Important Update
We’re going to be setting up a fork to maintain some separation, add additional features, and remove references due to raised concerns.
So, we will not be changing software, and will be continuing business as usual.
We’ve forked the repositories and they can be found at these URLs: https://github.com/PawbSocial/lemmy and https://github.com/PawbSocial/lemmy-ui.
You can follow the instructions at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/02-local-development.html for setting up a local development environment.
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Hey everyone!
We received feedback that raised concerns regarding the apparent moderation and censorship issues around lemmy.ml, and allegations made by Feditips about the Lemmy developers.
We’d appreciate some feedback from users of our community (users here, or on the Fediverse), furry.engineer, and pawb.fun.
As it stands, we have defederated from one of the more prominent problematic instances, lemmygrad.ml, but haven’t taken any action against lemmy.ml.
So the question stands: Should we continue running Lemmy, or swap to an alternative?
The currently considered alternative would be kbin.pub (example instance: kbin.social) which shares being a FOSS project with full ActivityPub support.
If we continue to run Lemmy, we wouldn’t be opposed to having a forked version that removes certain elements from the UI, such as the donate icon, but, we would require community assistance to maintain this fork.
Receipts:
- Beware by Feditips (recently reposted): https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379
- “Expressing concerns about moderation policy on lemmy.ml” - https://lemmy.ml/post/1167199
- Comments in https://lemmy.ml/post/1150805
Hey there! This is something I’ve come across myself as well.
In my case I decided to go with lemmy for the time being, but only because Kbin seems to need a bit more development. I tried to get it to post to Mastodon, but it simply won’t… and posts from Mastodon to Kbin didn’t work either (they were all classified as microblog).
I’m pretty sure that eventually there’ll be a fork, like there has been for Pleroma / Akkoma, Mastodon / Glitch Social or Misskey / Calckey.
Since this is the month of reddit’s exodus, it’s probably worth it to have something setup to take in refugees and stay afloat until there’s a fork with better and much needed features. It’s only a matter of time.
Since it’s open source, using lemmy at the moment does not mean I agree with the dev’s political viewpoints, nor do they have access to our user’s data. But regardless I do agree that it would feel better to jump on a fork at some point. But right now I would focus on building the community / instance first.
This is fair, and I had been thinking about forking before replying to the other feedback post, but realized I utterly wouldn’t have time to be able to manage it to the level it really needs.
But, I’d be happy to contribute and support a fork if the community wanted to run with one.
We could definitely put together a list of features and together with other likeminded instance admins discuss the path forward. I’m sure many others will be interested. But in the meantime, in my humble opinion we might ride it out and use the momentum of the reddit exodus.
Mastodon combability is a biggie. I can directly attribute lots of participation and even new accounts to me boosting posts I made on here on my Mastodon account.
The Reddit exodus is likely to bring lots of people with good ideas and skills, just as the various exoduses did for Mastodon. It’s how we got stuff like Glitch and Pleroma. I favor sticking with what we have for now until there’s a clearer path forward.