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Comment by croutonwagon | Hacker News Reader

Would agree. I am VERY torn on Lemmy. Its functional, I even run my own instance. But the distaste from the creators jamming of their politics into it, and much of the politics on there, make it really hard to promote or support.

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> But the distaste from the creators jamming of their politics into i

I don't understand. Are you saying the developers aren't allowed to have public political views? Their instance – lemmy.ml, doesn't even accept signups.

I disagree with their views, but I don't see where the politics are being jammed in (actually, the only place I've seen it so far is people complaining about their politics)...

The main thing I see is lemmygrad.ml alts posting stuff, but agreed, nothing from the creators. Afaik lemmy.ml is even defederated from their lemmygrad instance

It always brings some distaste to use things by those I disagree with. Some disagreements are minor and as a liberal (in the classical sense, not the so called liberal political party which have nothing to do with term) I can accept them as disagreement of opinion is good.

However some are very dangerous - any support, even the most indirect supports things that are against my interests and can destroy the very tolerance I want. Thus while I want to support people's right to say racist things, people actually saying such things makes the world worse. The creators of Lemmy have crossed the line - their stated beliefs are so opposed to mine that any support they get for their ideas - even the ones that seem harmless - I have to oppose as well lest they get more traction on their awful ideas by proxy in some way.

That is such a weak argument. No, using a software made by someone you don't agree with does not require you to subscribe to their ideology. It is not indicative of support of any kind.

It's getting tiring this extreme concern about being "guilty by association". Yeah, the Lemmy devs can make good, useful software. Yes, the Lemmy devs are idiots. The same thing can be said about Richard Stallman and Emacs. I can hold more than two opinions about a person, and I can tell when someone deserves credit or not.

I use a lot of services from people I disagree with. However eventually some disagreements go far enough that I start rejecting otherwise good things because I don't want them to have support.

This is why countries sanction others even though they lose good things.

You are not a country. The amount of interconnections between countries is a lot smaller than between people participating in the Fediverse. Sanctions are already ineffective for behavior-changing at the country level, at personal level it is not only completely ineffective but ends up creating more of the behavior you want to avoid by forcing the "sanctioned" to find support only in those that share the exact same values. It is a recipe for exclusion, polarization and extremism.

The Christian teaching of "hate the sin, love the sinner" is the best approach here. Showing support for what the lemmy devs are doing while showing how despicable are their beliefs and stating where are your differences will always work better than creating an insurmountable wall between you and them.

Well. It’s in their documents/history.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html

It’s also in their github. They actively suppress statements in their instance and communities, some of which are the largest/most active on the subject.

They use the pictures of communist/authoritarian leaders in their profile pics and profile headers etc.

So it’s very in your face, both in the instance and on GitHub.

There’s plenty more, I’ve linked it in previous comments in my profile if you care to look.

So…

1. It makes me VERY hesitant to reccomend this software as a result. It’s very in your face and anyone that looks into it will absolutely see the links.

2. It makes me very hesitant to contribute for the same reasons.

3. They aren’t just communists. They are actively in support of authoritarian regimes and in active denial of genocide.

So it’s not just politics to me. I have friends and family from some of these communist regimes that risked life and limb to escape. Both from Cuba and post Soviet regimes, ANd the thumb of China witb some family from Vietnam. So yeah, it’s not just “views” to everyone.

EDIT: More context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36731097

> There’s plenty more, I’ve linked it in previous comments in my profile if you care to look.

Not the person you were responding to but I went through your comments and all I did was waste my time. Really. I don't like wasting my time. I'm too old for that.

I did note a the picture on lemmy.ml but not much else. Some passive comments from the developer about wealth inequality among 100s of comments related to lemmy development.

The only link you provided (history of lemmy) has statements like:

"silicon valley surveillance-capitalist machine that commodifies users to sell ads and paid flairs, and propagandizes pro-US interests above all." (I don't think he's wrong about this)

"rise in anti-China posts that have hit Reddit lately, and along with that comes anti-chinese racism, which Reddit tacitly encourages." (As he continues, he seems so much more concerned about the actual racism and hate crimes).

I'm done here...

>Not the person you were responding to but I went through your comments and all I did was waste my time. Really. I don't like wasting my time. I'm too old for that.

Heres my comment with context link. I was on mobile, cant always just dig things up for those that dont really want to dig in.

https://lemmy.world/comment/311745

It is 5 comments ago in my profile, and the last topic on Lemmy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36376373#36380333

Also some more 7 comments down in my profile.

Heres the direct link to the discussion: https://lemmyonline.com/comment/17761

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36376373#36376989

Do with it what you will. O

Building, or using, Mastodon or Lemmy rather than big tech owned centralised communication social media is in itself a major political stand of course.

Why?

Depends on how you define politics.

Some people think about politics in terms of power relationships, in which case ActivityPub is a statement about user agency/ownership. Some people take those same power dynamics and look at ActivityPub as a statement about decentralization/centralization. Some people (not all but some) view ActivityPub as a statement about monetization and Capitalism more broadly, esp about the privatization of communication/data.

I'm not going to say everyone using ActivityPub is making a political statement[0], but a lot of people using ActivityPub are pretty consciously making at statement that I think could reasonably be described as political. Worth remembering in these conversations that a nontrivial number of people view even just making a choice to use Open Source software over proprietary software even in situations where proprietary alternatives might be more polished as a political statement on its own. I think ActivityPub is easier to view through a political lens than Open Source software in general is, so it's not surprising to me that an even larger portion of its users would look at it that way.

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[0]: Although some people do define politics so broadly that they might say that.

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