All I see in that source is ml living up to it’s acronym. Congratulations, you learned that people that believe in FOSS also tend to be leftists, and in this case Marxist-Leninists. I don’t particularly agree with how they choose to handle moderation and I’m definitely not a ML, but you don’t need to make that your local instance.
The leftists I know are under no impression that the Chinese government isn’t under a brutal authoritarian rule, i think this is a petty novel strain. Why does being a Marxist-leninisy necessitate defending and denying state atrocities?
I think the best you could argue is that China was, at one point, moving toward communism. But like the USSR, it’s never been communist, and the closest it’s gotten was state-directed capitalism.
The CCP claims to be communist but acts like capitalists. IE a literal split between the ownership class (the people that own the capital) and the laboring class.
It’s like a classic narcissist: says one thing, does another.
It doesn’t, ML is based on the philosophy of primarily Lenin (hence the name) and is meant more as the political means of transitioning power from capitalism to the eventual anarcho-communist existence that will be enjoyed by all. In general, they don’t defend the atrocities of ML states and are often the most critical of states like Cuba, Vietnam, the USSR, and China. I’m very skeptical of ML because it necessitates 1 party rule and I see all states as authoritarian, but claiming ML necessitates defending atrocities is a position of ignorance. It’s like supporting the US, it doesn’t mean people also support the genocide of latinos on our border.
China isn’t marxist-leninist though, not even Maoist anymore since Deng Xiaoping took over. They are very much capitalist (otherwise they wouldn’t try to undermine workers rights movements (gotta keep exploiting the proletariate for that sweet surplus value) and try to get rid of marxist and maoist student clubs etc)
The majority of leftists aren’t tankies. Tankies are an extreme fringe group of leftism that is even hardly leftist in its core beliefs on account of its support for authoritarian regimes everywhere as long as they are enemies of the US.
I guess at this point my main concern is the source code. If it gets to the point that they’re trying to make Lemmy take part in the Great Firewall we should consider a fork!
And the other concern is how it looks. I think this should probably be more widely denounced by the Lemmy community because there’s already liberals out there taking it as proof that all of Lemmy is compromised in some way.
Well... all of Lemmy was compromised with a security vulnerability over the weekend lol. But I take it you mean compromised morally or politically. In that case, yeah forking's one way to solve the "optics" issue, with the caveat that you lose name recognition in the process.
I have bad news for you, lemmy is an opensource project and anyone with the will and knowledge can contribute, the fact that an authoritarian government contributes to the project doesn’t change anything. Kernel Linux is widely used by the Chinese government (and many other governments) and they actively contribute to the project. Changes are not made at will, they are submitted and have to be accepted by the project leader usually after being analyzed, both for bugs and intentional attempts to create vulnerabilities. While one might question the content being posted to the instance, or the quality of the moderation, questioning the project as a whole because any specific entity contributes is hysteria.
The difference between Linux and Lemmy is that Linux is majority controlled by people who don’t don’t deny genocide and excuse away an authoritarian government
I don’t know what you mean by notable, but if we take Huawei as an example they consistently contribute around 3% of the code (for comparison this is the same amount that IBM or Redhat usually contribute), in the 6.1 kernel Huawai is responsible for 9% of submitted changes. Individually several Chinese developers add up to more than 8%. Source: lwn.net/Articles/915435/
Changes are not made at will, they are submitted and have to be accepted by the project leader usually after being analyzed, both for bugs and intentional attempts to create vulnerabilities.
This is an excellent point - some open source projects like the Linux kernel (or adjacent projects) are populated by industry veterans and open source champions. They are very good at what they do.
Some of the fediverse projects are run by a handful of hobbyists and tinkerers, some are handled by a single project leader, others still by a single developer. Such projects are acutely vulnerable to malicious contributions disguised as assistance. A quite literal Trojan Horse.
I’m an ML myself so yes, I knew. And that’s what I mean, I’ve never heard of an ML becoming a Trotskyist, so I don’t know why someone would leave a .ml instance to join a .Trotsky instance.
One of fascism’s biggest jobs is to cast doubt on the accusation. To downplay the notion that people should look at the circumstances to form their own opinions and to gaslight the uninformed into thinking it’s just a coincidence or misrepresentation.
The fact is, if an administration team is censoring anti-china sentiment, they are either controlled by China or afraid of retaliation.
Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.
So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.
Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.
I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.
Note the line: Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are. I'm pretty left-leaning myself (I draw the line at authoritarianism though), but they're very open about using their platform to push an agenda. The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people - the ".ml" in "lemmy.ml" even stands for "Marxist-Leninist".
