Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout (From the Lemmy Developer)

HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.com to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 558 points –
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Good read, gives me a lot of hope for this project.

I look forward to an exciting future with all of you.

(Also- hopefully this wasn't posted already)

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout

This was written by the Lemmy devs.

288

Holy smokes, growing 25 times larger in 2 weeks. Keep up the good work! I just need a good mobile app for iOS, beta is full according to test flight lol.

Its absolutely growing massively, I don't think the DEVs could have expected this level of growth.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Yeah, this has been one of those black swan events. Nobody could have predicted Reddit would shoot themselves so vigorously in the feet like this.

Well, nobody could have predicted when or how Reddit would shoot themselves so vigorously in the feet. I think a lot of folks have been expecting them to do it eventually.

IMO Reddit had been sinking into enshittification since New Reddit came around, with the suggested posts and the ads.

However. No one expected the process to lurch forward so quickly. I think the Reddit admins were trying to enshittify things slowly, but after looking at what happened with Twitter in the last year or so, they realized they could "tear the bandaid off" so to speak, and maintain (perhaps I should say attain?) profitability.

It's a bunch of horseshit. I was never comfortable with so much of the internet being concentrated into corporate-owned spaces and I'm glad to see that other people feel the same way.

I also wouldn't be surprised if their venture capital angels had finally told them "enough, we're not going to keep throwing good money after bad indefinitely. We're cutting you off, get profitable."

Speaking purely as an armchair CEO, I think they could have done it by trimming the fat and making a few minor adjustments (a reasonable API price, for example). They have an income stream, they just needed to learn to live within that income stream's means. But modern capitalism's credo is "grow, grow, grow! Always grow!" And so that's not the direction they went, and ironically I think it's ultimately going to kill them.

Full circle : coming back to dessalins's best words : History of Lemmy

... and the Reddit redesign has become a bloated anti-privacy mess.

It was so sudden though. 1 month notice that the app I use was going to be gone. I don’t use Reddit outside of third party apps so here I am….

Yes, explosive growth and it's a bit of a miracle we can post here right now.

To be fair , that’s Reddit’s achievement.

I'd say it's an achievement that it survived the chaos and hasn't yet buckled under the traffic or the chaos of managing the influx of users that probably don't even bother reading rules.

I mean, this place was absolutely not prepared for this, and it definitely has a ways to go yet, but it's come out a week later in a much healthier place than I expected.

And those are out of date numbers. User count is now past 150k

To be precise, they were talking about monthly active users in the post, not total user accounts, which you are talking about. Might be that their stats only count people who actually voted/commented/posted something.

I'm pledging $5/month each to mastodon.world and the lemmy devs. I recently quit drinking, so this is a drop in the bucket compared to what I used to spend monthly on alcohol.

Congrats man sounds like a really positive change 😊👍

Nice, fuck alcohol. I quit drinking years ago and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. My life is so much simpler and more fun now.

Congratulations and good luck my friend, stay strong 💪, resist all temptation.

Hell yeah, bröthur, congratulations on the start of your journey

It seems to have become a habit that most good things about the internet is linked to the EU. I'm really grateful. That being said, I hope that Lemmy can become a collaborative project uniting a lot of devs rather than rely on two people.

About the scandal; as long as their opinions do not influence the platform I don't see them as relevant to Lemmy. If they are illegal, let justice do its work.

I'm hoping that I need to worry about the morals of my admin more than the morals of the developers.

That said, I would expect the Lemmy project is going to need to scale based on the increase in users. Two developers isn't going to cut it.

...what scandal?

It appears that they support the CCP and deny the Uyghur genocide.

They specifically address this in the article and say it isn't true.

On another topic, there are rumors circulating that we are fascists or supported genocide. These claims are completely false, and like most viral twitter threads, are coming from a single Mastodon user on a personal vendetta who didn’t provide any sources. Such slander doesn’t deserve any response and is best left ignored.

Here is Dessalines denying that any genocide is taking place: https://lemmy.ml/comment/471382

They can say "we don't support genocide" all day long, but denying that any genocide is taking place and actively trying to persuade others that no genocide is happening isn't any better.

I argue that it unintentionally supports a genocide since they're using a platform to (inadvertently) hide the genocide from the public by convincing others that nothing of the sort is happening.

I for one do definitely believe that there is a genocide happening and I'm appalled that we can't do more about it. But people trust in different sources of information. Not believing that a genocide is happening is not the same as actually endorsing genocide.

this may appear to you as an irrelevant detail, but... they who?

Sorry about the ambiguity. At least one of the main devs of Lemmy.

I saw someone else did a bit of research deeper down in the thread. It seems it's questionable but they at least "only" control like two federated instances, lemmy.world not being one of them. Of course, still not good to have someone like that in the dev team :/

i mean, there's only two people. they ARE the dev team for now.

yeah. not good at all, I'm not comfortable with it. I don't understand people who have access to information on the internet and deny anything obvious, no matter whether it's flat earthers, genocide deniers or ufo believers. how can a brain be this disfunctional?

Any specific link to that?

Update 2: My conclusion

Update: So I dug around a little deeper, and found that

On another topic, there are rumors circulating that we are fascists or supported genocide. These claims are completely false, and like most viral twitter threads, are coming from a single Mastodon user on a personal vendetta who didn’t provide any sources. Such slander doesn’t deserve any response and is best left ignored.

Update: More info about @dessalines@lemmy.ml

It's definitely good to have people like you investigating the backgrounds of key developers, as there might be ulterior motives behind them developing open platforms that compete with established Western companies outside of loving the free web and open source. Thank you!

However, I wonder how many opinions we disagree with would be unearthed by doing this kind of research on every core developer of Chrome, Windows, MacOS, Google or whatever. I think you would find a lot if you get people to air their honest opinions. In today's climate, if these people were open about certain opinions they might hold (not saying they do, but statistically it's likely some do) they would just be fired, so it's easy for large corporations to shake damage to their reputation from having certain staff members. For OSS it is a bit harder, since although developers can be pushed out, and software can be forked, it's all open and it's harder to understate the contribution to the source code etc. that such a person could have contributed.

