As much as I dislike the fact that the “flagship” instance for lemmy is an echo chamber that bans for political wrong think, I still think Lemmy on average is a positive and it isn’t funded by ads or vcs so it should be proof against the most common avenues for enshittification.
So I set up a recurring donation despite being someone that would 100% get banned by the people I’m donating to if I were to comment on their instance.
Same way I can’t stand people using one negative within a larger political platform as an excuse to parrot anti-electoralism I feel like I shouldn’t use one unfortunate facet of the fediverse as an excuse not to donate towards its continued development.
Support “better” rather than waiting for “perfect”
Tankies are bad and wrong, but these guys do good work
Good work doesn’t excuse shit behavior. Hell, if you dig deep enough, you will probably find some good things done by musk or trump.
I will not give a single cent to people who defend russia in their aggression against ukraine, no matter what “good deeds” they otherwise do.
Yea, I never said they didn’t, and I’m generally a proponent of separating art from the artist.
However, by conflating their official work and furthering their personal politics through the moderation of the lemmy.ml instance (which, whether they like it or not, IS seen as the “dev” or “flagship” or “official” instance) It’s not currently feasible to actually donate money while maintaining “separation of art and artist”
If they turned over admin duties of .ml to a new, as unbiased and fair as possible, admin team nearly all the friction for almost everyone to donating would evaporate.
As someone in another thread put it “Devs should do dev work and not mod work, admins should do mod work and not dev work”
To me this whole thing depends on just how conflated the two things really are - if they’re going to use the donations to continue development, keep .ml running, or a mix of both. If it’s the strictly the former then I don’t see the problem if they happen to also have a hobby spreading braindead propaganda in their spare time. As far as I’m aware they haven’t previously abused their power as developers to privilege their own instance so I think we can probably trust them to use our donations to continue working on the protocol in good faith.
I don’t really care who writes the code. I care about what the code does.
Ah to have spite donation money.
Eh, if you want to contribute to Lemmy development, then contribute. If you don’t, then don’t. I think a good 70% of this is people giving themselves an out for financially contributing to something they get a lot of free utility out of. I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to make up excuses; don’t contribute if you don’t want to, but understand that means that the devs might have to move on from Lemmy development and prioritize other work.
Or alternatively, they could stop doing what they’re doing with .ml and loads more people, including myself, would probably start donating towards development
understand that means that the devs might have to move on from Lemmy development and prioritize other work.
Oh I do, the way I see it there are 4 paths
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they eek out just enough donations despite their constant merging of personal politics and their work and nothing changes
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They turn over .ml to a less biased admin team that will actually keep things fair and deal with the propaganda /misinfo (Unlikely)
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Lemmy development stops, and a new team without all the baggage takes over on a fork
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Lemmy development stops and PieFed or other alternative fills the gap
RN they’re asking for donations, but refusing to deal with the root issue directly leading to such low donations.
Or alternatively, they could stop doing what they’re doing with .ml and loads more people, including myself, would probably start donating towards development
This. Literally just keep your tankie bullshit to grad and this wouldn’t be an issue.
Problem is, not only is that impossible, they actively don’t want to. They’re the alt for grad and bear users, intentionally acting as a cover for them. The entire point is proselytizing.
To 3. what if I tell you no one is stopping anyone from doing that right now. If you think anyone is going to take over Lemmy 100% should the current devs stop, I wouldn’t say it is such a sure thing.
Now I don’t know why no one made a real fork just yet, but it would be an easy way out of the politics that surround the original. Hasn’t happened yet. Will it ever? Time will tell.
It’s mostly because it’s written in Rust, not a whole lot of Open Source devs in Rust. If Lemmy was written in something like Go or TS or hell even C# it’d probably would have been forked by now lol
Also that list was just possible scenarios, not listed in any order, IMO the most likely to happen is 4, because PieFed is written in TS iirc and is why it’s so much faster at development. I think 1 will happen for a while, but won’t hold long term
I don’t really care that they’re running .ml. It’s fine if it bothers you enough to not donate to them, that’s your business. My SO is never going to agree to let me donate to Lemmy, so I’m going to see if I can eek out some time to learn the codebase and contribute that way.
Why the hell do you need permission to spend your money?
Because it’s our money for the whole family, and we carry the scars of having had to ask for credit card limit increases to buy gas to get to work to pay the credit card.
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ActivityPub matters far more than Lemmy itself. We already have Mbin and PieFed as two excellent alternatives.
I really hate tankies, but I also know that maintaining an open source project is incredibly difficult work, and they’ve done a fantastic job. Without them there would be no Lemmy.
I do business with people I disagree with politically every day. Donating to Lemmy development is no different IMO. After all, they decided to build a decentralized platform that lets us make our own communities.
This really isn’t about what they believe in, but their activities to push it on everyone else. This isn’t a case of someone discovering dessalines separately maintained personal politics blog or something, in that sort of scenario, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
The problem stems from how they continue to manage the “flagship” instance. They can say it’s not or that it’s “just a test server” or that it’s just randomly recommended like any other instance, but that does not change what people see it as especially since they run official development comms and official support comms from it.
I’ve seen it before: “I went to check out Lemmy and went on the official developer instance lemmy.ml but it seemed to just be a bunch of tankies so I left”
Hm I see your point now, thanks for explaining.
I still think it’s their prerogative to use the instance they prefer for discussing development since they’re the ones doing it, and that’s the instance they host themselves.
Also wondering, where is lemmy.ml advertised as a flagship instance? join-lemmy.org doesn’t seem to be partial to it.
To be fair this is one of the rare times dessalines seems to be able to keep his mouth shut.
Dessalines has also made thumb key which I love as an input method. I wanted to ask something about it and was baffled when I saw his lemmy profile 😅 At the time I didn’t even know about him being involved here too.
