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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Rust
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I mean they kinda are, they run one of the biggest instances which of course will get a lot of attention because it's run by the developers.
On that instance they censor criticism of china and other such topics.
There was also the weird case of the hardcoded slur filter
But nothing it stopping you from running your own instance or joining one with moderation you agree with. You can even modify the source code to remove the slur filter and go 100% Nazi if you want.
I don't have an account at lemmy.ml and I doubt I ever will. I also don't sub to all that many of their communities, and those I do have very low likelihood of ever triggering that filter.
I consider myself a free market libertarian and I have contributed to the lemmy project. There are certainly things I disagree with, but in general I think it's an interesting project worth spending my time on. And none of my complaints have anything to do with politics, but are more technical in nature (i.e. I have serious concerns about scaling). So I'm working on something lemmy adjacent that I think is interesting to address my specific concerns (basically fully distributed like BitTorrent), but I continue to use and contribute to Lemmy in the meantime.
So no, it's not communist, socialist, or any other form of political ideology, it's just a federated social network.
@sugar_in_your_tea @NotAPenguin I think I agree with you in general and I’m really not worried about some set of words I might not see, but it is a very strange position from the project runners to make this decision in this way imo. I just don’t love seeing FOSS owners tossing a constraint in like this; particularly hardcoding the thing. It makes me anxious in a somewhat slippery slope kinda way that they might flip some other ideological switch on people
But the fact that we're talking about it means the system is working as intended. Someone noticed something odd in the code and raised a concern to discuss it. I also disagree with the maintainers on this, but from a different angle (i.e. I don't think built-in filters actually work, we should instead be relying on moderators and moderation tools).
At the end of the day, the maintainers get to choose what changes to accept, and contributors can decide whether to contribute. If contributors are annoyed enough, they can easily fork the project. That's how open source projects work.
It's not a democratic system, it's a consensus system, and the community can choose which fork to follow.
@sugar_in_your_tea yeah I think we’re in agreement here. And I agree it does mean that FOSS works. Nice thing too is the protocol isn’t at all locked down. They could entirely lose the plot and hardcode some insane stuff into their #activitypub implementation and we could still more or less play from another instance of another service from what I understand
Yup, and there are some good examples of projects that have done something similar, such as GrapheneOS which broke from CopperheadOS. Open source can be messy, but at least there's the option to fork the project.