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
Unpopular opinion: I personally don’t really see a problem with how they handled this. Moderating such a large instance for effectively free on top of developing the software is a huge undertaking, and the rules they define need to be ones that they can legitimately enforce. If they make rules (that, frankly, don’t actually matter a ton) that they don’t have the time to enforce, then they effectively have no rules at all.
This isn’t like reddit. They don’t make one community and moderate that. Instances can host hundreds of thousands of communities. At some point you have to rely on communities to self-regulate and only close down those that are egregiously bad.
By not regulating speech that isn’t, let’s say, “blatantly evil,” they have more time to put towards more important moderation of content that actually harms people. This is why the reddit admins rarely get involved, too: because moderating every community is impossible. And they’re paid to do it!
That said, I haven’t looked deeply into all that they’ve supposedly done, so my opinion could change, haha
It’s more about both devs of lemmy (the software) being tankies themselves, I also haven’t seen them abuse their power on lemmy.ml too much (maybe they’re rightfully aware that it would cause an exodus if redditors who moved there noticed anything off), they’re also actively recommending people go to other instances because lemmy.ml is overloaded, so they’re kinda mitigating their own influence tbh.
Still, financially supporting someone who doesn’t recognize human rights abuses, thinks authoritarian leftism is okay and is welcoming to other such individuals just feels bleh, especially with how things are in the world right now.
I think the line for everyone will be different but I’m not paying or supporting this project to endorse anyone’s views. I didn’t support and traffic reddit to endorse their awful capitalist views. And the moment that became more important to them than the community, I left. Same thing here.