[flagged]
BUT!
Even stipulating everything you said is true does not mean we shouldn’t support Lemmy. Open source code can live or die on its own merits. To punish them in one area because of political views in another is another toxic manifestation of cancel culture.
Someone else linked to the GitHub project and said just click on some of their profiles. You'll see it right away.
You can ask for sources if you're curious, that's understandable, but it seems to me more like you're just trying to discredit here.
Anyone reading this, I urge you, go to lemmy.ML, look at one of the threads they have about China.
> To punish them in one area because of political views in another is another toxic manifestation of cancel culture.
More like basic common sense. Are you going to trust people who support authoritarian censorship with the open source platform you speak on?
That would be as silly as trusting the NSA to build it. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of interest there.
This isn't punishing someone in one area because of their views in another, this is an area in which those views are simply not acceptable at all.
Couldn't you just avoid that particular instance then?
First off, I'm opting to not use Lemmy.
I've swapped my whole computer stack except for one gaming PC to Linux. I adamantly avoid any hardware whose stack is owned by anyone in China, and I run a pretty tight ship when it comes to my firewall and networking.
Next on my list is getting my phone de googled.
In order to achieve a purity in your view would require a line-by-line political Bill Of Materials that includes the political beliefs at the time of the coders at time of each commit. It is nonsensical.
Well, no, I've given a very specific and reasonable reason. They support authoritarian censorship and control, states that perform authoritarian censorship and control.
They're trying to run an open message platform.
It's not just because they're bad people, it's because they support states that are involved in the active censorship of speech.
You're trusting them with a message platform that's supposed to promote free speech.
It's not emotional, that's not just them being bad. It is a hilarious and obvious conflict of interest.
> code is itself tainted
Yeah. If you can't trust the authors you can't trust the code. You can perform a audit on it, you can create a team that maintains it as a fork, and at that point it's safe.
Unless you're willing to do that work, and nobody's willing to do that work, it's not safe.
> In order to achieve a purity in your view would require a line-by-line political Bill Of Materials that includes the political beliefs at the time of the coders at time of each commit. It is nonsensical.
No, I just don't want the developers to be obvious and blatant supporters of what are basically fascist nations.
If they really love mixed housing developments I don't really care. It's not about their politics, it's about the fact that they have specifically very extreme politics that are a conflict of interest with the very software they're developing.
Why did you use the words “blatant” and “obvious” in this sentence?
I wouldn't want them to be hidden either, but I'm not going to notice if it's hidden and then I would tell you the same thing except instead of obvious and blatant I would say sneaky weasly and malicious.
I’m confused though, if you’re very adamant about not running code that was written by authoritarians, how do you use a computer at all?
I appreciate that you switched to Linux — it being open source means you (or your team) can audit it to make sure that it isn’t supporting genocide. That isn’t something that you could do with closed source software like Windows, so it makes sense with your ideological goal.
Considering the Herculean effort it takes to track the political leanings of contributors to the Linux kernel and the multitude of various packages, is there any open source software that you suggest people not run that doesn’t happen to be a Reddit competitor?
Edited for clarity
You're trying to argue to absurdity.
Here I have a concrete example of a group that is explicitly politically extreme. They are explicitly in contrast to the values of open source.
Linux, meanwhile, is an absolutely massive project with billions of eyes on it every day which is head and resisted multiple attempts to compromise it.
I'm confident that the software I'm running still has bugs holes and inroads to malicious actors.
But, like you said, you basically can't use a computer if you want to avoid them all together.
So you avoid the obvious cases, you do what you can, and you keep on going forward.
Same story with buying stuff made in China. You don't do it when you can, you do it when you have to. You support laws and regulations that encourage people to move away from it.
Be pragmatic, focus on what you can accomplish, and don't worry about being perfect.
What exactly does “bad faith” mean?
Edit:
To make myself clear: You propose that your issue with the Lemmy software is based on your strongly held principles. I have asked you about how those strongly held principles apply to your usage of software.
If your principles only apply to one piece of software, my response is that they are not principles at all and that you are working backwards from not liking Lemmy and creating justifications to support that. My point is that your argument appears to be either
a) incoherent Or b) itself in bad faith
That is all.
Or would you prefer to ban communists and their ideas from the internet? What would that make you?
You basically invented three things that I never said here.
I said they support China, and implicitly support the sort of authoritarian control that China represents.
That authoritarian control is fundamentally incompatible with open source, and free speech, and democracy, and most human rights.
If you support any of those things you would be a fool to support Lemmy.
In fact, one might say that it would make one a something of a useful idiot.
The Chinese government reserves the right to ban censor and shut down any form of online speech going on in the country.
In fact, they reserve the right to throw you in jail for doing it.
Where is ever an event or a situation or a topic of discussion which the state does not like they flip a couple of switches and all across the country firewalls begin blocking words, banning access to VPNs, and generally preventing those topics from being able to be discussed.
They believe this is good because it promotes social stability, when in reality it's just a massive system that empowers the government and ensures that the people can never easily disagree with it.
Anyone who supports such a system or a country who runs such a system should not be running and open source message board.
And at the end of the day unless you want to be running software on the public internet which is out of date, you're going to be running their updates, which gives them long-term control and ability to mess with the network after time.
Plus the basic fact that writing such a large and popularly used piece of software gives you a fair amount of social credibility and attention which is not served by those people.
