im just shooting that down outright, what about the devs or the server they run matters? as far as I can tell the software works fine, we can fork and run what we like, its a protocol not a proprietary system.

why are people saying the culture must match the devs? do you adopt the culture of all the devs that make the software you use?

do we all need to list the OS's and software stacks we use so politics are clear?

this is silly.

I think it might for a little while but not for much longer.

When the influx started, the two oldest and biggest Lemmy instances, the ones maintained by the developers, and thus presumably the flagship instances, were lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml. Tankies are definitely overrepresented in those two instances, and since the devs themselves are tankies, there's a lot of moderation bias in favor of red fascist authoritarian regimes even in the nominally "neutral" lemmy.ml — such as them refusing to remove genocide denial or outright genocide justification, while also removing posts critical of China and so on.

You might argue that this doesn't affect you if you just pick a different instance, because the culture of that instance will be different and so will the moderation, but the problem with that is that if the vast majority of users on a network are tankies and are moderated by tankies then that's going to influence your experience of the network as a whole pretty much unavoidably unless you defederate with the largest instances and thereby intentionally hamstring yourself.

So even if you joined another instance, your experience of the site as a whole would be dominated by a tankie leaning culture via comments and posts, and that's where the reputation (deservedly) came from. And it probably did and maybe still does hamper the growth a little bit. It definitely made me, a trans anarchist, think twice about joining.

However, with the more neutral and professionally-run lemmy.world taking over as the second largest and flagship instance, and beehaw as the third (iirc), as well as the overall influx of a variety of users from Reddit, I think over time the dominance of tankies in how the network is experienced by users, even from other instances, will drastically decrease, especially as many instances defederate from lemmmygrad, and so the reputation will also fade.

Kbin is new, the distinctions between Magazine and micro-blogging creates an extra barrier to understand the system, the few instances are straining under the load, and it's very much in beta.

New users won't be terribly forgiving, so I feel like Lemmy's the better option.

I never understood why questionable views from software devs might be a problem.

• It's not a corporation, so you're not financially supporting tankies.
• Lots of devs don't share your values, because everyone has different values.

It's not like I can only use software made by people who don't eat meat, and everyone's doctors are partially informed by science performed by the Nazis.

I have no idea what kind of world these people think they're living in, as if everything were developed with shared values, and a pure conscience, until Lemmy came along.

No, this is over blown. Whenever visited before the large influx, lemmygrad was so big it made clear who this was for. But not on the technical level. Now it just is a reddit alternative, which also has some questionable communities here and there to be dealt with.

Kbin and Lemmy operate on the same network, so if somebody has a problem with that they are better off on the first platform. Or they can just host their own instance like Behaw mods do. I just wish people would finally shut up about Lemmy's developer views, it's a circlejerk at this point

I never encountered the term "Tanky/Tankie" until yesterday, here, on Lemmy. I'm just trying out a bunch or Reddit alternatives and some fediverse stuff. I mean, some of the founders of Reddit aren't my kind of people, and I've been over there since it was founded. If they're not doing something extremely horrible, then meh.

I don't think it matters. If people want to use Kbin instead, then great! It's still a fediverse platform (even though they had to temporarily turn off federation), so we'll still all be in the same pond.

Sadly, it will. People are too used of the whole "administratives of the product I consume represent me".

Federated applications (and open source for that matter), don't really have an "owner", nor a CEO. Yeah the devs may have some questionable opinions, but at the end of the day the software is free as in freedom for everyone to use as they please, the only thing they can control is their own instance. Just join another and block theirs if you like.

It doesn't help, but i don't see it as a massive problem. the project is decentralised, free and open source, so as long as that codebase is open and you can choose to join a server instance that doesn't federate with the more extreme groups it's fine.

The influx has led to a big increase in contributors to the codebase, more moderators, and there are no central admins to worry about due to the way the network works, so it would be effectively impossible for them to censor unrelated communities.

I'm pretty auth-left on a lot of topics but those guys are crazy, they're the far-left equivalent of far-right conspiracists and cant be reasoned with.

I've suddenly started seeing the word "Tankie" around. WTF does it mean?

Doesn't really help with the reputation among non-users, but I found myself much more comfortable with the platform and seeing dramatically less of the "Mao did nothing wrong" kind of extreme views once the instance I joined decided to defederate lemmygrad, maybe recommend an instance that does that? Lemmy.ml is also kinda concerning but at least there the typical user isn't really much of a problem, it's just the moderation policy there, so I just try to avoid the politics and news communities from that instance.

In the long run, I imagine that some instances will just end up setting up their own forked versions, I know the owner of my instance has been talking about doing that although i don't really know how that's going or how likely such a thing is to work out.

Post trump memes to change the perception?

Probably but it's a non issue for me. Don't interact with it and move on. There's shitty people in every facet of life.

I think I was having a quality discussion with some "tankies" last night about politics and philosophy. Not really sure what their thoughts on ccp were exactly as it was more a broad discussion.

I don't condone authoritarianism. Hell I don't condone most govt systems lol.

I'm totally cool with a social network where a variety of political opinions are allowed to be voiced, but the problem comes when criticism of some politics is censored. For example, I'm pretty pro-left/socialist but I also think it's important to point out human rights atrocities like Tiannenmen Square and the Holodomor

as opposed to what? pro authoritarianistic capitalists?

fuck big money and reddit/twitter/etc is the bigger money

no because no normie knows what a tankie is

Yes, it'll hamstring the growth of lemmy. I'm currently using kbin instead and as soon as it has an app to use I probably won't interact directly with lemmy. All simply because of the tankie baggage and I'm not the only one.

Well, if the people around you are more interested into left-shaming for supporting an open to everyone technology (You should remember them that Truth Social is a shameless fork of mastodon code) than trying to understand the true « free speech » potential of Lemmy / Mastodon, maybe you should move on and find some more suitable friends.

Since the pandemic I kicked off those « I’m not political but » people of my life and I’m way happier now.