It does kind of suck when you hear that developers working on software you like have wildly different worldviews to your own, but sometimes you have to put things in perspective. Having said that, if this guy is the only developer I might feel less than happy about using Lemmy instead of Reddit.

Personally, I'd rather my open source, decentralized software be developed by a nearly fanatical communist than a slimy entrepreneur/capitalist. Either could try to pull the rug out from under you, but at least one is internally consistent until then...

but at least one is internally consistent until then…

Having to do the mental gymnastics required to make China not commit genocide does not suggest internal consistency...

I’d rather have open source, decentralized software be developed by none of those groups/slimy individual. Doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.

I mean you're more than free to start contributing to Lemmy and / or offer to be on the core team. You can fork it and start your own version of it not owned by them. The nice thing about having a communist (or at least an anticapitalist) developing it instead of a capitalist is that you have the freedom to do that. You cannot do that with Twitter, or with Reddit, or with Facebook, or with Instagram.

Capitalists will not voluntarily do that because it is unprofitable to them. Companies that do end up floundering or dead.

Idk to me there's a very real difference between the two and I'd rather have a tankie developing a platform than someone like Elon Musk making it go to shit.

Wow...thanks. I had no idea this was ongoing. As someone living in Asia and seeing these issues from up close, these ring close to home. I'll be paying attention for any of these...moderations.

If you are not on lemmy.ml or lemmingrad there is nothing to look out for because these people have no influence on your content.

How about Lemmy.world? Whichgroupss will they influence mostly?

They moderste lemmy.ml and lemmingrad. Apart from those, in which they are admins, they have zero influence or power anywhere else... Lemmy world and other indtances have completely different people in charge.

The Lemmy.world server is owned by the same guy that owns Mastodon.world. Nothing to do with the Lemmy devs. Just mainstream general interest servers.

@dessalines@lemmy.ml is /u/parentis_shotgun on Reddit. Source: https://archive.is/Ky9vd

  1. There is nothing that links to @dessalines@lemmy.ml there.

  2. Ask yourself: what is this person gaining from spreading misinformation and trying to make people to hate Lemmy developers?

Since you didn't notice that in that post /u/parentis_shotgun claims to have made Jerboa and links to it - which links to github.com/dessalines/jerboa - you're not very observant so I'll provide you with some alternative posts as evidence.

Step 1) Visit /u/parentis_shotgun's profile

Step 2) Old PgDn to load some posts. Find the one that says nothing but "Yes" on it. This post specifically.

Step 3) Click Context to see which question it is answering

Step 4) Read the question: "Wait a second, are you the same dessalines that narrated my The State and Revolution by Lenin and Fascism: What it is and how to fight it by Trotsky?"

Step 5) See /u/parentis_shotgun's response: "Yes."

"Misinformation".

What exactly do you get out of defending Tankies?

E:

Alternative route #1: Find parentis_shotgun's post about creating thumb-key - a privacy-conscious Android keyboard made for your thumbs. Notice it links to a Github profile for dessalines.

Alternative route #2: Find this post where they keep their "communist 101s" on dessalines.github.io/essays/

thank you for the research & informing us

@dessalines@lemmy.ml is /u/parentis_shotgun on Reddit. Source: https://archive.is/Ky9vd

  1. There is nothing that links to @dessalines@lemmy.ml there.

  2. Ask yourself: what is this person gaining from spreading misinformation and trying to make people to hate Lemmy developers?

Since you didn't notice that in that post /u/parentis_shotgun claims to have made Jerboa and links to it - which links to github.com/dessalines/jerboa - you're not very observant so I'll provide you with some alternative posts as evidence.

Step 1) Visit /u/parentis_shotgun's profile

Step 2) Old PgDn to load some posts. Find the one that says nothing but "Yes" on it. This post specifically.

Step 3) Click Context to see which question it is answering

Step 4) Read the question: "Wait a second, are you the same dessalines that narrated my The State and Revolution by Lenin and Fascism: What it is and how to fight it by Trotsky?"

Step 5) See /u/parentis_shotgun's response: "Yes."

"Misinformation".

Ask yourself: What exactly do you get out of defending Tankies?

Alternative route #1: Find parentis_shotgun's post about creating thumb-key - a privacy-conscious Android keyboard made for your thumbs. Notice it links to a Github profile for dessalines.

Alternative route #2: Find this post where they keep their "communist 101s" on dessalines.github.io/essays/

Why are you taking a personal vendetta against the devs? LOL

I dislike genocide apologists about as much as I dislike liars and people who spread misinformation. It's trivially easy to confirm who /u/parentis_shotgun is - so calling it misinformation is blatantly lying especially when their first point is blatantly wrong.

People can be OK with the dev being a Tankie ("separate the art from the artist" which is a terrible philosophy in its own right but people are welcome to believe in it this more of a philosophical difference) but denying that the dev is a Tankie is where I cross the line. The dev is a Tankie. Do with that information what you will but there is no denying it.

This is so weird to me lol, maybe I'm just odd but it's so weird seeing McCarthyism still rearing it's ugly head after what... 5 decades? I am by no means an ML (can't stand them as an anarchist) but this is wildly blowing out of proportion what @dessalines@lemmy.ml has said and done.

I mean like why link a 'Socialist FAQ' that's literally just a ton of links to education on socialism and the different schools of thought it has? Not all communists are tankies (not even most) lol. Just generally shows a lack of familiarity with actual leftists / anticapitalists.

I think it's more like 7 decades and I thought the same. Reds-under-the-bed is still a thing!

@dessalines@lemmy.ml is /u/parentis_shotgun on Reddit. Source: https://archive.is/Ky9vd

  1. There is nothing that links to @dessalines@lemmy.ml there.

  2. Ask yourself: what is this person gaining from spreading misinformation and trying to make people to hate Lemmy developers?

