Karu 🐲

Tankies don’t own or pretend to own the Fediverse. Y’all literally made up an ill-defined strawman group so that you can immediately dismiss anyone critical of liberal thought because you heard someone else say “China good actually” once.

The Fediverse itself is predicated on the idea of having social spaces on the Internet away from corporate control and the logics of capitalism. The userbase, which you are so dishonestly weaponizing here to make a false claim, is consequently filled to the brim with LGBT people, neurodivergent people, furries, and overall people who is at the very least not satisfied with the system. It’s not at all surprising that a few of these platforms are developed by explicitly leftist groups. Marxism is just one of the lenses through which you can understand how corporate abuse permeates our lives at all levels.

This kind of hysteria about the .ml instance is entirely fabricated. You’d be pressed to find this “dictator worshipping behavior” you are talking about, but that didn’t prevent you from crying about .ml. You can find, however, people arguing that, for example, Russia existing keeps the US in check so it cannot spread its terror as effectively, but this is really far from worshipping Putin, despite how y’all like to pretend. Not that .ml has a particularly leftist userbase either; this kind of opinions are very common elsewhere, on Mastodon, or among non-English speakers, or God forbid, offline. Go ahead and provide that one transphobic DM by Nutomic if you want.

Y’all anti-tankie shitcriers ruined it for yourselves. Despite the Lemmy devs being professed marxist-leninists, they have kept the flagship instance widely federated and took a mostly permissive approach to moderation, only banning things such as blatant transphobia or genocide apologia (Despite how much y’all like to pretend that .ml users are genocide apologists!).

I’d argue that the side attempting to dominate the fediverse is the minority that keeps trying to defederate one of the most populous instances, the main one no less, because of some nebulous claims about .ml users somehow all defending China or whatever dumb criteria you want to use to define “tankie” at any given point.

I am fucking impressed. Even something as neutral as an announcement of an AMA hosted by a small group of FOSS developers on the flagship instance of the third most popular fedi platform is also overriden by this obsession to turn the fediverse into a turf war.

There is only one side of this massive waste of time of an argument that is obsessed with suppressing differing points of view, and it’s not “tankies”. There are way too many meta threads where users from 2 or 3 instances act like rabid monkeys slinging shit at everything if so much as someone has casually mentioned Marx in their general direction at some point in history. Even if a thread is not meant to be meta, there is a high % chance that the discussion has devolved into this. Some users really cannot think or discuss anything else. But because they override entire discussions, sometimes blocking them just leaves threads empty (see, for example, the present thread). At this point it’s pathetic, and makes me want to stop using Lemmy altogether.

It is also even more frustrating having seen the “lemmy.ml is a tankie instance” campaign be fabricated in real time the exact moment .world defeded grad because, otherwise, how are we going to pretend we are being censored and manipulated by a nebulous communist authority at the point of the 21st century where liberalism has openly turned to fascism across the entire Global North?

Idk, if I were some “red-fash” dictator wannabe making a website, I wouldn’t consider it a very good idea to make it open and federated to anyone who wants it no questions asked, and then letting the flagship instance federate with other instances that openly justify US-backed genocides and have included it in their rules that even implying sympathy towards genocided people will get you banned. Oh well, then you will pull some “whatabout” concern trolling involving the Uyghur people that you will literally not mention anywhere else other than to justify this pointless goal.

I’m sorry my comment is not on topic. I don’t care particularly about Framasoft other than respecting the work they do. No other comment in this thread, as of the time of writing, is on topic either, as y’all can’t stop obsessing about this turf war.

Say you hire a company to build a house. You don’t have the skills or the know-to, but at some point, you’ll have to deal with some inevitable aspects of building a house, if only to discuss them with the workers. Say they “force” you to deal with plumbing, for example by including it in the budget. Imagine if you not only don’t know how plumbing works, but also what plumbing is. Maybe you’ve never had to think about it before. What would you do? Would you go to another company that doesn’t force you to deal with it, perhaps by not even providing it in the first place?

Say for the sake of argument that this becomes a generalized problem, and companies use it as an excuse to no longer provide plumbing in new houses, as a cost-saving measure. Most people don’t seem to care. Over 10 years pass by, and people have gotten used to expect not having running water at home. “It sucks, but that’s the way it is I guess”.

Now, a community-driven initiative arises to build cheaper houses, complete with running water. Can you imagine most people refusing participating, because building a house with running water implies having to know that plumbing supplies water? That the mere thought of it is already too complicated, and that maybe having fresh water at home is only for people whose special interest is plumbing?

You need some elementary knowledge on things, if only to exist in the world. The Fediverse, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is not that complicated once you grasp the most basic concepts of the internet.

While I won’t deny outright that open-source devs most of the time don’t think about making their software accessible to the wider public, and that some aspects of decentralized social media still have to be ironed out (duplicated communities on Lemmy are a pet-peeve of mine); these issues are often heavily blown out of proportion. Besides people honestly not understanding some concepts, I think there is also some deliberate anti-intellectualism going on with this topic in particular. People who spend their afternoons troubleshooting Windows just so that their computer games run at 60 FPS suddenly don’t know what a website is when Mastodon is mentioned.

I’m pretty certain that this “Fediverse is too complicated” mantra would not have worked at all before 2010.

While I understand and largely agree with your point, I think it’s worthwhile to question whether it’s reasonable that this is the way people expect the Internet to work.

Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack, so that unless you’re somewhat tech-savvy, you can’t tell the concept of app apart from the concept of server. Not unlike how Android and iOS have been obscuring many basics of the system to the point that some people don’t even know what a filesystem is.

Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved, rather than just “the way things work” and that we need to cather to it. Mostly because FOSS services will always, invariably, struggle to adapt to a conception of the internet optimized for consumption and nothing else.

I agree that people nowadays might struggle to understand what, for instance, a third-party app is, but I also think it’s too an unreasonably low bar to just let it be, and have FOSS forever playing acrobatics to somehow adapt to it.

Whether Lemmy should be the one leading this struggle is a whole another argument lol. Somehow forcing people to understand this with Lemmy in particular, without changing anything of the larger culture, will just cause people to not use Lemmy outright.

But this cannot be the way it works. Everyone using the internet needs some bare minimum tech literacy.