Lemmy is software anyone can develop and everyone controls, libre software, which makes it very hard for Lemmy to abuse us. To keep it this way, share the ideas of software freedom.
- Always check its software license: always check it is libre software (video guide here).
- Also avoid service as a software substitute.
- Libre software plus decentralisation [federation or peer-to-peer] is ideal.
- Remember, ‘open source’ misses the point.
If we focus on warning against individual apps, we must repeat our time and effort everytime new malware appears. So, target a common property: its software license.
With proprietary software, we are not the user, we are the used.
It’s important to note that both Lemmy and kbin are licensed under AGPL, which means that any instance using code based on Lemmy or kbin must publish their full source code. Not even the Lemmy devs can change this.
A number of Lemmy instances that have their own forks have unfortunately not upheld this license, as they only link to the LemmyNet github, not their own code. Nothing against the instance maintainers of course, everything is still very new here.
But yeah, it is possible that a Lemmy or kbin instance pops up that has reimplemented the Lemmy federation from scratch, withuot publishing their source code. Doing that is highly likely to be a form of “Embrace Extend Extinguish”, and any instances doing that should be defederated as a matter of policy.
But yeah, the decentralized nature of Lemmy means that if any instances try to do anti-user things, then the users can just vote with their feet and leave, and still have access to all of their communities. The only limitation is that instances effectively control their communities and user accounts, but hopefully that will be improved in the future with user migration features and community federation.
Technicly the Lemmy source code owners could change the license as they hold the ownership.
It does get a little blurry when there are many different contributors though
I see a lot of people misunderstand these licenses as binding for the original copyright holder/author, when they’re allowed to dual license, or take the project private. They just can’t remove the license from any code already released.
True