Lemmy is exactly that for a lot of people, the developers are quite controversial.
Obviously most users are not installing the software from those developers on their personal machines, but serving a federated instance certainly involves doing so.
I run thousands of pieces of software and I have no idea what the political leanings of the developers are. Obviously I know about the main Lemmy developers because this seems to be a recurring topic here. However why would I start caring about these particular developers now?
There have been developers who have done shady things in their projects and it usually torpedoes the trust in the project and people fork and move away. However whatever I may think about the Lemmy developers politics I have no reason to believe they are doing nefarious things in their software.
I don't "trust" tankies, because no authoritarian can ever be trusted, nor do I trust lemmy. I just prefer to vote with my content/wallet, and Reddit showed the world they don't deserve their user base, or any of their content.
This is an open non-profit platform anyone can scrape. That's good enough for me, until something with a better value proposition comes along.
i'm so excited about the progress piefed is making and my home instance's plans to migrate
Wait. How similar is piefed to Lemmy? Does Voyager work with it?
extremely similar with some serious quality of life improvements and better dev leadership. the api, per my understanding, is similar to lemmy, but not wholly compatible. voyager, i do not think, does not support piefed currently (i will need to switch apps)
Who's out here trying to figure out the political or other beliefs of developers? I've got around 50 docker containers running on my server, there's no way I'm going through people's profiles to see if they're morally aligned with me.
Yes, since not liking or disagreeing with someone isn't the same thing as likelihood they are pushing malicious code. If something is open source that's a really good sign, because they could also push closed source code and be more likely to get away with it that way. More points if it clearly has other eyes on it; even if I am not checking over the code myself, someone probably is for a lot of projects.
It's like "separate art from artist" except even more so because software tends to be even more quantifiable as its own independent thing than art is.
Depends heavily on application (access required, sensitivity of data handled, etc) and nature of disagreement as it pertains to trustworthiness.
Example A: I use Lemmy even though I disagree politically with the original devs because the design appears sound and it doesn’t require access to sensitive data.
Example B: I won’t use anything from the Proton Foundation because the founders’ personal comportment and political leanings have led me to suspect that they intend to sell user data.
While I am... suspicious of what the CEO (?) has spouted recently, I am unaware of how that connects to user data. Can you ELI5/summarize/point me in a direction?
I trust the Lemmy developers enough to use their platform hosted on external servers despite them being Marxist clowns, but I wouldn't self host without a thorough code review.
And I'm seriously just waiting for a decent piefed app in order to ditch the platform altogether. So far voyager is the most functionally complete one, but doesn't look very appealing.
if it is open source and sources I trust approve of it, sure
it depends entirely on the context, what the software is, alternatives... etc
I already do, I disagree with a lot of foss devs
I'm going to guess not everyone who runs a lemmy server agrees with the maintainer's politics
I presumably already do. Am I expected to know every single maintainer of every single piece of software I boot up? That is a LOT of homework to run an application.
Genuinely can't tell if this a real question or some weird reductio ad absurdum thing on the not separating art from the artist trend in modern society.
Would you drive on a road made by nazis? Your life literally depends on the quality of the road, but where does political ideology come in to this equation?
With software though, different things are at stake, but how will ideology affect the quality? I think it does have a effect on features and how the project is run, but isn’t quality a mostly separate area?
I've installed thousands of programs on my systems over the past 30 years. Closed source, open source, you name it. Never had a single problem.
Trusting software is such an overblown hangup that people have. Even if it bites me in the ass someday, so what? I'll roll back, reformat, do whatever I have to do. It'll have been worth it.
I mean... I used reiserFS for years and that guy killed his wife, I'm not too keen on that.
I guess its fine as long as its not actively malicious code, its not like I'm letting them into my brain.
On that though, I find it unlikely someone who differs from me politically would have the same priorities, and as such their projects are much less likely to show up on my radar.
Edit: spelling correction, Autocorrupt, ykwim?
If there's no alternative that has the feature set that software has, the alternatives are ultimately worse, and/or I cannot find a fork from another less egregious dev, then it's like I'd have any other choice if I need the software. If I don't need the software, good chance I might just stop using it and just uninstall.
It's why back when I heard that the people in charge of Audacity, back a few years ago, had potential plans on adding telemetry, I stopped using it all together. Of course I kinda moved back because, as far as I know, all the forks are basically dead and the team went back on those plans due to community uproar. Now I just keep it unable to connect via firewall to be safe.
Yes because it can be verified by others even if you don't understand
Everyone else, in unison: "yes, someone else will say something if this is a bad program"
Someone Else™: wind gently blowing, as a tumbleweed goes by
I choose not to do business with anyone who's too vocal about their political disagreements. I'm paying you for your services not your opinion so shut up!
I used to feel this way but I need more nuance now.
If I had a global (or national, or statewide, or even citywide) platform of any kind, and there were momentous things happening in the world that I felt were wrong, and that I felt needed more awareness, how could I not use my platform?