Please stop spamming this in the thread, it's annoying af.

Sometimes people just like spreading drama. Other times they just have weird or different beliefs. Accusing someone of having ulterior motives isn't useful or helpful unless you can demonstrate that this person isn't just having an internet debate that they feel strongly about.

Accusing someone of having ulterior motives isn’t useful

@spirit is making claims out of his ass though and taking lots of upvotes. I don't agree with spamming but there is no proof the reddit user is Dessalines.

Okay, what I'm saying is a vast majority of the time people just say stupid shit online. And that's it. This is a good way to say it, not 'what does this person have to gain by doing the thing that internet users have done for forever to earn imaginary internet points? Are they trying to destroy Lemmy?'

You are amazing! Thanks for the time spent on OSINT

@dessalines@lemmy.ml is /u/parentis_shotgun on Reddit. Source: https://archive.is/Ky9vd

  1. There is nothing that links to @dessalines@lemmy.ml there.

  2. Ask yourself: what is this person gaining from spreading misinformation and trying to make people to hate Lemmy developers?

Seeing as you're spamming this reply - I'll go ahead and spam my response to it.

Since you didn't notice that in that post /u/parentis_shotgun claims to have made Jerboa and links to it - which links to github.com/dessalines/jerboa - you're not very observant so I'll provide you with some alternative posts as evidence.

Step 1) Visit /u/parentis_shotgun's profile

Step 2) Old PgDn to load some posts. Find the one that says nothing but "Yes" on it. This post specifically.

Step 3) Click Context to see which question it is answering

Step 4) Read the question: "Wait a second, are you the same dessalines that narrated my The State and Revolution by Lenin and Fascism: What it is and how to fight it by Trotsky?"

Step 5) See /u/parentis_shotgun's response: "Yes."

"Misinformation".

Ask yourself: What exactly do you get out of defending Tankies?

Alternative route #1: Find parentis_shotgun's post about creating thumb-key - a privacy-conscious Android keyboard made for your thumbs. Notice it links to a Github profile for dessalines.

Alternative route #2: Find this post where they keep their "communist 101s" on dessalines.github.io/essays/

Wow, this is a lot to digest. Thank you for putting this all together.

@dessalines@lemmy.ml is /u/parentis_shotgun on Reddit. Source: https://archive.is/Ky9vd

  1. There is nothing that links to @dessalines@lemmy.ml there.

  2. Ask yourself: what is this person gaining from spreading misinformation and trying to make people to hate Lemmy developers?

Seeing as you're spamming this reply - I'll go ahead and spam my response to it.

Since you didn't notice that in that post /u/parentis_shotgun claims to have made Jerboa and links to it - which links to github.com/dessalines/jerboa - you're not very observant so I'll provide you with some alternative posts as evidence.

Step 1) Visit /u/parentis_shotgun's profile

Step 2) Old PgDn to load some posts. Find the one that says nothing but "Yes" on it. This post specifically.

Step 3) Click Context to see which question it is answering

Step 4) Read the question: "Wait a second, are you the same dessalines that narrated my The State and Revolution by Lenin and Fascism: What it is and how to fight it by Trotsky?"

Step 5) See /u/parentis_shotgun's response: "Yes."

"Misinformation".

Ask yourself: What exactly do you get out of defending Tankies?

Alternative route #1: Find parentis_shotgun's post about creating thumb-key - a privacy-conscious Android keyboard made for your thumbs. Notice it links to a Github profile for dessalines.

Alternative route #2: Find this post where they keep their "communist 101s" on dessalines.github.io/essays/

(lemmygrad.ml) "funded by the NED"

Must have been stated as sarcasm if Ned is : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy
since they are fighting specifically against this kind of United States's actions.

I mean regardless of the devs' opinions they are forwarding the democratization of information by working on this project

Yeah, honestly, these NED guys seem really cool based on the wikipedia article. It's nice to find out my tax dollars are actually supporting something positive every now and again :)

I agree with you yet I was not completely clear : I meant to say that lemmygrad.ml are fighting USA's stance

I believe those people saying lemmy is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy were being sarcastic.

@dessalines@lemmy.ml is /u/parentis_shotgun on Reddit. Source: https://archive.is/Ky9vd

  1. There is nothing that links to @dessalines@lemmy.ml there.

  2. Ask yourself: what is this person gaining from spreading misinformation and trying to make people to hate Lemmy developers?

Seeing as you're spamming this reply - I'll go ahead and spam my response to it.

Since you didn't notice that in that post /u/parentis_shotgun claims to have made Jerboa and links to it - which links to github.com/dessalines/jerboa - you're not very observant so I'll provide you with some alternative posts as evidence.

Step 1) Visit /u/parentis_shotgun's profile

Step 2) Old PgDn to load some posts. Find the one that says nothing but "Yes" on it. This post specifically.

Step 3) Click Context to see which question it is answering

Step 4) Read the question: "Wait a second, are you the same dessalines that narrated my The State and Revolution by Lenin and Fascism: What it is and how to fight it by Trotsky?"

Step 5) See /u/parentis_shotgun's response: "Yes."

"Misinformation".

Ask yourself: What exactly do you get out of defending Tankies?

Alternative route #1: Find parentis_shotgun's post about creating thumb-key - a privacy-conscious Android keyboard made for your thumbs. Notice it links to a Github profile for dessalines.

Alternative route #2: Find this post where they keep their "communist 101s" on dessalines.github.io/essays/

Jesus christ, what a dumpster fire that comments section was.

@dessalines@lemmy.ml is /u/parentis_shotgun on Reddit. Source: https://archive.is/Ky9vd

  1. There is nothing that links to @dessalines@lemmy.ml there.

  2. Ask yourself: what is this person gaining from spreading misinformation and trying to make people to hate Lemmy developers?

I never said anything about that person, your copy/paste comment is not relevant to what I said. I don't hate the devs, I said the comments section of the post that was linked to is a dumpster fire of tankies and genocide apologists.

