Comment by bioemerl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bioemerl | Hacker News Reader

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> 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

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.

Lemmy isn't a platform at all. It's a piece of software that can be used to run many platforms. The software is open source, so if the creators put crap into it for censorship they will rightly get called out for it, as already happened with the slur filter. In the meantime literally anyone can spin up an instance and thereby create a new platform that stands on its own. If they don't like the direction the project is taking they can fork it. Developing a piece of software in the open like this does nothing to suppress free speech.

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.

> The software is open source, so if the creators put crap into it for censorship they will rightly get called out for it

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

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.

> 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

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.

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