this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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I've been trying to make people aware of Lemmy on discord and Mastodon, but it's always met with resistance citing "the devs are pro authoritarianism tankies." Kbin seems to be picking up steam because of the developer baggage.

Do you feel like this negative perception will hamstring Lemmy's growth?

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (21 children)

im just shooting that down outright, what about the devs or the server they run matters? as far as I can tell the software works fine, we can fork and run what we like, its a protocol not a proprietary system.

why are people saying the culture must match the devs? do you adopt the culture of all the devs that make the software you use?

do we all need to list the OS's and software stacks we use so politics are clear?

this is silly.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Kbin is new, the distinctions between Magazine and micro-blogging creates an extra barrier to understand the system, the few instances are straining under the load, and it's very much in beta.

New users won't be terribly forgiving, so I feel like Lemmy's the better option.

I never understood why questionable views from software devs might be a problem.

  • It's not a corporation, so you're not financially supporting tankies.
  • Lots of devs don't share your values, because everyone has different values.

It's not like I can only use software made by people who don't eat meat, and everyone's doctors are partially informed by science performed by the Nazis.

I have no idea what kind of world these people think they're living in, as if everything were developed with shared values, and a pure conscience, until Lemmy came along.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Kbin and Lemmy operate on the same network, so if somebody has a problem with that they are better off on the first platform. Or they can just host their own instance like Behaw mods do. I just wish people would finally shut up about Lemmy's developer views, it's a circlejerk at this point

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They are better off picking another instance anyway, enough people are joining lemmy.ml at the moment. I hope that the way things have taken off during the last few days show people that Lemmy is a diverse community, just like Reddit was.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I never encountered the term "Tanky/Tankie" until yesterday, here, on Lemmy. I'm just trying out a bunch or Reddit alternatives and some fediverse stuff. I mean, some of the founders of Reddit aren't my kind of people, and I've been over there since it was founded. If they're not doing something extremely horrible, then meh.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

It's niche political drama, and it doesn't really affect the development of Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

It's a silly meaningless word

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (8 children)

No, this is over blown. Whenever visited before the large influx, lemmygrad was so big it made clear who this was for. But not on the technical level. Now it just is a reddit alternative, which also has some questionable communities here and there to be dealt with.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think it might for a little while but not for much longer.

When the influx started, the two oldest and biggest Lemmy instances, the ones maintained by the developers, and thus presumably the flagship instances, were lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml. Tankies are definitely overrepresented in those two instances, and since the devs themselves are tankies, there's a lot of moderation bias in favor of red fascist authoritarian regimes even in the nominally "neutral" lemmy.ml — such as them refusing to remove genocide denial or outright genocide justification, while also removing posts critical of China and so on.

You might argue that this doesn't affect you if you just pick a different instance, because the culture of that instance will be different and so will the moderation, but the problem with that is that if the vast majority of users on a network are tankies and are moderated by tankies then that's going to influence your experience of the network as a whole pretty much unavoidably unless you defederate with the largest instances and thereby intentionally hamstring yourself.

So even if you joined another instance, your experience of the site as a whole would be dominated by a tankie leaning culture via comments and posts, and that's where the reputation (deservedly) came from. And it probably did and maybe still does hamper the growth a little bit. It definitely made me, a trans anarchist, think twice about joining.

However, with the more neutral and professionally-run lemmy.world taking over as the second largest and flagship instance, and beehaw as the third (iirc), as well as the overall influx of a variety of users from Reddit, I think over time the dominance of tankies in how the network is experienced by users, even from other instances, will drastically decrease, especially as many instances defederate from lemmmygrad, and so the reputation will also fade.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

red fascist authoritarian regimes

Do you include Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Vietnam, Laos, Nepal, etc in that? Is there a type of "red" (marxist) that you don't call a fascist?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I have some memory of you being reasonable when actually presented with arguments. I would strongly encourage you to try to actual talk to these people that you speak about in such strong pejoratives, perhaps by asking them non-presumptuous questions. I think you will find that they have more to say than you give them credit for.

The people running beehaw are extremely dishonest about this issue, citing "hate speech" as a reason for defederation with platforms that aggressively ban and remove hate speech, including the only instance I know of that actually displays pronouns with the username (Hexbear.net , which they preemptively banned).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I don't think it matters. If people want to use Kbin instead, then great! It's still a fediverse platform (even though they had to temporarily turn off federation), so we'll still all be in the same pond.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (22 children)

I've suddenly started seeing the word "Tankie" around. WTF does it mean?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Same thing "woke" means to conservatives, except it's used by liberals instead - absolutely anything they want it to mean in any given situation.

It's deployed by people generally referring to any kind of marxists that have anti-imperialist politics, but I frequently see it used by liberals against even anarchists if they're not pro-nato.

It is complete garbage, should be ignored, and the people using the word derided as cranks. Once you start to realise that their behaviour is exactly the same as the people that scream about the "woke" all the time you realise how ridiculous it is, they filter EVERYTHING through hating the "tankies" (which can mean anything in different situations remember) in exactly the same way.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

A tankie is a leftist who doesn't agree with mainstream geopolitical opinions or shows any interest in nuance

Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.

The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.

https://redsails.org/tankies/

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Sadly, it will. People are too used of the whole "administratives of the product I consume represent me".

Federated applications (and open source for that matter), don't really have an "owner", nor a CEO. Yeah the devs may have some questionable opinions, but at the end of the day the software is free as in freedom for everyone to use as they please, the only thing they can control is their own instance. Just join another and block theirs if you like.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Probably but it's a non issue for me. Don't interact with it and move on. There's shitty people in every facet of life.

I think I was having a quality discussion with some "tankies" last night about politics and philosophy. Not really sure what their thoughts on ccp were exactly as it was more a broad discussion.

I don't condone authoritarianism. Hell I don't condone most govt systems lol.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It doesn't help, but i don't see it as a massive problem. the project is decentralised, free and open source, so as long as that codebase is open and you can choose to join a server instance that doesn't federate with the more extreme groups it's fine.

The influx has led to a big increase in contributors to the codebase, more moderators, and there are no central admins to worry about due to the way the network works, so it would be effectively impossible for them to censor unrelated communities.

I'm pretty auth-left on a lot of topics but those guys are crazy, they're the far-left equivalent of far-right conspiracists and cant be reasoned with.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

no because no normie knows what a tankie is

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I literally just found out what that word means because of Lemmy

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

LOL wait til you hear about the political views of the devs of other social media sites. At least you know the moderation will b strict ;)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

as opposed to what? pro authoritarianistic capitalists?

fuck big money and reddit/twitter/etc is the bigger money

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