Seeing as you're spamming this reply - I'll go ahead and spam my response to it.

Since you didn't notice that in that post /u/parentis_shotgun claims to have made Jerboa and links to it - which links to github.com/dessalines/jerboa - you're not very observant so I'll provide you with some alternative posts as evidence.

Step 1) Visit /u/parentis_shotgun's profile

Step 2) Old PgDn to load some posts. Find the one that says nothing but "Yes" on it. This post specifically.

Step 3) Click Context to see which question it is answering

Step 4) Read the question: "Wait a second, are you the same dessalines that narrated my The State and Revolution by Lenin and Fascism: What it is and how to fight it by Trotsky?"

Step 5) See /u/parentis_shotgun's response: "Yes."

"Misinformation".

Ask yourself: What exactly do you get out of defending Tankies?

Alternative route #1: Find parentis_shotgun's post about creating thumb-key - a privacy-conscious Android keyboard made for your thumbs. Notice it links to a Github profile for dessalines.

Alternative route #2: Find this post where they keep their "communist 101s" on dessalines.github.io/essays/

You mean to say : except for that excellent comment you replied to ?

I'm referring to the comments section on the post he linked to, where half the comments are tankies trying to defend the actions of the admins who were banning users and calling them racist for criticizing the CCP/Kremlin.

Sure, but as I said, I don't see any of this as relevant as long as it doesn't affect the platform.

https://raddle.me/f/lobby/159606/-/comment/294792

You leave reddit because the ceo introduces shitty pricing but you don't mind the main devs being literal fascists?

The project is open source and anyone can create instances, that's why its irrelevant.

The way it works in practice is that the largest instances are where most people go. What is stopping those devs from imposing their views on the community, e.g. by censoring?

Nice thing is, the devs have no power about instances they don't run.

They just write the code for them, and since it's open source, we could see any sketchy code and just fork it away

If that happens word gets out and people switch and currently the instances ran by the OG tankies are actively trying to dissuade people from joining.

Hahahaha fuck. I love it when tankies are a self-solving problem.

Reddit is in hot water because of its actions as they affect various user groups, not because the CEO has a political view that's undesirable.

Of course political protests could be done, but that's not what happened here, and you know this.

Reddit's admins are taking decisions based on their worldviews and objectives that affect the content of Reddit, i.e. what we can talk about, what we can do, what tools we can use, what information we can access...

As of my current knowledge, the worldviews of Lemmy's devs (that I certainly don't share) don't affect content on instances that they do not administrate or moderate. Even if they were building and shaping instances around hatespeech (which I don't know they do), I'd simply block them and let the police and justice act on the potential crimes or offence they may do.

The beauty of federated networks is you can avoid the platforms with these kinds of people altogether. I typically avoid lemmy.ml altogether unless I don't have a choice and even then it's pretty easily to find alternatives.

Girl calm down, please just take a step back. Maybe read up on communism or communists / the far left before blaring off takes like this. I'm not an ML and not a fan of them as an anarchist, but this is suchhhhh an overreaction to what they actually said.

Additionally if you don't like the dev team, then fork it. Or volunteer to be on the core team. Submit some PRs. Start your own alternative. One of the cool things about having anticapitalists develop software is that it is open and you can do that. It actively does the opposite of what capitalism wants us to do. I think just that fact alone should make you pause and maybe reassess the language you're using (Hitler and other fascists rose to power actively aided and funded by capitalists because it helped retain their power).

I've never subscribed to any of these things, due to multiple reasons like being broke, because I knew I'd never remember to cancel it if I quit using the service, hating subscriptions, realizing most of these collapse almost as fast as they skyrocket, among many other reasons. I know I'm a pessimist.

But it's time to put my money where my mouth is, even if I just want a Reddit alternative. I'm old and grumpy enough to be sick of companies using people the way they do, and since I can't code, I can pay.

If you've read this far, I implore you to really sit down and think about what this project means to you, what it could mean to you, and what it's worth to you. Everyone does the whole coffee analogy - give up coffee for a day and you can support X. But as a Reddit refugee, I think that if I was willing to give Reddit a couple bucks a month to an app for their API access, why on earth wouldn't I do the same here (even before all of Reddit's recent BS)?

You can either pay or be the product being sold.

I’ve never paid Reddit a dime but I’m going to signup for at least whatever gold costs. Fuck spez.

Hopefully this defuses the "lemmy is a tankie network" rumour once and for all

I couldn't care less if they are actually tankies, just keep developing the code and don't try to inject malware (well it's open source they can't lol), believe whatever you wanna believe, I don't care.

but they can write malware and commit it to their repos.

the question is how long will it take for someone to recognize it. ie.: how well obfuscated is it?

not saying they gonna do it, just that doesn't trust any code just bc they are open source

They're not geniuses, they won't be able to hide malware code for long. And the moment it's recognized they are finished as far as ever being coders on any related project in the future, so I don't see how they could accomplish much by doing that.

2 more...
2 more...

Well of course they aren't genocide deniers. You can't deny something that never happened. Also note that they did not deny being Tankies - they denied being Fascists. Tankies don't recognize themselves as Fascists and will vehemently deny that they are. Here's another phrase for Tankie for the uninformed: Red Fascist

Here is one of the Lemmy devs denying that the Uyghur genocide in China is happening:

https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xq49ct/deleted\_by\_user/iq954mu/

The Uyghur genocide is as real as white genocide. - Source

Here they are again denying it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xq49ct/deleted\_by\_user/iq951cv/

The holocaust was a genocide that actually happened, with all the evidence that goes along with it. There is no Uyghur genocide.

Do you believe in anything as soon as the word "genocide" gets attached to it? What about "white genocide"? Are you a white genocide denier? - Source

And just so nobody can deny that parentis_shotgun is a Lemmy dev: - "I'm one of the devs of Lemmy"

Direct links to the posts will not work but still exist on the user's profile page: https://old.reddit.com/user/parentis\_shotgun/ - hold PgDn until comments stop loading then Control+F. In fact feel free to peruse their history in general - it's quite interesting.

