I shared my fly.io Lemmy project to Hacker News and one of the first responses was “Lemmy is for tankies.”

This isn’t the first time I’d heard this either. In leaving Reddit and researching alternatives I’d heard it a fair amount.

I think it’s basically untrue; beehaw doesn’t even federate with the big tankie servers. But that seems to require some understanding of what Lemmy actually is.

So… what’s the best way to talk about it and/or get around this optics issue?

  • Kaldo@beehaw.orgEnglish
    14·
    1 year ago

    I think people responding to this with “just defederate them” or something in that vein are missing the point - the software lemmy is still being developed by “potential” tankies. It’s not just an issue if they will ban you from the main instance if you speak against CCP, they decide what gets added to lemmy repo and in which direction they take the development and who’s allowed to contribute.

    I don’t know enough yet to make a decision about it so i’m using both lemmy and kbin for now. Just wanted to point out that “ignore them” is not really an answer that solves everything. And besides, it is always good practice to be skeptical about who you’re giving your data and money to on the internet.

    • Rhabuko@feddit.deEnglish
      17·
      1 year ago

      Lemmy is open source. Worst case is people fork it and the community has to pay the new developers. But I don’t think it will come to this. Now that the project is rolling I doubt that the devs will risk it. But wouldn’t hurt to donate maybe a extra buck, if you already help your server instance, to finance another independent full time contributor.

      • isosphere@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Open source and AGPL licensed, we can separate the code from them at any time and we do not need permission.

        Agree re: $ towards instance admins; I have a tiny Mastodon instance and it isn’t cheap.

    • sophware@beehaw.orgEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Which one is the main instance? I want to test if I speak against CCP if I get banned. If I don’t, that is one data point this issue isn’t what people are saying. Plenty of data points are needed, I’m sure; but we Leftists are misrepresented and are not just one monolithic group. I meant to type “we know Leftists” are misrepresented but will leave the slip just the way it is, lol.