This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.eeEnglish
    3510·
    1 year ago

    I have heard some respectable communities, namely r/AskHistorians, express hesitance at coming to Lemmy in part over fears of appearing biased due to the overt political stance of Lemmy’s creators. In other words, it’s hard to be a neutral body in affiliation with anything that has an overt political stance.

    I wonder what the devs of Lemmy think of this hesitance. Is it unreasonable and itself biased? Or do you see any potential for finding a way to facilitate a platform that would allow for a more neutral space?

    • sub_ubiEnglish
      45·
      1 year ago

      They can run their own lemmy server, and they don’t need to federate with any servers run by or for proles or anyone else they find distasteful.

      Also, the deepest faith you can have in a political ideology is when you don’t recognize you have one.

      • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        42·
        1 year ago

        Also, the deepest faith you can have in a political ideology is when you don’t recognize you have one.

        this This is a powerful truth. Some of the most critical actors in maintaining the status quo are the mass of people who are convinced it is the neutral, natural way of the world and not informed by politics at all.

    • comfyEnglish
      331·
      1 year ago

      If anyone considers themselves a historian and thinks anything is unbiased, their experience and insight will be dubious at best. Understanding that everyone has a distinct worldview and therefore bias is literally high-school history class, years before History 101. Do they think reddit.com, or any reddit alternative for that matter, is unbiased or neutral??

      Not only is it irrelevant in context (FOSS, forkable, the devs in question only moderate this single instance), it’s especially unreasonable coming from /r/AskHistorians. They of all people should be able to understand bias, context and causation. If anything, this bias is just a guarantee that they won’t sell out and extort the userbase.

      • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        71·
        1 year ago

        Yeah this. No association is implied just by using open source software. You don’t have to agree with Richard Stallman to use GNU utils, nor linus torvalds to use linux, it doesn’t make you suspect politically, it’s just software.

        If you don’t wanna be associated with communists then don’t use a communist instance (hexbear, lemmygrad), that’s fine. even if they don’t make their own instance they can pick and choose their associations. Frankly, being associated with reddit is far worse than being associated with commies.

            • TimewornTraveler@lemm.eeEnglish
              31·
              1 year ago

              What are you talking about? It is BY FAR the subreddit with the most consistently throughly cited responses. Comments get removed even just for not having sources.

              You are not talking about the same subreddit, please check yourself. Or maybe provide some citations of your own if you’re going to say that content of that caliber is “unresearched”. I mean who the heck are you??

    • SomethingOfAGirlEnglish
      263·
      1 year ago

      “Neutrality” as a concept doesn’t exist. People who claim to be neutral are usually pro status quo, so they don’t need to express any political views because things are going well for them so far with the current politics.

    • DessalinesOPMAEnglish
      17·
      1 year ago

      They can definitely run their own server, and we’d even help them get set up. There’s no such thing as a neutral space, but people can set up an instance if they’d like to moderate / control it how they see fit.

    • jernejEnglish
      16·
      1 year ago

      Doesn’t the federation part fix that? Couldn’t they host their own server or be on a more neutral instance? or am I missing the point?

    • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      it’s hard to be a neutral body in affiliation with anything that has an overt political stance.

      What the hell? This is open source. The minute the devs do something to the product that people don’t like, a bazillion forks will appear. While they are the developers of Lemmy, the code isn’t theirs, it’s everyone’s.

    • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      This is antithetical to the decentralised web. The primary feature is that there’s no centralised control. Create your own askhistorians instance.

    • Dame English
      2·
      1 year ago

      Why don’t they join Kbin instead if that’s the case?