One of my favorite posts is their defense of the government of North Korea in /r/AskTankies: https://old.reddit.com/r/asktankies/comments/tb1836/okay\_but\_dprk\_seriously/i04d1wu/

Now ask yourself why would someone who is not a Red Fascist Tankie piece of shit be answering questions on behalf of Tankies in /r/AskTankies while defending a totalitarian regime? Is it... perhaps because they're in support of such a regime because they are in fact a Tankie piece of shit?

They also lied about the "single user on Mastadon not providing sources". They did provide sources. The source were things said straight out of the dev's mouth.

Let's play a game of spot the difference between fascists (nazis) and fascists (tankies).

Nazis: Fascists who are directly responsible for the deaths of an estimated 12,000,000 people. Deny a genocide ever took place despite evidence to the contrary (Holocaust). Antisemites who forced minority ethnic groups to work in forced concentration and labor camps and starved them to death. These concentration camps began in 1933 and ended in 1945 lasting for a period of 12~ years. Had a secret police known as the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) whose job it was largely to suppress political opposition by any means necessary including execution of dissenters and spy on behalf of the Nazi party. Torture and execution were common - including that of women and children.

Tankies: Fascists who are directly responsible for the deaths an estimated 26,000,000 people. Deny multiple different genocides ever took place despite evidence to the contrary (Holodomor being the most well known). Antisemites who forced minority ethnic groups to work in forced concentration and labor camps and starved them to death. This Gulag network of death prisons began in 1919 and only ended after Stalin's death in 1953 lasting for a period of 34~ years. Had a secret police known as the Чека (Cheka) whose job it was to suppress political opposition by any means necessary including execution of dissenters and spy on behalf of the State. Torture and execution were common - including that of women and children.

Great post and I really appreciate bringing the sources to the discussion.

I know some people don’t have an issue with the developer’s views, so long as it doesn’t affect their software, but I’m not comfortable using Lemmy. I wouldn’t be comfortable using a Nazi developer’s software either.

You would be surprised how many genuinely amazing pieces of software you use / rely on on a daily basis the developers of which you don't politically align with.

I agree that separating the artist from their art is not (always) easy, or even possible. However, in the case of Lemmy you can actually separate yourself from the influence of the creators (for example by defedarating from any instance they have control over), in the worst case scenario, where even the software itself would include these kind of biases, parts of the community could literally fork the codebase and remove all the problematic parts.

That’s a fair point and something I’ll need to keep in mind. There are plenty of game developers I’ve walked away from over the years because of their views and behaviors. While I’m sure there are plenty who’ve never said the quiet part out loud, I’ve divorced myself from those who do.

I’m no programmer and I understand that open source is a significant shield against weighted algorithms and behind-the-scenes shenanigans, but I also know where Lemmy’s roots lie, not just the developers, but the initial communities they created.

To me, kbin already feels like a fork I’m happy with. I’m not trying you be dogmatic, but for now, this is where I’m comfortable.

A tankie is not a fascist. He denied being a genocidal fascist.

I've seen a lot of pro-China propaganda coming from Lemmy and I suspect tankie is still on the table.

Another phrase for Tankie ideology is Red Fascism.

I'd specifically like to highlight that someone who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp - so has firsthand experience with a fascist regime - described the Soviets as the following, emphasis mine:

Kurt Schumacher, who was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, but survived WWII to become the first post-war SPD opposition leader in West Germany, described pro-Soviet communists as "red-painted fascists" or "red-lacquered Nazis"

So in what ways exactly is a tankie not a fascist?

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

that exalts nation

"We did not hesitate to shoot thousands of people, and we shall not hesitate, and we shall save the country." - Vladimir Lenin

often race

https://www.britannica.com/event/Holodomor

that stands for a centralized autocratic government

The State

headed by a dictatorial leader

Lenin;Stalin

severe economic and social regimentation

Five year plan

forcible suppression of opposition

Cheka secret police.

If Tankies are not fascists - then neither were Nazi's.

Man, I really appreciate this post and I think tankies are absolutely authoritarian turd burglars. Calling them red fascists is fine and maybe that’s how history will know them.

I know there’s a lot of diverse thought on what makes a fascist and many definitions try to distinguish it from run of the mill genocidal authoritarianism.

That’s why I chose to distinguish tankies and fascists. I broadly think they have different goals, beliefs and methodologies, though the damage they’ve wrought is remarkably similar. At the end of the day, if we look at results, it’s probably just as fair to lump them in together.

I don't like lumping them together because in my experience current tankies tend to be people who want good things, but are wrong about large chunks of history and current events. Fascists just want power and to enforce oppression so go with whatever story or lie they think will get them there as truth is immaterial to them.

tankies tend to be people who want good things,

That also describes civilians living in Germany during Hitler's reign. They were swept along with the populist zeal until they found their children passively picking up racial slurs and their neighbors competing to report on each other. This is why it's important to focus not just on the end result of Nazi fascism (the Holocaust), but the path that led there and the parallels that can be found in modern day societies. (both western and eastern)

Tankies isn't a cute catch-all term for Communists who do have various goals, beliefs, and methodologies of how to transition to, create, and maintain a Communist state. They're Stalinists and/or Maoists who deny well-documented genocides and claim that everything against their ideology is a Western conspiracy theory and the only correct sources of information come from Russia and/or China. In a similar way that Neo-Nazi's claim everything is a Jewish conspiracy theory and the only correct sources of information come from their biased as all hell Alt-Right/Neo-Nazi sources like Stormfront.

This is the exact type of ignorance that I'm talking about when I say people defend Tankies because they were taught the Holocaust in school but never taught about the Holodomor.

E: "The US government is evil so the people the US says are the bad guys must actually be the good guys and are undoubtedly correct about everything. There is no such thing as CCP or Soviet propaganda - that's propaganda from the CIA. Read this article from the CCP explaining it all."