I joined Lemmy.ml in 2020 after they made a (different) pitch to /r/linux... and left shortly afterward when I saw who ran it. Thankfully we have other options now (hello from Kbin!).
You new here? 2y ago those people were all there was here. It was impossible to get friends to join since those schizoids chased them all away, understandably so.
On reddit when I reminded to other users that this community existed and they could move here you insisted to clarify that you’re not moving on Lemmy and reminding that the only official communities are on reddit and on discord. Now you change your mind and we should start cross posting, for what? So we can have that mod team who tried to discredit this place, instead of this community which is perfectly fine? Hell no, you made your decision, now you deal with it.
How does that work? Is threads using a protocol compatible to lemmy? (And I fully agree with the preemptive blocking of any facebook stuff).
Edit: thanks for all the detailled answers.
So Facebook tries the old EEE - Embrace Extend Extinguish. 1.A big company is Embracing an open source standard ("we’re friendly, see?) They get a lot of users that way - even the open source savvy types. 2.they start Extending that standard “to make it even better” - but not talking about these changes with the rest of the community first. They cannot react quickly enough and become incompatible with the new version of this standard. 3.Extinguish. When all the users are effectively using the big companies platform with something that isn’t the original standard anymore they change it so much that it isn’t compatible at all anymore or replace it completely.
Yes. Threads wants to use the ActivityPub Protokoll. We can interact with Kbin and Mastodon users thanks to this Protocol. The fear is that they use their huge user base to change the protocol to their liking (basically take control over the ActivityPub) and everyone who wants to stay federated with them and their users has to adapt those changes until the day they will simply cut everyone off.
the standard is made by the World Wide Web Consortium, which I trust to not let facebook take control of their standard. They also manage standards like HTML, CSS and SVG
No, they re-publish the work of WHATWG in standards form, the vendors literally made a pact not to deal with them. Then sometime in the last decade they standardized EME, even after the technology activists told them fucking not to. Defective By Design said this shit for years, decades, and W3C ignored everyone. I have more reason not to trust Berners-Lee at this point than put any stock in his leadership skills.
Yes, sounds like there should be Meta’s fake, desecrated version of “ActivityPub”, and the actual Fediverse version of ActivityPub that does not budge to any of Meta’s interests.
If one instance gets too big they could just ignore the standard and start adding random tweaks to it. And all the others would eventually have to adapt to that or become incompatible with the big instance.l
Federation allows for choice. Indeed, many AP implementations already add to the base AP stuff. Peertube already does this itself.
For this to really be a problem, the server software would need to be maintained by the same person running the instance, and they have to have the manpower already to either a) Build an implementation or b) Run a fork of existing software. Both take effort and quite frankly is juice that isn’t worth the squeeze to risk cutting yourself off from the network like that.
I agree in theory, but in practice, when Google dropped RSS and XMPP support it took most of my friends with it, which is what started this mess in the first place. I’m actually not a fan of mastodon; feels too ambitious to start a new protocol without a killer app. RSS and XMPP are extensible protocols and I really just want modern support for those.
ActivityPub wasn’t built with the purpose of having a “killer app” in mind. That’s centralization logic. The point is for all apps to be able to talk to each other regardless of where on the network and maintaining the ability to do so seamelessly without the user having to think too much about it.
Mastodon should be able to talk to Lemmy. Lemmy should be able to talk to Pixelfed. Et cetera. I don’t believe XMPP had the same purpose, matter of fact I remember it just being a subpar IM protocol iirc, and I don’t see social media going by the wayside the way IM clients of the past did.
That’s the same problem as with Chrome. If internet for most people goes through Google Chrome (which it currently does: Android, smart devices, Electron Apps, Android apps, Edge, Brave, etc.) then the controlling entity can redefine the meaning of that protocol. In the above example it would be Google redefining the meaning of the web, see DRM, manifest v3, and similar efforts. Small players wouldn’t be able to play catch-up or disagree (it wouldn’t matter) and risk bring irrelevant.
The admins of defederating instances fear the same could happen to ActivityPub and fediverse.
Threads is using the protocol that the entire fediverse is using, called ActivityPub. The protocol allows for lemmy instances to communicate with each other and with other sites like kbin and mastodon. What lemmy.ml did is called defederation, so threads can’t communicate with lemmy.ml. This is to prevent meta/Instagram/Facebook from killing ActivityPub in the same manner Microsoft, IBM, and Google has killed open source protocols in the past.
The most notable one imo is Google semi killing XMPP. They started Goolge Talk based on XMPP and after many people started relying on it, they replaced XMPP with their proprietary protocols.
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