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:

  • SevEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago
    • Does forking interfere with federation at all?
    • One of the linked articles mentions that mod actions are federated - does that mean that if somebody is banned on any lemmy host, they’re banned everywhere? Or only that the log of it is federated?

    It seems like if Lemmy is forkable in a way that doesn’t break federation, and if pawb.social can ‘own’ their own moderation in the same way a mastodon instance does, that would be the ideal path. I think something like Lemmy loses a ton (most, really) of its value without federation. It’s basically a small community forum without that. But at the same time, yeah, that second article about people being banned for being critical of China is veeeeery offputting.

    I know in reddit threads today about the API / 3rd party app shutdown fallout, there were some highly-placed comments recommending Lemmy. It would be nice to have a fallback after reddit.

    • Crashdoom (he/him)OPMAEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Does forking interfere with federation at all?

      Nope, that wouldn’t be affected.

      One of the linked articles mentions that mod actions are federated - does that mean that if somebody is banned on any lemmy host, they’re banned everywhere? Or only that the log of it is federated?

      The log is federated, as are any actions that the remote instance (or remote community) are allowed to take.

      For example, if we ban a remote user here, that wouldn’t ban them on their instance, but their posts would no longer show up here and they couldn’t interact with any communities on pawb.social.

      So, yeah, thankfully, we can moderate remote users and communities (without impacting their instance) and keep using our own moderation policies.

      • SevEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Gotcha, that sounds like a good path forward, then.