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.