Communism is on the left, Fascism or on the right. Purely from an academic perspective talking about Red Fascists is like debating virginity of a prostitute lol

If we're going to get academic about it, the political compass is an imprecise tool and it's a fool's errand to take an absolutist approach to assigning political ideologies on the spectrum. :P Just because an ideology is generally in the authoritarian-socialist quadrant doesn't mean it can't crib notes from a philosophy in a different quadrant. The authoritarian axis is more anchoring here than socialist/conservative.

This is like a small child's understanding of politics

I mean if you want to get academic about it - I suggest you talk to some people in academia. Nearly all of those who say "Fascism is different." self-describe themselves as Marxists or are Stalinist apologists - such as Michael Parenti or Sheila Fitzpatrick. Gee, I wonder why Marxists would want to distance Communism (and more specifically - Stalinism) from being compared with other fascists regimes like the Nazis. Maybe they don't like how it makes them look bad?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison\_of\_Nazism\_and\_Stalinism

No really - read the above link and anyone who is cited as saying Stalinism isn't fascism check their wiki profile. Without a doubt they're a self-described Marxist. They're quite literally the only people who deny that Stalinism was a form of fascism and play apologists for all the atrocities that took place.

A disturbing amount of Communists see attacks on Stalinism as an attack on Communism and so make all sorts of mental gymnastics to defend Stalinism.

Edit:

I much prefer the "That wasn't real Communism!" brand of Communists over the "That was real Communism and here's why the mass murder they did was justified or never happened (despite being well-documented by the Stalinists/Maoists themselves)!" brand of Communists.

I'm old and out of the loop but that astroturfing was so blatantly obvious it pinged my BS meter immediately.

What astroturfing? The tanky astroturfing or astroturfing about the place being tanky?

Because before the influx, Lemmy.ml was absolutely tanky. It's just been completely drowned out by the flood, so it barely matters anymore.

Like, this entire platform has arguably gone through one of the most dramatic changes in a week in the history of the internet. What was here before is almost irrelevant now. What the devs believe is also irrelevant because it's open source and decentralized. Literally the whole point of this is to not be beholden to them.

Can confirm lemmy.ml had a pretty unsavory look to it before the migration. It's the reason I elected not to sign up there out of precaution because with what I was seeing, I worried about it getting defederated stat.

Absolutely, when I first arrived… seems long ago but wasn’t! The “tankie” talk was thick and I was hearing all kinds of wacky perspectives I’d never heard before and presented pretty heatedly. I do think they’ve been drowned out now with the influx.

Just because they said they weren't? They just dismissed the claim without linking to any real counter evidence by claiming it's just a random Mastodon user or whatever

I've never heard of that. Where did that rumor come from?

Moron, morons everywhere

If you follow the link and then the "History of Lemmy" link it does get weirdly anti US....

What does it mean to be "weirdly anti US"?

Have accurate assessments of US politics, socioeconomics, and foreign policy

Just my feeling read it for yourself I guess

I don’t have an issue with the developers being Tankies as long as it doesn’t affect the software

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Here are some mod logs from lemmy.ml (which is an instance run by the Lemmy devs) from a few years ago: https://raddle.me/f/TankiesGonnaTank/89852/the-lemmy-ml-admin-is-banning-anyone-that-mentions-stalin-or

Here's one of the Lemmy devs (you can tell it's them from their profile activity) denying genocide: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xq49ct/deleted_by_user/iq954mu/

Insisting that fascists are good, actually not fascists at all, as long as their nationalism makes them oppose the US (because the enemy of my enemy is a totally good guy!): https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/vgg2x3/thoughts_on_slavoj_zizek/id2cxb8/

There's more here: https://raddle.me/f/lobby/159606/-/comment/294792

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Perhaps, it is possible some communities do follow... uh, whatever that is. (I am oblivious to what a tankie is).

But, like reddit, there will ALWAYS be echo-chambers, or less desirable places/communities.

Remember, the_donald? Despite- that sub basically dominating the top feeds all over reddit, reddit never got ousted over it.

I feel, lemmy will be the same way. There will be... areas you likely want to avoid. As any platform.

I am here for the platform itself, and the communities on it.

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This was a very well written statement and gives me a lot of hope for the future of the platform. I’ll be more than happy to invest my time and effort into it.

I just want to say I'm fairly vocal about bugs/issues/confusing things. But I totally understand lemmy wasn't prepared for tens of thousands of new users overnight, it was just so sudden and unexpected. So even if me and other users sound grumpy just know that at least this one is aware it's going to be a bumpy ride for a while as the internet adjusts to this massive upheaval.

Not only did reddit break reddit, it broke lemmy too! (but for different reasons)

Hey, even with all of the bugs and issues-

I have had much more enjoyable conversations on Lemmy, then I have on reddit in a LONG time.

For that- I can endure the bugs. Worth it IMO!

How many people were turned away by the whole tankie thing I wonder..hmmm

Imagine hearing some vague bs and making a distinct and principaled opinion about an entire universe of information.

Even if they are some flavor of doo doo, we take it, and make it what we want. I just don't see the point in outright noping. At least in this instance.

If people really care there's also kbin, which is the same content just with a different (imo better) UI.

I just happened to get on lemmy at first. It was largely coincidence. Perhaps I'll try kbin, but this working how I need. I'm not real picky. I just like to write comments tbh.

Yeah I'm a pretty left-wing guy myself but I just like the kbin interface more. I think it's really cool how this stuff all works together. That's the real dream of communism!

I wish it was easier to setup an instance and manage it

Agreed, it's an absolute nightmare to get up and running.

I messed with it for a few hours later.

Did you ever get it up. I tried both the docker and vps methods on both Debian and Ubuntu. Never could get it to connect.

Part of it is some of my unfamiliarity with some of the tools and their purpose (namely redis and rabbitmq). But all I got was 500 errors and when looking at service logs, everything was clean.

I tried both, with fresh vms.

No dice. Lemmy has been working good, so, I stuck with it.

