The Lemmy platform is just a tool to manage and delivery content. And I think it’s important to differentiate the software from those who manages the software. I can see there’s is a tacit connection and influence there. But unless they start baking inherently bias features into the software and skewing it, I don’t think it’s a big problem.

Also, because it’s an inherently federated platform, if people don’t like the opinions of those who run a specific instance, they can (with the inclination and determination) spin up their own instance and manage that the way they see fit. And that has happened quite a few times over the last couple of years.

So no, I don’t think it requires a fork really. Not unless the people managing the main branch lose interest and the software starts to wither on the vine, or they start corrupting it somehow. But that’s just my opinion.

Once every couple months someone makes a post saying “I just found out the Lemmy devs are TANKIES! Won’t someone do something about it?” No one has expressed real interest in forking Lemmy, though plenty of people have expressed interest in someone else forking Lemmy for them.

Most of the dev interest seems to be on Piefed right now. For some reason Mbin hasn’t seemed to really take off, I don’t see people talking about it as much.

Reactionary forks don’t have a great record of success (or even getting off the ground).

What should we do?

There is no “we” and you can start a fork/rewrite if you want to, good luck!

The thought-police strike again.

The main advantage of fediverse over, let’s say X, is that you can change server if you find owner not trustworthy. So just do it, it’s exactly why it was designed in this way, to let you do it easily.

But talking about funding… I might indeed reconsider doing this…

Just don’t give money to the instance they own that is pro russian occupation and pro china human right abuses

So far no one who’s able and willing to do the work for a fork has done it so I assume the motivation is low. There’s alternate pieces of software mentioned here that have their pros and cons.

I don’t see the point in boycotting something that’s free and doesn’t make money off of selling my data. I suppose you aren’t obligated to donate to it, but that was already true.

I suppose OTOH, I’m not pro-tankie, but I at least prefer tankies to the fascists and authoritarian capitalists (or whatever you want to call them) that run mainstream media. Harm reduction is the name of the game IMO, not finding a platform with a perfect set of political values aligning with yours (at least for me, I haven’t run into many leftists who are also committed to nonviolence due to pragmatic reasons). The russia/ukraine stuff in that thread you link does look nasty, on the other other hand

I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers

For what it’s worth, that thread is openly biased with many of those examples being strawman quotes and misframing events, like a non-sequitur troll post ban being framed as “support for Ukraine”. And frankly, some of those points are cm0002 themselves intentionally trolling, like dubiously reporting a political meme as “Propaganda”.

Personally I think the main devs are terrible at forum moderation. I’m aware that they’re chronically overworked, and that .ml is not intended to be a neutral or liberalist general-purpose instance, and I’m aware that it’s very normal for moderators to be bad at moderating, and yet that doesn’t detract from my belief that they’re technically bad at moderating a forum. For example, simply writing “rule 1” as a ban reason allows people to misinterpret bans as we’re seeing here. Automate that shit, prefill ban reasons with the rule list! Make clearer rules and FAQs describing how memes and talking points considered normal in the US are actually chauvinistic propaganda!

As for a fork or rewrite, like others have said, alternatives already exist, but I also don’t think this is a case where maintainer opinions are harmful to the user or project (even if I disagree with some). They’re devout anticapitalists, which makes their FOSS and anti-enshitification positions clear, I know it won’t sell out in five years. They only have power over their own instance, which one is welcome to not join or block.

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Does the term “freedom of opinion” have any meaning to you?