The thought-police strike again.

Why? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers

For what it’s worth, that thread is openly biased with many of those examples being strawman quotes and misframing events, like a non-sequitur troll post ban being framed as “support for Ukraine”. And frankly, some of those points are cm0002 themselves intentionally trolling, like dubiously reporting a political meme as “Propaganda”.

Personally I think the main devs are terrible at forum moderation. I’m aware that they’re chronically overworked, and that .ml is not intended to be a neutral or liberalist general-purpose instance, and I’m aware that it’s very normal for moderators to be bad at moderating, and yet that doesn’t detract from my belief that they’re technically bad at moderating a forum. For example, simply writing “rule 1” as a ban reason allows people to misinterpret bans as we’re seeing here. Automate that shit, prefill ban reasons with the rule list! Make clearer rules and FAQs describing how memes and talking points considered normal in the US are actually chauvinistic propaganda!

As for a fork or rewrite, like others have said, alternatives already exist, but I also don’t think this is a case where maintainer opinions are harmful to the user or project (even if I disagree with some). They’re devout anticapitalists, which makes their FOSS and anti-enshitification positions clear, I know it won’t sell out in five years. They only have power over their own instance, which one is welcome to not join or block.

They are insane. But their views don’t seem to ever make it into the code, so I don’t mind for now.

I don’t see the point in boycotting something that’s free and doesn’t make money off of selling my data. I suppose you aren’t obligated to donate to it, but that was already true.

I suppose OTOH, I’m not pro-tankie, but I at least prefer tankies to the fascists and authoritarian capitalists (or whatever you want to call them) that run mainstream media. Harm reduction is the name of the game IMO, not finding a platform with a perfect set of political values aligning with yours (at least for me, I haven’t run into many leftists who are also committed to nonviolence due to pragmatic reasons). The russia/ukraine stuff in that thread you link does look nasty, on the other other hand

How dare are you a communist😡😡😡 Accept freedom and democracy in your country 🦅🦅🦅

This has been rethreaded so many times I feel like it deserves an entry in knowyourmeme. Opinions are like asses, everyone has one, everyone things someone else’s stink, in the end, what matters is you can support Lemmy without actually supporting the developers (eg.: support your local instance).

Does the term “freedom of opinion” have any meaning to you?

Just don’t give money to the instance they own that is pro russian occupation and pro china human right abuses

I think that Richard Stallman is a despicable person. Never stopped me from using and supporting the development of Emacs and GNU tools for the past 25+ years.

If you want to, go ahead.

But Lemmy isn’t a small project. Can you really bear the maintenance burden alone?

And Piefed & Mbin already exist, just recommend them over Lemmy then? They are also supposed to be easier to maintain, so fork them if you want to fork something.

No, I think they’re doing a great job.

Is the code good? Are you prepared to make any potential fork viable and useful in ways that Lemmy isn’t so people have a tangible, non-ideological reason to choose your software over Lemmy? Do you have a long term goal for funding and maintaining a fork?

That said, Piefed is already a thing, and it federates with Lemmy. It’s where I’m commenting from right now. It has a better on boarding process and does a better job surfacing things I care about.

Reactionary forks don’t have a great record of success (or even getting off the ground).

Move to PieFed