I wanna mess around and see if I can build a blazer front end for it. With web assembly

Mentioned up above, but there is a pull request that will make docker deployment much easier. It will move all setup into env variables and use precompiled images.

If you are talking about these, I believe i ran through them as well. But honestly I was redeploying my VPS and ansible configs so quick I could have messed something up.

I may give it another go as well.

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/132

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/143

Jerry of infosec.exchange was saying there were some bigger issues with the code as well.

https://fedia.io/m/fedia/t/13850/FEDIA-IO-MAINTENANCE-ANNOUNCEMENT

Yeah 143. It will also replace caddy with nginx, which on its own should be an improvement.
I don't know what's up with fedia, as far as I know his system is massive, like many times the resources of kbin.social.

Pledged on their $5/month tier on their Patreon page now. That's the least I can do given what I understand they're going through right now. :D

Same. If this is going to be my new online home, I'd like to contribute somehow. Especially since I cant code, this works

I'm not down to subscribe ongoing (because I definitely will forget and think some fraud popped up), but I made a one time donation, and will likely make additional donations in the coming months and weeks. I'd love for this platform to thrive and have no qualms throwing up a few bucks for that here and there.

I hope we see more donations. I for one will for sure make a few over time

Dang these guys are so committed and it's definitely understandable what they've just gone through. It's definitely up to the community to help out wherever possible as that's kinda what the fediverse is all about

The rumors actually got to me. I've still been using it but wondering when that would be mentioned by the creators. Glad to see it's false

It doesnt even matter if its true, if a non fascist/tankie made the same code, none of you would be complaining. Why should anything be different just because the devs happen to be a fascist/tankie/ whatever they believe in. They cant control what each instance does once they publish the code. The code is public now and its free for anyone to use. They can't censor what we say in instances that they don't control. I mean try it now, you can flip them off right here, right now and they can't do anything about it, they don't run lemmy.world. Only the owners of lemmy.world can do something about it.

Apart from everything else that has been mentioned I would add that a very real factor is that every instance to my knowledge has a donation button which cannot be removed without forking the project that goes directly to the devs. Plenty of people in this post are saying things like "Wow, glad they cleared that up! I'll definitely be giving them money" and very likely don't have the full context. Assuming Lemmy does continue to grow exponentially it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that these devs will probably receive a large amount of money in donations from people who may not all be okay with supporting them if they were more informed. So spreading the truth about the devs and not taking their pitiful denial as absolute truth is important even if you believe in the project as a whole.

Oh I didn't know they asked for donations, I thought they just did it as a hobby. Yea the donation thing is definitely concerning, given the fact that one of the devs have an image of Mao Zedong as a banner on their profile. I guess we as a community could decide to make a fork of it and ask one of us non-tankie non-fascist programmers to continue developing.

This completely ignores the influence that flagship instances have.

People don't become Neo-Nazis without spending time among other Neo-Nazis listening to Neo-Nazi talking points. People don't become Tankies without spending time among other Tankies listening to Tankie talking points.

People are more likely than not to join the flagship instance than any of the smaller instances and significantly more likely than starting their own instance. Some of them will realize the kind of people they have found themselves surrounded by and leave. Many more won't - especially due to general ignorance about Tankies (see this entire thread and the absolutely bizarre common defense of Tankies not being equatable to Nazis when they absolutely are and have resulted in more deaths and suffering than the Nazis ever have or will.) The people who stick around might start thinking the Tankies make some good points. This is how you end up with more Tankies. More Tankies is always a bad thing just like having more Neo-Nazis is always a bad thing.

Most people have a good sense to not surround themselves with Neo-Nazis. That good sense appears to be missing when dealing with Tankies.

Aren't the flagship instances right now essentially lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works? Maybe Beehaw once the re-federation gets figured out? And then kbin.social on the kbin side.

This only matters if you use lemmy.ml, which I would expect to be largely defederated at some point soonish.

Lemmy.world at this point is over twice as big as Lemmy.ml, and lemmy.ml isn't even linked on the join-lemmy.org page anymore. It's more of the reference instance than the flagship instance now.

Yeah, reference instance sounds more correct.

At this point they are definitely getting there, but that only been the case for a few days.

That does seem to have changed since I last cared to look. As dannoffs pointed out - it seems lemmy.ml was unlisted from the join-lemmy.org instances page where previously it was listed as #1 for the Popular section. They also removed the ## users / month metric so the list is no longer guaranteed to be sorted by popularity.

Just last week - lemmy.world was reporting as 87 users/month and lemmy.ml as 1.6k users/month:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230608170721/https://join-lemmy.org/instances

This has of course changed - and unlisting the instance so that it isn't the most popular instance likely has a lot to do with that. That seemed to happen sometime in the last week - I cbf checking every wayback timestamp to see exactly when.

I've been using Kbin myself so haven't been following Lemmy very closely. Only whatever happens to reach my page over on kbin.

lemmy.ml (or even the infamous lemmygrad) was never intended to be the flagship instance afaik. I first signed up on lemmy.ml but one of the first things I saw was a sticky from the devs to choose other instances. That's primarily why I looked for others (I wasn't aware of these "rumors" back then). It just happened to be the biggest at that time.

Personally, as long as their political beliefs aren't being pushed on lemmy then I don't see anything wrong. Many of us came from reddit, and they're not exactly without controversies - that never meant we supported or even believed in some of those.

The people who stick around might start thinking the Tankies make some good points.

Then it's up to them to educate themselves. We've all been exposed to things we disagree with.

I'd never seen any of the rumors, went to lemmy.ml for the first time (thinking I might join) and one of the top threads was a complaint that a post with anti-CCP analysis had been taken down by the admins and within 5 minutes of further research I was able to verify that, yes, the admins/devs are tankies. It's definitely not false.

So I backed out and switched to kbin.

Yea see, the only instances that the devs control are lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, every other instance is not run by them. For example, the instance I use (lemmy.dbzer0.com) is run by an anarchist.

