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Comment by choiceschoices | Hacker News Reader

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This is lunacy, why would you ever think people choose software platform over which political beliefs they maintain. I am on a predominantly LGBT+ instance and they run pleroma cause it's everyone's preference. It's there any other platform where such a thing occurs?

This is a real thing. Pleroma's reputation on the #fediblock tag is largely "oh god it's another Pleroma with five anime girls who love to nazipost, you know what to do".

Mastodon admins don't see the Pleromas like yours. All we see is the problem ones. Yesterday I saw someone running a single-user Masto who was sharing a bit of code they knocked together to auto-defederate every Pleroma their Masto saw. They said they were fine with losing the obviously vanishingly-small number of non-nazi Pleromas.

I agree that this is fucked up. But this is the reputation Pleroma has among Masto admins. I don't know what Pleroma can do to change this, assuming they want to.

The assertion seems to be that federated social-networking software in the wild tends to split ideologically. Your assertion would counter that a bit. In the abstract, politics shouldn't matter in the development/use of neutral software.

This happens far more often than you seem to think.

> Many instances are quick to block single user Pleroma instances

Do you think this makes Mastodon look good? Quite the opposite.

No, I agree with you that it is quite the opposite, I think the culture war stuff that absolutely pervades all of the major ActivityPub implementations is a pox on the network, a serious problem that hampers the stated goals of the protocol designers and may completely doom the experiment in the long run

The people who block single-user Pleroma instances on sight are too mentally stunted to be worth communicating with in the first place.

Sad but unsurprising. It reminds me of the AR-15 vs AK-47 schism in the firearms community. A ton of Americans would hate on the AK as a "commie gun". They were unable to appreciate the technical merits of the platform due to their ideological blindness. I think that has largely changed with the younger generation of firearms-related content creators (see below) but damn, it's a shame that America's cultural divide is fracturing yet another technological community.

Personally I use whatever technology I want due to its merits and suitability for my use case. I don't care that Lemmy's dev is Marxist, Rust FTW!

examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb2Us5Lqr1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkJ2VZ24BiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJBugHgDi30

> you should be aware that your choice of software will broadcast your political allegiance

No. I refuse to allow such a reality to manifest itself.

Use the software which best suits your needs. I will not assess your political beliefs based on your software choices and I ask that you do the same for me.

If I researched the political alignment of all the developers of the software I want to use and only choose software made by developers whose politics sufficiently align with mine, I'd never be able to get anything done.

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