If someone is willing to go and do the legwork of doing a full audit and commit to maintenance of the project in the future I would totally run that code.
Until someone does, you should stay the heck away from it.
I believe that the free interaction of ideas is invaluable to society. Suppressing dissent isn't just bad because it helps a government maintain a monopoly on power. It's bad because it creates an intellectual monoculture, and a monoculture is extremely vulnerable. Without exposure to a robust culture of debate and discussion, people are far more vulnerable to manipulation by the next great demagogue or by their country's propaganda or by their opinionated uncle. Citizens in a free nation need to learn to weigh ideas and discard the bad ones, and we build that capability by exposing people to many ideas, both good and bad.
If we continue this trend of suppressing any views that are distant from the mainstream, our ability to judge ideas will atrophy. We'll be doing the intellectual equivalent of becoming a couch potato: by never allowing ourselves to hear a narrative we dislike, we lose the ability to judge right and wrong for ourselves. We sacrifice our own judgement and replace it with the shifting tides of conventional morality.
In Fahrenheit 451, Faber (the covert intellectual) says this to Montag as his captain finishes defending their acts of censorship (book burning):
> All right, he's had his say. You must take it in. I'll say my say, too, in the next few hours. And you'll take it in. And you'll try to judge them and make your decision as to which way to jump, or fall. But I want it to be your decision, not mine, and not the Captain's. But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you now to know with which ear you'll listen.
My short response to this is that you can let people speak freely while not trusting them to run platforms where there are clear conflicts of interest.
I do not care that tankies exist. They can have their communities, they can run their communities, they can have their platform and try to make their point. That is fine, that is good, that is healthy.
They should not, however, be running the platform that you are trying to speak on. Lemmy is a platform that you are going to be trying to speak on, and it is a platform that they have control and power over.
As people who support authoritarian control, that power is going to lead to the sort of authoritarian monoculture that you do not want to see happen.
So you support the platforms that are actually pro free speech, that are actually not having this massive conflict of interest. You support platforms which you can trust to actually care about the values they are promoting.
Lemmy is not such a platform, you should not support it. Because if you do, they will close that door and they will empower the sort of authoritarianism that you fear will occur.
Adamantly defend their right to exist and speak freely, adamantly defend your own right to ensure they never hold any form of power, because they will take it and they will destroy you with it.
On the other hand, what you are proposing is that we should boycott the software because of the personal views of the people creating it. As that attitude has become widespread, it has already had very real and tangible negative effects on freedom of speech. When people get the sense that their expressed political opinions can have lasting negative effects on their lives and projects, they become much more reticent. It doesn't matter whether those negative effects are imposed by an autocrat, a tyrannical majority, or a loud minority, the effect is the same: silence.
I don't agree with "boycott" as a framing.
None of us have infinite time to contribute to open source projects – so we all have to pick and choose which projects to get involved in.
How do you decide? There are many relevant factors – interests, technical factors, career prospects, among many others – but the community is also an issue. If the culture of the community around an open source project puts you off, that's going to discourage you from getting involved in it.
The stuff I hear about the developers of Lemmy (and Mastodon too) – that they are dominated by people who are very political and hard-left – it doesn't make it sound like a welcoming community for someone who doesn't share those politics. Why bother getting involved when there are other projects with a culture I'd experience as more welcoming? That's not a "boycott", that's just rational decision-making. And if enough other people feel the same way, those projects will suffer for it – and maybe, at some point, someone will create a less political fork, and some people who are put-off by the culture of those projects might be willing to contribute to that fork instead.
Unless they sneak something into a binary.
Or create a backdoor that doesn't get noticed for months or years.
Or they just design the software to make it difficult to weed out incursion attempts from butt networks like we've seen Russia and China use to influence American opinions.
Or they use the fact that basically everyone joins the main instance of these networks to run regular censorship and defederate with anyone who goes against that.
There are many many have a news for abuse. We're only assume that because something is open source that it is trustworthy. When you make that assumption you're making a bad assumption and you're making yourself not secure.
Security takes actual vigilance, and a lot of that vigilance comes in the form of trusting the person you're using the code of.
> When people get the sense that their expressed political opinions can have lasting negative effects on their lives and projects, they become much more reticent
At the end of the day my priority of not enabling Chinese control over our lives in society is far more significant than protecting the Lemmy developers feelings.
I agree with you in abstract, we should hesitate to enact things like this unless it is strictly very important to do so.
This is a case where it is strictly very important to do so.
This is, I think, the problem. You're prioritizing your fear of an external threat over what I see as the much more real concern of growing democratic censorship within the US. I don't doubt that China is a threat, but all too often we become single-minded in defending against a single obvious enemy and lose sight of the much more subtle but no less dangerous threats that are closer to home.
EDIT: fwiw, I upvoted your top-level and wish that people hadn't flagged it.
No, both things are issues and both should be concerns. I generally support open source platforms because they generally do allow for people to speak their mind more freely and federation allows for a more open system.
If I was fearful of opinions from communists or people with bad political opinions I wouldn't support decentralized software at all. I'd support centralized clothes communities like reddit that have "the right opinions".
This isn't the case of being single-minded, this is a case of just genuinely the external threat being real and you needing to respond to it.
Follow the links for the people associated with the project and the links for which they provide for themselves. Note avatars, profile backgrounds, and posts.
That isn't supporting China or supporting genocide or engaging in genocide denial.
From what I've seen these people are very much on the other side of that line.