Cleanest way to solve the issue according to the dev blog post principles is that those instances (not db0) defederate with others.

lemmy.ml is general purpose whereas Lemmygrad is ideological. The first influx of users from Reddit went to Lemmy.ml before Beehaw was spun up and the devs stopped promoting Lemmy.ml.

Most of these instances already defederate from Lemmygrad.

I don't see any reason why they should defederate from Lemmy.ml, the literal largest instance at this time.

I honestly view calling for this as wrecker behavior.

.ml is large yes and has some general purpose communities.

Although, quite clearly and easily confirmable by anyone, it hosts the problematic issues and the related user base described in this thread.

The whole ethos as described in the blog history of lemmy suggests to let those kinds of instances be on their own. Not wreck the wreckers.

I was completely unaware as well. I'm off to kbin. In my opinion, there is zero chance this doesn't cause issues down the line and it makes me feel uncomfortable using Lemmy.

Yeah, it's bad. I'll probably be looking into hosting my own kbin instance on principle soon.

Seems like the fedi way to solve these disputes 👍

There's a pull request to make the docker install easier for us normies.

Saying they don’t support genocide isn’t really addressing the issue…

Most complaints are that they deny China’s treatment of Uyghurs and seem to conflate criticism of that with racism against “China” (conveniently ignoring the plethora of ethnicities in such a huge country). If they want to detach themselves from the controversy they should be making a statement denouncing the Chinese government’s treatment of people in Xinjiang. Their statement could be clearer.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism\_101/comments/lua87n/why\_does\_china\_have\_so\_many\_cameras\_on\_the\_streets/gp67qx9/

moderator of

r/ABoringDystopia
r/capitalism_in_decay
r/InformedTankie
r/JucheGang
r/fediverse
r/asktankies
r/GunZedong
r/CapitalismInAction
r/Communist_Gaming
r/Communism1O1

is parentis_shotgun dessalines

r/InformedTankie

I'm dying of laughter at this oxymoron.

you've been going so hard in this thread, have tankies sent you death threats in dms yet

fork run by non-idealogues when

The honest way to separate the dev problem from the software would just defederate those instances. A fork would just spread dev resources thin

Probably when the ideologues do something stupid that would require a fork to be made. Until then they're at least making useful software.

One can quite easily twist "we deny genocide is taking place" into "we don't support genocide." It's easy to say you don't support genocide when you're saying there's no genocide in the first place. Frankly, everything I've read about these guys is repellent and there's no way I'd be donating money to them. I gave money to Ernest, the developer of kbin, instead.

That said, though, this is completely true:

We are individuals with our own opinions. If you disagree with these, it is no problem! You can still freely use the Lemmy software on different instances. If you host your own instance, we have no control over it at all and are unable to censor what users say.

It's an open source program operating with an open protocol and they can't stop the rest of us from using it. If they ever try it'll just get forked. So I see no problem with having Lemmy be a major part of the Fediverse's infrastructure.

Exactly. I have no issue using the lemmy software (lord knows the developers of most other major social media platforms I've used in the past have had some messed up political views). But there's absolutely no way I'll be donating a penny to them. Ernest and admins of other major lemmy instances, yes, but not the tankie devs.

Yeah they confuse criticizing China with racism against Chinese people. Additionally they claim that any source from and news agency or journalists in the US that says anything bad about the USSR or China is CIA propaganda and should be ignored but then exclusively site Chinese propaganda websites.

There's also a lot of other evidence: https://raddle.me/f/lobby/159606/-/comment/294792

They say the same nonsense when Australian media also rightly criticizes them so it's not just a US issue. Just look at the way they tried to strong-arm Australia when they were called out a few years ago, they tried cutting off a range of imports to try economic pressure (which didn't work since plenty of other places will happily take wine, meat and product imports)

It was a great thing for Australia after some short-term pain, exporters saw how exposed they were to a single market and started to put effort into diversifying.

How do they deny this? Are they actively posting saying that this is not true?

it's a blurb in the linked announcement.

I do not see it. Could you copy the text?

oh, you're asking the opposite of what I thought.
Up until a week ago, yes they were still denying the genocide and suppressing attempts to talk about it (they call it "orientalism"). I think they've been too swamped to do much since then.
There are some links to their reddit above with older stuff.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/471382

Here is Dessalines denying that any genocide is taking place.

Here I only see that some moderator, most likely on lemmy.ml (but not proven) bans statements critical of China. I do not see what you stated.

If you scrolled down you'd see Dessalines' comment. Although another user commented elsewhere that the URL was busted. Here is a SS for you:

This is a very well written post. Love to see a rust project grow so large!

Nice. I hope this momentum continues to grow.

I personally think it's going to explode in size, even more so than it already has.

The small, vocal minority of reddits (ie, most of us) came over to try it out as soon as we thought it could be a viable alternative. That caused a MASSIVE include in users to lemmy.

Next- since we are building lots of content here- lots of the other reddits will soon figure out- Wait, everyone who writes shit worth reading, went to lemmy. What am I doing in this toxic cesspool echo-chamber. And- more will come.

Yeah, these developer guys seem great, I’ll donate for sure. I love their vision.

Not sure if I'm getting wooshed or not, but you should know the lemmy devs are tankies who deny the Uyghur genocide. Your money is better spent going to non-affiliated instance admins to keep their servers running.

Cool, I’m definitely not ok with the tankie stuff and the denialism you refer to. I actually live in China and am critical of such points as much as I dare to be considering I have family here. I already have my own instance (lemmy.pro) on a robust server so yep, that’s a good way for me to contribute and I’m already doing that.

Thanks for sharing.

I love Lemmy, but I'm not a fan of the pressure for recurring subscriptions. Via Opencollective I was able to do a one-time payment.

Feels so common to me as a web developer to find another instance of people seeing Web Sockets as really cool, and then tragically deciding they don't fit due to scaling problems.

The occasional live comment update is kind of nice, but the glitches and other performance problems it causes weren't generally worth it.