Ask Lemmy

Can someone explain like what are the lemmy devs political stance ?

They're tankies, ie radical communists who support authoritarian regimes like North Korea and the CCP, and fully support Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The devs also onboarded someone who openly said many times on October 8th that "all Israelis are valid targets", "anything that moves and isn't Palestinian is a valid target" and "there's no such thing as an Israeli civilian" and he's still in their team. On their own instance lemmy.ml (their choice of the .ml TLD is a reference to Marxism-Leninism), if you mention the Tiananmen massacre you get banned for "orientalism", and if you say that Hamas are terrorists you also get banned for "bothsidesing (sic)".

Does that leave a stain on Lemmy, the open-source project? Yes, for sure, it leaves Lemmy with a very questionable governance, and weird decisions like the absence of any prioritization of work on moderation tools and the very weird and completely random fact that they suddenly disabled sign-up captchas last summer leading to a bot infestation of most instances. Coincidentally, tankie instances like lemmygrad and hexbears rely on brigading, bots, and cyber-harassment to spread their poison, and strong moderation tools would hinder them a lot.

Now does that make it impossible for Lemmy to succeed? No, it's again an open-source project, and it can be forked away from the tankies at any time. In fact, there's even a highly credible rewrite in Java currently whose goal is to be 100% API-compatible with Lemmy: https://sublinks.org/ (see the announcement here: https://lemmy.world/post/11005411 )

I've only been here 6 or so months so it's hard for me to gauge, but saying something like "the lemmy devs are bad" doesn't really mean much.

Each instance has their own users, mods, admins, and developers. As a result, each instance really has it's own vibe.

There is no singular "lemmy", it's a melange of different attitudes all being shared through federation.

When I first joined, I set up a lemmy.one account because it seemed easy to access, but then they had some kind of technical problem that took them offline for a bit, so I spun up lemmy.world and kbin accounts.

Lemmy.world became my main account when I was asked to help out on Mod duties, and Kbin never really got much use since I found at the time I could only use THEIR app to access it and there are better apps out there.

I haven't followed the drama closely, but from what I understand, the main devs of Lemmy and many of the older instance admins (including lemmy.ml) are tankies - basically pro-authoritarian, pro-violence, communists getting their name from support of the use of tanks against protesters. From what I can tell, lemmy.ml is pretty hands-off with their moderation, so there shouldn't be too much of a problem with this, but you can always move if you feel you need to. While individual instances do have a significant degree of freedom, there is still potential issues with the lead developers being supporters of authoritarian ideologies, if only because that mindset will impact their understanding of how moderation/administration should work in their software. That said, again, I haven't followed all this closely, so this might be outdated or incorrect information.

Really, this is more of a polling and discussion community rather than one for providing factual or diffinitive answers to questions. If you want better answers, you'd be best off posting somewhere like [email protected]

bad

I don't know if you can reduce politics to "good" and "bad", but the main dev, dessalines, is enthusiastic about Stalin and was unhappy that the Soviet Union went away and such.

You can read some of his stuff here.

https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md

You have stuff like:

Ukraine now has a pro-US, nazi-glorifying government with ultranationalism, anti-semitism, neo-nazi pogroms, and attacks on LGBT groups.

It is a take that many, including myself, strongly disagree with, particularly given the context of the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia. I'd add that the "ml" in "lemmy.ml" was chosen to refer to "Marxist-Lenninism".

Is lemmy as whole affected by it because i think the two main guys who hold all the cards are the ones with these opinions ,like do they have any control on lemmy as whole in anyway ?

Well, they have a lot of influence, as they make the calls on how the software is developed. The software is open-source, though, and could be forked. I have seen some statements that concern me, like "we want to make it hard for right-wingers to use lemmy", which I don't think is a great take for forum software that would -- at least as I would like to see it -- become widely-used in a content-agnostic way for many forums. But thus far, I don't think that I've seen political policy decisions baked into the software package. Policy on lemmy.ml, sure.

If you don't like lemmy and want to avoid the developers, there's another software package, kbin, which can also communicate with the Threadiverse. It's done by some -- as far as I can tell -- pretty ordinary Polish guy. Note that I don't know what the state of the mobile clients is -- they were behind lemmy a few months back when I last looked, as they were still working on the API to expose to clients -- though the Web UI is fine. It also has some additional functionality, can interoperate with Mastodon as well.

The instance that Ernest, the lead kbin dev, runs is here:

https://kbin.social/

If you just want to use a lemmy instance that is content-agnostic and want to avoid lemmy.ml, lemmy.world is a large, popular one. It does defederate with some instances, though, which may or may not be okay with you. I use lemmy.today, which is on the US West Coast, and has specifically stated that they aim not to defederate with other instances.

EDIT: I'll add that I have both a kbin and lemmy account, since generally, if something breaks on one, it's working fine on the other, and it can be nice to have that as a backup. One of the perks of having a federated infrastructure with different software packages that can talk to each other.

EDIT2: If you're looking for a different lemmy or kbin instance to call home, I'd recommend the Fediverse Observer, which can help find a lemmy or kbin instance near you.

For kbin:

https://kbin.fediverse.observer/

For lemmy:

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/

The devs on Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml are proudly Communists which is no secret, but they are particularly pro-China and pro-Russia. Saying something that could be criticism of those countries often can get you banned for "Orientalism". This happens most often on news threads about Ukraine, but can happen anywhere there if they catch it.

That said, because they released the software as FOSS, they don't really dictate how to run communities not on those two sites, so everyone benefits.

There are various development pains and issues that slowly are being addressed. I'm most hopeful for Sublinks, the Java reimplementation and extension of Lemmy in development.

the things i consider bad and not polical stance are : for instance i just don’t like trump because he is against t lgbt and being racist etc. Which are geniunly bad in my opinion and not just difference in opinions

I haven't run into anyone with a racism or anti LGBT stance on .ml, or grad or hexbear, unless you include shittalking white people. The only time I've seen Trump come up is to mock him, they just hate Joe Biden for his long list of crimes too.

Those instances have been the quickest to remove transphobia, meanwhile in other places it will often get straight up ignored/denied.

They aren't "bad", it's just that most people coming from reddit are liberals and as such won't agree with their leftist/communist takes.

Just join any general instance really. feddit.ch which you're on is one such instance.

The instance you are on doesn't really matter that much unless the owner decides to shut it down.

Nobody's going to assume you're a Nazi.

And if they are that bad why aren’t anyone forking it

There's more than one piece of software that is interoperable with the "Threadiverse." Kbin is known best and also has microblogging features (like Mastodon). There's a new one too, but I can't think of the name.

I don't know if this is what you mean by forking Lemmy. but there are a ton of Lemmy instances that aren't lemmy.ml or ran by the .ml admins

https://join-lemmy.org/instances

There's also kbin instances as well!

https://fedidb.org/software/kbin