. They even admit that it is good for business. The AI researchers at Facebook trying to reduce fascist content were fired because they were actually effective, but would loose the company money. They also own threads, the twitter alternative. The Reddit CEO has used authoritarian methods to undo protesting on the platform. Sounds like it’s going in the wrong direction…
Even so, the united states performs human rights violations all the time, inside the US, and outside using the military. You don’t see CEOs and politicians denouncing the USA after committing human rights violations, do you? Do you know all of the Chinese politician opinions on the matter?
If you want to avoid all forms of authoritarianism, you could live under a rock. The fact of the matter is that open source and decentralization is the absolute best way to avoid authoritarianism, no matter who writes the code. Fork it if you don’t like it.
Whenever I click on the link it prompts me to register on kbin. Is it a closed off instance?
It’s not closed off no, try this link instead, it’s the same link but in a different format:
https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/47012/Update-from-Lemmy-after-the-Reddit-blackout-From-the-Lemmy#entry-comment-196579
That worked, thanks
Ive removed this comment due to being unrelated to the actual topic of the post which is the new lemmy frontend. Reminder to keep talks here about rust rather than politics. Theres a ton of other communities for that and the lemmy dev politics have already been discussed heavily
It’s always relevant when the dev of what is being discussed denies human rights violations by authoritarian governments, why is that something you want to hide?
The core dev of said software put it in a position where it can be forked at any time. If they decide to go crazy in the future and affect how we use the platform were just going to make a fork here and then continue on that. Until then there’s just a separation of the developer and the software
(Especially since this is a community for discussing the software due to being c/rust/)
Theres also way more contributors than just dessalines and nutomic for things relating to lemmy now after the wave of people from reddit
Good, I’m a Tankie too.
Do you support the CCP and deny human rights violations too?
(1). Yes and (2). Only the ones that didn’t happen