Deputy Defense Minister Hannah Maliar published an urgent plea on her telegram (annamaliar):
"At the request of our military, I appeal to all telegram channels that inform about the operational situation at the front. Do not publish ๐ news from the front live and day after day - ours get immediately covered after that. Well, such is the specificity of our enemy. Only after the information has been made public by the official speakers - the General Staff, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Ministry of Defense. We all coordinate information prior to release with operational security units and directly with field commands."
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This is your reminder not to post or repost information or videos of Ukrainian troop movements unless it's from an official source or they are several days old. Videos without source will be deleted. There, apparently, have been cases where RU found out their position was taken by UA through OSINT and social media, handily with geolocation and all. These positions then got shelled.
Now, you might say that the videos are out there and the russians can geolocate themselves. That is true, but there is absolutely no reason to make it easy or to do the work for them.
You break OPSEC, you get banned.
This, of course, does not go for russian OPSEC breaches, russian positions, fire positions or handy videos by russian war bloggers showing russian troop concentrations. Please geolocate these as you please, as fast as you can, and spread them everywhere.
I don't think that you could do that even with the devs on board, and I suspect that at least one would probably consider "the enemy" to be the Ukrainian forces. Dessalines, the founder of lemmy and lead lemmy dev, seems pretty gung-ho on the idea that the USSR shouldn't have ended and objects to wartime support to Ukraine being provided, considers letting Finland/Sweden into NATO to be imperialism, and has a whole lot of other material there objecting to Ukraine associating with the West, Euromaidan, etc.
That fact is why at least some people wound up using kbin rather than lemmy (wasn't my reason, but I've seen people on some of the kbin magazines out of Eastern Europe really unhappy with him and not wanting to provide him with more influence).
It's disturbing. I deliberately avoid any community hosted on his lemmy.ml instance (the ml stands for Marxist-Leninism). I could certainly not stomach the Ukraine community there.
Continuing my reaction.
About the funding Lemmy app development:
"This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322."
In their own description nothing about Marxism/ Leninism afaik. So what's exactly going on?
project lemmy
"Dessalines, the founder of lemmy and lead lemmy dev, seems [pretty gung-ho](https://dessalines.github.io"
I had read something, but it was all downplayed. I wasn't aware about this link, good info!
I mean, I don't agree with him politically at all, but that's actually not what really bugs me.
Like, okay, Eric S. Raymond is a pretty prominent guy in the open-source world. He's famously right-libertarian. A lot of people who use his software are not, but that's okay, because he separates the two.
But when I was looking around to figure out this whole Threadiverse thing, and find a home instance, I got linked to a comment by dessalines saying explicitly that he wanted to make lemmy hard for right-wingers to use. For me, that is a problem, because then you're not separating your views from the impact on those people who use and rely on your work. And at least for me, the Fediverse is interesting as a global, ideology-agnostic system that anyone can use.
As it happened, the people linking to the statement were from a rather racist server on Pleroma that I ran into when trying to find a free-speech-oriented server on the Fediverse. I didn't want to hang out with them either, but I agree with their sentiment that him having the position was problematic.
Lemmy is open-source, so that does place some bounds on things. If dessalines does something really objectionable with lemmy, if there are enough people who object to it but do like lemmy as a software project and are capable of continuing its development on their own, the project could be forked.
But at least for me, that was enough of a red flag that he wasn't aiming to separate his political positions from his role as lead dev of a potentially global discussion forum system. That, rather than the Marxist-Lenninist stuff or views on Ukraine or whatever, was what sent me over to kbin. I just didn't want to have to worry about dealing with potential friction down the line if things went sour.
Yeah I think your deliberations were probably correct. Thanks for laying them out. Hopefully the devs will keep their ideas and those of the users seperated.
lt appears I'm associated via lemmy. world.org. And, not via lemmy.ml. So hopefully the same goes for me, and I won't run into trouble later.
Personally, I prefer to stay away from all (kinds) " extremes", though unfortunately they seem quite fashionable of late. Though I definitely support fruitful discussions, and exchanging points of views, freedom of expression etc. within normality ofc.