I wouldn’t get too depressed about it, it would just be another niche bit of alt-tech if it were anything other than completely neutral. I can’t think of a case when an anti-left fork of a software was memorable as a self-hostable tool. The closest I can think of is Gab, which hardly qualifies, nor does it hold a torch to Mastodon.
Also, the entire idea is contrary to rms’ FOSS goals
Perhaps, and I don’t see how that’s a problem. Saint IGNUcius isn’t the divine dictator of FOSS. The original Funkwhale announcement’s author makes it clear at the end that they don’t hold freedom-as-an-end-goal (liberalism) as their ideology.
LARP
Not LA nor RP, my friend.
As you hinted, a determined admin can disable the blocklist, it probably isn’t too technical to patch, but this makes a clear statement, which if you’ve seen any right-leaning tech forums, has a real impact on them (see their discussions on Firefox and Rust, or better yet, don’t).
[from the original announcement]
If you are a liberal or if you want to have fun, have a look at “Aamer Rahman: Is it really ok to punch nazis?” :)
haha, nice. And this makes the Funkwhale announcement author’s position clear: combating fascism is more important than defending lofty ideals, like their liberties. They treat Funkwhale as a community, not merely a tool.
Some of the points Sean brings up may be reasonable critiques, I don’t know enough about music tagging to know how easy or hard MusicBrainz is to use, and there is also the question about what if a formerly RW artist reforms (many, many have deradicalized or left the movement, fun fact: this is an important source of antifascist intel). I know about a dozen artists who, as teenagers, were in edgy right-wing circles and echoed that in their works, and are now very far away from that and regretful, but if they hadn’t taken up new aliases, they’d probably be lumped in with their unwelcome past works. So I do see merit in the complaint about that project lead failing to implement a way to handle special cases.
With all that said, I’m definitely in support of this move. I just hope they implement and improve it well - that will make or break it.
This reminds me of Mastodon (like Sean mentioned in the article) and Lemmy. I’m not experienced with Mastodon, but I am aware of how they reacted to Gab (formerly a Mastodon instance, before getting bullied by almost everyone), and how most of Lemmy divorced Wolfballs (run by a US-Libertarian, think 🧊🍑 + antivax, but soon populated by white supremacists and neo-nazis; eventually shut down, among other reasons, when the admin realized the Nazis on their instance weren’t just pretending for a laugh and that many were commercial bots. Probably didn’t help that their admin had a non-white partner and jewish friends) and exploding-heads.
These are examples when a FOSS tool takes a community stance, rather than an idealistic liberalist freedom-above-all stance.
For what it’s worth. I suspect fed-run relays have sped up the Tor network substantially. I’m really mostly using it to avoid commercial tracking and passive dragnet so it doesn’t really bother me…
For what it’s worth, I don’t understand why anyone needs any linkedin.
I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin.
I already had this problem on PeerTube years earlier, so I played it safe with a bigger instance, at least for a main account (I also had one on gtio.io which was gone before the reddit API exodus). This is absolutely a real issue with people recommending small instances, but at the same time, it’s necessary to avoid recommending just one which gets overwhelmed and disables new accounts.
I joined lemmy through a link my relative sent me and somehow I did not get to select an instance, it seemingly auto-assigned me to lemmy.cafe.
Like spujb said, my guess is the link was directly to lemmy.cafe.
If you want to quickly browse around different instances, there’s https://join-lemmy.org/, which some people have said they avoided because they don’t want people joining the politically-stricter instances as a first impression. So I’d recommend settling in for a week on .cafe to get an idea of how this works, before considering if you’re having no problems with .cafe or if you’d like to explore other options. For example, if they have blocked any communities on other instances which you’re interested in (I don’t know if this is the case).
To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong.
Most of them are. Some of them are even plain old factually wrong, not just condescending or exaggerating.
It’s important to understand that many of these instances were raised by people who didn’t like reddit’s widespread US-defaultism (including people claiming reddit is left-of-center because it swings Democrat) and its tolerance of bigots and trolls. Now if someone wants to set up their own instances to clone reddit and keep all the bad parts, sure, all we can really do is ignore them or get ignored by them. But when those people complain that this is “a bunch of 14 year olds” with “vote bots” or a “political echo chamber”, that’s just plain old ignorant, or shocked that they’re suddenly in a place with a different culture and struggling to believe it’s mostly just normal nerdy people like reddit is.
How was it default? I’ve been here for years and in all that time, it was never default. It was one of the most popular, and the most widely shared, but that’s not the same at all.
The linked post given on the second point is a bit flimsy. It’s basically saying that if you use evidence published by a person with shitty views, you must have them too. To me, that’s absurd as claiming that referencing FBI statistics makes someone a federal agent.
It was made very clear from the start that .ml was not meant to be a ‘default instance’.
The fact that Lemmy doesn’t calculate and show a user’s total post score is proof itself that it doesn’t reflect Lemmy’s political leanings.
I don’t know enough to say if it’s more insular or not, I don’t know how common it is to have the default sort as All, but we’re definitely worldly enough for other instances to have some users pushing stereotypes on us when we comment.
You do have some point about lemmy.ml having enough instances that you can get by with Local as default, but I assume most people would be subscribing to or exploring other instances too? I really don’t know.
Honestly, it depends on your circles and network. I only remember seeing The Picard Maneuver maybe twice, didn’t know of them before this week. I’ve seen your username far more, for example.
and especially here
Good to know that old post is still useful. (It’s also nice to see that wolfballs, bakchodi and exploding-heads all died.)
well I’d say since non-federated Lemmy is just a forum with a bunch of stuff for federation that you won’t use
It’s not the same as every other forum software, or even every other content aggregator.
with only one instance, it’s little more than a mediocre forum.
What would make it mediocre or not is the community, and pre-federation Hexbear, or even reddit itself, is proof that you don’t need federation to have an active community, it simply makes it far easier.
Federation doesn’t make the rest of the software worse.
It’s not like wanting a car to solely generate heat with the exhaust, it’s closer to using a four-wheel-drive car on regular city streets.
I haven’t checked around since the reddit API fiasco, but there were unfederated Lemmy instances. As Diva mentions in more detail, Hexbear used to be unfederated and it was the largest of all instances. Even without federation, it’s a viable, actively developed content aggregator. So I wouldn’t call it silly, it’s a valid choice.
and wasn’t it revealed that that Trump’s garbage dump was running defedded Masto?
Gab is also a Mastodon fork, which was originally defederated before being blocked from most instances and bullied by the remaining freeze peach instances, so they mechanically removed the federation code.
I’ve also heard some special interest communities on Mastodon intentionally defederate from the broader network for privacy reasons.
I personally don’t value the microblogging format and never really gave it a shot. It’s just personal preference. In my opinion, the site format mechanically encourages low-effort junk, and there’s enough of that on sites like this. I only use microblogs as an inconvenient feed for specific niche news updates I can’t get elsewhere, like I would an RSS-type feed.
With that said, I support people posting on fediverse microblogging sites rather than on xitter or bluesky. I have to jump through a lot of moving hoops to even view xitter feeds without an account.
This describes a general forum format, but you might mean chan imageboards specifically. There have been federated imageboards for a while, but they’re very niche and experimental and I don’t see the value. The two examples I’ve heard of are NNTPchan (2015-present, NNTP protocol) and Fchannel (ActivityPub protocol).
There’s the related imageboard webring, but there’s no actual federated interaction between the boards, it’s effectively just cross-advertising to allow easier discovery.