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> Are you going to trust people who support authoritarian censorship with the open source platform you speak on?

Couldn't you just avoid that particular instance then?

Yes, you could, if you want to also audit their code base and maintain their code base going into the future indefinitely.

What is your current system to make sure that the code that you run on your machine isn’t politically totalitarian?

You're asking this in bad faith, but...

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.

There isn’t any response to your point that can’t easily be deflected as being in “bad faith” because your own argument is an emotional appeal. Your position is that the people you despise are so bad that their code is itself tainted to the extent that even running it runs the risk of… genocide or something?

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.

> Your position is that the people you despise are so bad that

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.

> No, I just don't want the developers to be obvious and blatant supporters of what are basically fascist nations.

Why did you use the words “blatant” and “obvious” in this sentence?

Because it's obvious and blatant?

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.

Thank you for clarifying that you don’t want to run code written by people that support authoritarianism regardless of their public stance on that.

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

This is where I come back to pointing that your arguing in bad faith here.

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.

Is there a single other piece of open source software that you feel this strongly about? Just one example?

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.

OK, I briefly looked at posts on Lemmy.ml. I saw nothing about China or communism. But so what if it is there? Other people posting on a particular instance doesn't reflect at all on the Lemmy code or project. Is it so hard to link to something specific and offensive the authors themselves wrote or did?

The lemmy.ml authors appear to be communists. Their ideology and support of China doesn’t mean they are somehow funded or corrupted by China. That is an irrational and conspiratorial line of thought.

Or would you prefer to ban communists and their ideas from the internet? What would that make you?

I never said they are funded by China. I didn't say but they were corrupted by them either. I also didn't say they should be banned from the internet.

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.

I think you’re going to have to be more specific with what you mean by “authoritarian control” because I have a feeling that there are some fundamental differences between the way China operates and the way an open source message board project operates.

Authoritarian control.

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.

I really don’t think the argument that because China is authoritarian, by your measure, internet communists will do ??? to mess with private instances holds any water.

I'm making the argument that because the developers of living support China and their forms of authoritarian control they are likely to publish updates and make changes to their software which enables and helps to promote those ideals that are ultimately against the ideals of all things open source.

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.

> 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.