I used to be so sick of celebrities with their political statements until one day that hit me. How could you, in good conscience (and this is true even of opinions I don't agree with) find yourself with millions of people willing to listen to you, how could you not use your platform if you feel strongly enough that there is a moral or ethical obligation to speak up?
jdupes: it's great software. The author left GitHub not because of Microsoft, but because he refused to implement 2fa on his account, which GitHub made mandatory.
His website has some wild ranting about codeberg too. I've been tempted to stop using jdupes.
As have I... But it's so dang handy. From what I know there is no alternative that is quite as good
'Open source' is a deliberately ambiguous phrase, engineered to derail libre software.
It's not, it's a term that means very specific things. Most people don't even know that, but both free software and open source are not some catch all phrases. And in fact they don't even mean the same thing.
You can for example have an open source software that's not free software. The reverse is harder, but IIRC I've seen some license that would qualify (it's been years, maybe I'm misremembering cause I can't find it anymore).
^ yet another victim of this scam. They don't even know and they're trying to teach us. lmao
no.
IMO conservatives are untrustworthy and can't identify fact from fiction.
would you run software from a dev who has a problem discerning reality? do you think a schizophrenic person writes stable maintainable code?
mental health is an important part of gaining trust in your product. ironic that they continue to trust and support a geriatric nazi-wannabe, but goes to show how compromised conservatives are when it comes to their decision making skills.
TempleOS?
technically the guy went crazy because of the project.
I'm assuming this is a dig at Lemmy? The author is a tanky, the software is Janky and we are all having a fun time anyways.
Not really directed at Lemmy.
I was thinking about the time Louis Rossman (who used to advocate for using Graphene OS) said he stopped using GrapheneOS because he didn't trust the former lead dev.
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor comes to mind.
He lied about stopping use of GrapheneOS. He can be seen in videos long after still using GrapheneOS on his Pixel. Also, the reasons he stated for not using/trusting it were nonsense. There was not, and is not, a technical way to target a user with malicious OTA updates.
He was also one of 3 owners of a for-profit telecom that included Nick Merrill (Founder of Calyx). https://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2009536/000200953624000001/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml is the SEC filing for shares issued in February 2024 .
Ok first of all: GrapheneOS is great, probably the best alternative Android OS, but their PR skills are rock bottom. Still, many ignore that due to how good it is.
With that said, I don't believe their claim that it's impossible for them to target a user with a malicious OTA: their reason is basically that the update server never even knows who is downloading, and so it can't send a different file to just one user. That's true, but thet could, in theory, make a single OTA that everybody gets, but checks for a specific IMEI or other device ID and only there enables some malicious payload.
I trust them not to do it, for many reasons, but technically they could. I also don't think they'd do it to Louis, despite the beef they have with him.
I moved off of lemmy because I didn't want to use software made by a tankie, so no.
Does it make much difference when your still federalised?
If you had not mentioned it i would be unable to tell that you are not on lemmy, i also believe your comments and interactions are still getting indexed by lemmy instances and help their growth.
That said, your instance is alluring to me.
I didn’t know about piefed till now, how big of a switch/change would it be?
it's the same principal of using one lemmy/piefed mobile client over another. my comments are still going to the fediverse, but if you're using one software, you aren't supporting the growth of another. even if other instances can see the things I post, that's not their growth, since at any time I can cut them off if I do not like the behavior of their users.
as for features, piefed has a few significant things that lemmy does not have. for example, problematic users have a big red or yellow warning sign next to their name everywhere they go, showing that that person has low or very low reputation. at a certain threshold that I set, I can also automatically hide downvoted posts and comments. there's also built-in user notes, so I can tag users and have that tag display next to their name as well.
and finally, piefed has actual user/instance blocking. for example, we found out the hard way that by having .ML as an instance blocked in my personal settings, no .ML users were able to comment on my posts or reply to my comments at all, even though my instance is federated with them.
there's also a lot more settings when it comes to communities. while it was still on lemmy, we used to have a lot of .world users downvoting every post in !libjerk@anarchist.nexus, simply because they found the content offensive and did not interact in any other way. downvotes affect discoverability in /all, so those liberals were in effect trying to censor us because they don't like being criticized. we've even had to deal with people using alts as zombies for downvoting. now that we've moved the comm to piefed, we can restrict the people who are allowed to downvote as much as we want, so that sort of abuse is impossible now.
open source is safe.
even non-technical people can learn how to look at issues on Github (or wherever the code is kept).
it's like restaurant reviews: if there are dozens of people saying they got malicious food, then you have reason to be careful, even if you don't understand why the food is malicious.
caveat: if the code is open source but no one has had time to review it, it's potentially dangerous even if there are no issues yet. it takes time for people to review the code. and there should be multiple reviewers; there's always the chance that a single malicious developer has created multiple github users. Time is on your side here.
If I know someone's political affiliation prior to using their software I'll likely find an alternative if their views are harmful.
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