Please check my post, I think everything I said is very valid, but I want this community to see it too, and help steer the discussion, I think reddit is doing this intentionally.
Please check my post, I think everything I said is very valid, but I want this community to see it too, and help steer the discussion, I think reddit is doing this intentionally.
Gosh, I felt like I was going to make this post, albeit not from a username titled “communist” 😅 .
Now, I always implore anyone who’ll lend an ear - please, hold your horses on labeling devs as “tankies”. Let’s not instantly stamp them good or bad. Rather, let’s mull over the behavior of a community that decides its course of action based on whether it’s supposedly tainted by a particular ideology. Try to think of the bigger picture of how people act as a whole based on information and what those actions benefit.
Let’s level with each other here. The GPL? It’s got more than a dash of Marx, if you ask my humble self (and heck, I think that’s a good thing). But has that deterred folks from assembling magnificent creations under the banner of a collective project? So, where do we end up if we tread down this logical path? Do we forsake Open Source software, just because its bedrock principles share a striking resemblance with Socialism/Communism? Is this selective ideological litmus test the norm now? And what fuels this selective disposition?
Now, just imagine, if I were a bigwig at a deep-pocketed corporation, wouldn’t it be a walk in the park to sow the conspiracy that ALL Lemmy devs are rabid tankies (ALL of them, seriously? If I pitch in, does that make me a hardened communist?). Couple this with the palpable fear that Reddit might just bulldoze their way to victory, and voila, you’ve got a fearful, active amygdala ready to perceive an “enemy” - no matter how illogical. Outrage, my dear friends, is among the most contagious of emotions. Curiously enough, this entire conspiracy/misinformation hinges on just that - unbridled outrage.
It’s almost as if there’s no call for outrage, provided one possesses even a smidgen of understanding about open source development, its inherent messiness, and the swirling ideologies around it. Now, those are the nuggets worth pondering. But, who am I to say, right?
The problem with tankies has nothing to do with communism, i’m a communist, that’s not the problem at all.
The problem with tankies is that they’re authoritarian genocide deniers. The GPL doesn’t have any authoritarianism or genocide denial in it.
The LEAD DEV denies the genocide Uyghurs in china. It’s much worse than you’re assuming.
As a person who hasn’t really looked up the issue(I mean I have read about it on the net here n there, but have never dived into the issue deeply), I have seen people talking about it on both sides and I’m confused.
The main things I’m hearing from people who say that a genocide isn’t happening are:
Most of the times I’ve seen it, both sides accuse each other of being blinded by propaganda and the convo devolves there.
Which side is actually right here?
Yeah! Definitely, I understand that! But in my neck of the woods “tankies” are more just boogeymen that people throw around when they want to cast an entire group as immoral. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they aren’t gaining power either. It just seems like an appeal to fear (a reasonable one at that), but using illogical framing that doesn’t at all represent reality. That’s the fundemental crux of it for me. It may come to bite me in the future too! Growing up in conservative parts in the U.S. I’ve grown numb to people claiming others are communists - it comes across as more a technique for division than any real concern of community harm.
I’m not trying be an apologist for the devs opinions or detract from them as much as I’m trying to state that open source, and this project - given its git history - doesn’t appear to spread authoritarianism. I didn’t sign an agreement to violently seize the means of production upon cloning the repository. Had this information not been swirling around on reddit (and now lemmy) I would’ve never known that I had to “cancel” yet another thing.
I mean, personally, I’d rather fork it and make it into a vision that the people of Tucson want in their social media experience. Lemmy is a bit better architected, and I think the codebase is a bit more mature for such thing.
Yes, I agree that lemmy doesn’t have any politics injected into the code, and that’s why i’m on lemmy, but the devs are definitely politically fucked up.