Context:
/r/ProgrammerHumor/ closed for a couple of days, then - “because mods have to listen to the community or otherwise they get replaced by more /u/Spez compliant mods” opened up again, and held a voting which new rules to enforce. The sub opened up with the new rule allTitlesMustBeCamelCase.
I made the first post about 15 minutes after the sub re-opened (because I’m in their discord, I was aware it opened up again, it wasn’t announced yet, I think) - and of course I just make a shit-post about John Oliver since it’s the /r/pics (and a bunch of other) subreddits way to protesting the API changes.
It wasn’t even that good of a post to be honest, it got temporary taken down by the subs’ mods since they mentioned “it’s only anecdotally related [to programmer humor]” - but after messaging them explaining the context they put it back up. So it’s basically approved by the moderators of the subreddit. And not against the content policy of the sub
It got like 3k upvotes in about an hour, so I got a message from some bot that I was on the frontpage of /all/ as well. At the end of the day it had 13.5k upvotes
About 48 hours later I got an automated message:
Your account has been permanently suspended for breaking the rules. This account is permanently suspended due to violations of Reddit’s content policy
I posted an “appeal” basically just asking “Lol you banned me for posting John Oliver?”
And the only response I got was:
Thanks for submitting an appeal to the Reddit admin team. We have reviewed your request and unfortunately, your appeal will not be granted and your suspension will remain in place. For future reference, we recommend you to familiarize yourself with Reddit’s Content Policy. -Reddit Admin Team This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
I posted another “appeal” yesterday asking “Could you clarify which Content Policy rule I broke?” To which they haven’t responded yet.
It’s the only post I made in the last 2 weeks, so there wasn’t any other reason to suddenly ban me besides this post…
My reddit account was 12 years old at this point. I was going to leave anyways because the Reddit client I use (sync) already announced it would be shutting down June 30 - so I don’t care that much that they banned me - just though it was a pretty weird approach from the Reddit Admins to start banning people for getting John Oliver on the front-page
I’m not so sure about that…
I’ve been nagging /u/ljdawson (the sync dev) to comment on whether he’d open-source sync or whether he’d make it compatible with Lemmy: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsync/comments/145vvjg/reddit_clients_can_support_lemmy_just_by_changing/jnog4ag/?context=3
The news so far is
ReVanced has patched sync to be compatible with any reddit API key, in case /u/ljdawson nukes it. And people have been working on decompiling sync and making it compatible with lemmy, and then recompiling it, but that’s not a long term solution. Making large changes on decompiled source is not ideal in the long run. Best case scenario would be for sync to become open source
Edit: Apparently I was wrong and the actual reddit sync dev is making a “sync for Lemmy”. The context here for preferring an “open source reddit sync” was that - if there wouldn’t be an official app - it would make it a lot easier for the community to port reddit sync to Lenny from open-source, instead of having to do it from a decompiled closed-source."
How is open source related to Sync for Lemmy being an option? It was announced already: it’s coming.
Something being open source or not may be a reason for some to use or not use something but generally it isn’t an issue for the mainstream. (Exhibit A: Windows and MacOS hold around 85% of regular home users).
He also wouldn’t nuke Sync for Reddit… the key he uses will stop on July 1st since he won’t pay for it.
Oh ok, my bad. I wasn’t aware the actual sync dev was working on an “official sync for lemmy” - I suppose I missed the official announcement
As far as I was aware “reddit sync” would be abandoned and “sync for lemmy” was going to be an un-official port from the closed-source version by volunteers decompiling the closed-source version of reddit-sync and replacing the reddit API layer with a Lemmy one. - Which wouldn’t be ideal for long term support.
That was the context for the initial “I’m not so sure about that…” comment
What is the problem with it being closed software? I mean it is his decision after all.
The problem is not knowing what the program does on your device (if it spies on you or if it shows you what you want to see instead of what the developers want you to see). It’s his app, but your device and you deserve to have control over it. The author doesn’t think so apparently, but fortunately other Lemmy developers have better standards.
True… But are people reviewing open source software and code to make sure they aren’t malicious? I’m not. I haven’t looked at the Lemmy code once, just saw there was a repo.
I think the bigger issue is what motivates the dev. If it’s freeware, then the project probably isn’t backed by greed VS passion. In saying that, I paid $3 for an android music app (Symfonium) and it’s closed source. I absolutely love it way more than plex Amp and the dev is active. I have no issues with closed source unless development halters.
Yes, people look at software’s code all the time, if it’s popular enough. Lemmy seems to have multiple people contributing right now and each of them knows some portion of the code. You don’t have to do that yourself to benefit from this. When a program is Free and Open Source, it doesn’t automatically mean that it’s secure and private, but it can be. With proprietary software that’s not possible at all, because it’s very difficult to verify what the program does and when authors do add malicious features, the users can’t do anything about it.
With Free and Open Source software, users can study what the program does, make changes to it and share their modifications with others. It wouldn’t make sense to add malware to such program, because users can easily remove it.
Isnt the logic in the case lemmy kinda flawed? Sure the main instance is open source but you never know if any other instance may added tracker and such stuff since you cant directly verify what it runs.
Technically, because of the AGPL license that Lemmy users, instance owners have a legal obligation to disclose any changes they made to the source code upon request. But you are right that we can’t verify what is running on somebody else’s server. There is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to verify what runs on your computer/phone though and that’s more important.
Hm, but also if Lemmy’s server code was proprietary and its developers wanted to add spyware to all instances, it would be difficult to stop them. So there are still benefits.