The creators of Lemmy are tankies and have some pretty despicable views, maybe we shouldn’t advertise giving them money.
I like the software, it feels cozy outside some communities from lemmy.ml, and I hope someone forks it eventually, but for now removing the link should be easy to do.
Relevant thread: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379
Admin Response: Please see the post at https://pawb.social/post/9639 and provide your feedback.
Tankies are insidious in the same way TERFs are. They can seem like comrades and fly under the radar for a long time as long as you don’t broach certain topics, but when you do, holy shit. Suddenly little easy to ignore/not think about things in the things they’ve said come screaming into focus.
I would like to see Pawb maintain its own fork, even if it’s 100% the same except for name and documentation. That way the process and infrastructure are in place to make a clean break if needed.
Yeah, for real. They dress their stuff in lefitst ideas, just like TERFs do with feminism. The worst kind of tankie is one who shows no signs at all, you think it’s someone decent, maybe even worth recommending, and then they suddenly start going down and using whatever following they got to spread propaganda. It’s awful.
I’m sorry, I’m a bit out of the hook here, but what is a tankie? I know what TERFs are, but I’ve never heard the term tankie. Are they something like radical communists (given that it was mentioned the main source of them is lemmygrad.ml)?
Yea, they’re authoritarian communists specifically, so people who support regimes and ideas such as the USSR, PRC, NK, etc.
I’m okay with turning off the donation button but I think the code itself should probably be fine to use. full disclosure: I have no idea what a tankie is.
edit: I do have to say though, I think kbin is a might bit prettier than Lemmy!
Yeah, kbin does have a much nicer UI, though “magazines” is a bit odd instead of “communities”, but that’s so minor.
It’s a play on words, since kbin comes from karabin (rifle in Polish)
Ah ha, that makes more sense
From taking a look through the feditips post and just idly browsing lemmy.ml, there’s an alarming amount of toxicity and strange moderation decisions that seem to be weirdly tankie… sigh
I’m unsure if I’ll be able to maintain a fork myself given everything else, but I’d be more than happy to swap to one that removes those links and references. As well, I’m going to look at defederating from lemmygrad.ml which seems to be one of the more prominent sources.
I did see Feditips recommend an alternative: https://kbin.pub/en – but, I’m unsure if anything that’s already been set up would be cross-transferable.
Haven’t looked at it yet, but patching out the button should be relatively simple even in production as the frontend is in typescript. Not sure about the licensing aspect, since it’s AGPL, which means source code has to be provided.
I have a test instance up because I’m experimenting with lemmy as a blog backend, so I’ll try it out and let you know!
For transparency, we’re using the ansible playbook to deploy it, so we’d end up needing it dockerized, but yeah.
I’m not very familiar with docker and whether it’s possible to just patch files in the image, if yes the you could probably make a script to apply it in case of an update (client.js is the file that needs to be changed), if not it should be possible to make a theme with some CSS that removes it.
With the license, I think stating the exact change in the sidebar would be enough, but obviosuly not a lawyer and AGPL is funky.
Think of Docker as just an .exe, the compiled version of the code in a neat bundle. We’d just need to set up a pipeline to run that, but since it’s AGPL, we should be fine.
Oh, would you look at that! We found a tankie in their natural habitat!
They seem to be very shy creatures without their friends though, we may never get to directly observe them outside of a zoo.
I’m not sure how kosher this would be, with licenses and whatever, but rather than get rid of the donate button, should we just have it refer to supporting the pawb network in general instead? https://ko-fi.com/pawbsocial
It’d be fine, all changes are allowed, it’s just that they have to be stated and the modified source code for both the client and the server has to be available, because network use counts as redistribution under the AGPL.
My concern with the license earlier was about adding a quick patch in production to get rid of the button.
Maybe with a fork it’d be nice to add a setting for the link instead of hard coding it, so if other instances want to run it they can just put theirs in.
