Good read, gives me a lot of hope for this project.
I look forward to an exciting future with all of you.
(Also- hopefully this wasn’t posted already)
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout
This was written by the Lemmy devs.
It doesnt even matter if its true, if a non fascist/tankie made the same code, none of you would be complaining. Why should anything be different just because the devs happen to be a fascist/tankie/ whatever they believe in. They cant control what each instance does once they publish the code. The code is public now and its free for anyone to use. They can’t censor what we say in instances that they don’t control. I mean try it now, you can flip them off right here, right now and they can’t do anything about it, they don’t run lemmy.world. Only the owners of lemmy.world can do something about it.
This completely ignores the influence that flagship instances have.
People don’t become Neo-Nazis without spending time among other Neo-Nazis listening to Neo-Nazi talking points. People don’t become Tankies without spending time among other Tankies listening to Tankie talking points.
People are more likely than not to join the flagship instance than any of the smaller instances and significantly more likely than starting their own instance. Some of them will realize the kind of people they have found themselves surrounded by and leave. Many more won’t - especially due to general ignorance about Tankies (see this entire thread and the absolutely bizarre common defense of Tankies not being equatable to Nazis when they absolutely are and have resulted in more deaths and suffering than the Nazis ever have or will.) The people who stick around might start thinking the Tankies make some good points. This is how you end up with more Tankies. More Tankies is always a bad thing just like having more Neo-Nazis is always a bad thing.
Most people have a good sense to not surround themselves with Neo-Nazis. That good sense appears to be missing when dealing with Tankies.
Aren’t the flagship instances right now essentially lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works? Maybe Beehaw once the re-federation gets figured out? And then kbin.social on the kbin side.
This only matters if you use lemmy.ml, which I would expect to be largely defederated at some point soonish.
Lemmy.world at this point is over twice as big as Lemmy.ml, and lemmy.ml isn’t even linked on the join-lemmy.org page anymore. It’s more of the reference instance than the flagship instance now.
Yeah, reference instance sounds more correct.
That does seem to have changed since I last cared to look. As dannoffs pointed out - it seems lemmy.ml was unlisted from the join-lemmy.org instances page where previously it was listed as #1 for the Popular section. They also removed the ## users / month metric so the list is no longer guaranteed to be sorted by popularity.
Just last week - lemmy.world was reporting as 87 users/month and lemmy.ml as 1.6k users/month:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230608170721/https://join-lemmy.org/instances
This has of course changed - and unlisting the instance so that it isn’t the most popular instance likely has a lot to do with that. That seemed to happen sometime in the last week - I cbf checking every wayback timestamp to see exactly when.
I’ve been using Kbin myself so haven’t been following Lemmy very closely. Only whatever happens to reach my page over on kbin.
At this point they are definitely getting there, but that only been the case for a few days.
lemmy.ml (or even the infamous lemmygrad) was never intended to be the flagship instance afaik. I first signed up on lemmy.ml but one of the first things I saw was a sticky from the devs to choose other instances. That’s primarily why I looked for others (I wasn’t aware of these “rumors” back then). It just happened to be the biggest at that time.
Personally, as long as their political beliefs aren’t being pushed on lemmy then I don’t see anything wrong. Many of us came from reddit, and they’re not exactly without controversies - that never meant we supported or even believed in some of those.
Then it’s up to them to educate themselves. We’ve all been exposed to things we disagree with.
Apart from everything else that has been mentioned I would add that a very real factor is that every instance to my knowledge has a donation button which cannot be removed without forking the project that goes directly to the devs. Plenty of people in this post are saying things like “Wow, glad they cleared that up! I’ll definitely be giving them money” and very likely don’t have the full context. Assuming Lemmy does continue to grow exponentially it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that these devs will probably receive a large amount of money in donations from people who may not all be okay with supporting them if they were more informed. So spreading the truth about the devs and not taking their pitiful denial as absolute truth is important even if you believe in the project as a whole.
Oh I didn’t know they asked for donations, I thought they just did it as a hobby. Yea the donation thing is definitely concerning, given the fact that one of the devs have an image of Mao Zedong as a banner on their profile. I guess we as a community could decide to make a fork of it and ask one of us non-tankie non-fascist programmers to continue developing.