I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers an the .ml instance. The issue of funding a project with people openly expressing opinions many find distasteful and it being the biggest reddit alternative on the fediverse came up, so here’s a topic to discuss it.
What should we do? What are the options?
Answer: No fork necessary, there are Piefed and Mbin.
You have piefed if you really want to. I personally am fine with developers having views I disagree with, expecting everyone to have the same views as me is unrealistic; if they tried to influence how you host your instance based on their views that’s something I’d disagree, but they do not do so on Lemmy.
We all have limits. For some communicating with those who tolerate genocide is alright, for others using their software is fine, and for even others they will happily give money to them à la “it’s not me, so why should I care?”. But if the number of people who don’t care is not enough to sustain that software development, it will have an effect. We can wait to see if we get that far or do something about it.
I’ll check out Piefed and Mbin as that seems to be most common answer here.
I don’t think Lemmy dev even have the opinion you stated above…
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.
I disagree. You are right that through federation and open source you can create your instance if another instance is a nazi bar. But now you open your new bar. Should you buy chairs from the nazis for your bar? Is it not a problem if the nazis are the only ones producing chairs?
That is to me the analogy with lemmy. Yes I don’t have to be on .ml. But I don’t want to sit on the transphobic, genocide denier built chair either.
Technology and society don’t exist in separate spheres and we should always consider them together.
So go with piefed if you can. I haven’t had any complaints since I switched :)
In this nazi analogy it would be less of buying chairs and more the nazis giving away chairs for free that come with blueprints so if the nazis started installing spikes in their chairs people can just build their own from the blueprints, they just choose not to because it’s a lot of work. Which is fine if you don’t want those chairs, but a lot of people are fine with those chairs as long as the nazis don’t start any camps.
Maybe join piefed and if you want block ml.
There is Piefed, it’s compatible with Lemmy instances and has a whole load of useful feature for both users and moderators.
Much quicker and responsive development (I’ve been able to get two small feature/improvement requests implemented within weeks of my initial issue post).
One of the Lemmy developers is also an admin on the notorious Lemmygrad instance.
Looks like I’ll be checking that out.
It’s great, a lot better than Lemmy.
The main weakness IMO is that Voyager doesn’t support most of the cool features of Piefed (core interaction works great though). I have yet to try Interstellar. The mobile WebUI is pretty good, if need a need of some polish and optimisations.
I’d like to clarify here that Voyager can do with PieFed everything it can do with Lemmy. But PieFed has a lot more features than Lemmy does, and of those extra features, Voyager supports none. But that only means that the PieFed experience on Voyager is precisely the same as the Lemmy experience on Voyager!
I think most of us using 3rd party apps are missing out on a lot of great piefed features that are available on the default UI. I personally use Thunder. I tried Interstellar but unfortunately don’t really like the UI (at least at its current state). Blorp is also supposed to be built with piefed in mind but it lacks even more UI customization (doesn’t even have compact view mode). I think we can just be patient that our apps will catch up eventually. Piefed is being developed so fast that I can understand 3rd party app devs have a hard time keeping up
Compact view mode like this?Source: I’m Blorp dev
Ah I haven’t checked in a while. Thanks for correcting me! I need to try using Blorp more often.
I added it on the more recent side. Thanks for trying Blorp!
you can block the tankie instances on lemmy, and any community too, i blocked the triad, and politics,.world, and any individual account that are from those tankie instances.
Just a quick note that PieFed allows you to easily block all users from a given instance, like a personal defederation with no need for admin powers. Your way also works, but you’d have to block thousands of users individually, plus new ones that sign up later.
While in contrast the option that looks like it would work easily, the “instance block”, in fact is strongly misleading - still allowing those users to vote on your content, reply to you, submit posts in other communities, DM you, triggering notifications, etc. Essentially it does not “block” the “instance” at all, only muting communities hosted on them.
This has been rethreaded so many times I feel like it deserves an entry in knowyourmeme. Opinions are like asses, everyone has one, everyone things someone else’s stink, in the end, what matters is you can support Lemmy without actually supporting the developers (eg.: support your local instance).
Reactionary forks don’t have a great record of success (or even getting off the ground).
Piefed already exists (although I contest the use of “reactionary” here)
It’s also not a fork
PieFed is not even a fork, btw, it’s a completely different software
Yes I know, but I was just speaking generally.
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.
Mbin is just kinda weird. I guess there aren’t too many people who are after a Reddit-like that also care too much about microblogging. Or maybe they do but the microblogging part of Mbin is just an inferior experience to Bluesky or Mastodon anyway? Or maybe people just dislike having to call shitposts in meme communities “articles” in “magazines”?
having to call shitposts in meme communities “articles” in “magazines”?
That is super clunky and I do hate it.
Is the code good? Are you prepared to make any potential fork viable and useful in ways that Lemmy isn’t so people have a tangible, non-ideological reason to choose your software over Lemmy? Do you have a long term goal for funding and maintaining a fork?
That said, Piefed is already a thing, and it federates with Lemmy. It’s where I’m commenting from right now. It has a better on boarding process and does a better job surfacing things I care about.
I write opensource software, I donate to opensource, I use opensource. I however can’t do everything. That is why the question is “we” not “hey @gerowen@piefed.social why don’t you make a fork, you lazy bastard”. Code is not the only way to contribute to a project and I’m willing to donate to lemmy alternatives while it is still possible for me.
Piefed might be where I start donating. Gotta check it out first.
The thought-police strike again.
Usually it is as this point things turn to shit in opensource/community/fediverse/cooperative. The devs are not the product.
Who will go in holidays with 100% of the team for every product one use ?
Usually it is as this point things turn to shit in opensource/community/fediverse/cooperative. The devs are not the product.
What does this even mean? Who creates something doesn’t matter at all? If that’s the case, then using Microshaft products doesn’t matter, does it? They can provide the infra and software for bombing Gaza but who cares right? They make software that is worth using so we should keep giving them money. No problem.
Please re again my previous message. I didn’t mention any single thing of your list.
Sorry if this has been triggering for you, have a nice Christmas.
I just wish .ml was more honest with their rules and policies, so people can actually make an informed decision, before they sign up there.
It’s the Communist tradition to force it on unsuspecting people because they don’t want anything to do with it otherwise.
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 aternate pieces of software mentioned here that have their pros and cons.
PieFed and mBin exist. Both do everything Lemmy does, and a bit more. They use less resources as well. What reason would there be for forking Lemmy? The only reason Lemmy is the most popular one among these is that it was the first one. Since then, better things have surfaced.
What should we do?
There is no “we” and you can start a fork/rewrite if you want to, good luck!
PieFed is essentially what OP means. It exists, it does everything Lemmy does, and a bit more. And it does it faster, both for the user and for server resources.
You can use mbin if you want out of the Lemmy codebase, it’s a separate codebase that does the same thing.
Not only the same thing, some features are even better compared to Lemmy.
