I shared my fly.io Lemmy project to Hacker News and one of the first responses was “Lemmy is for tankies.”
This isn’t the first time I’d heard this either. In leaving Reddit and researching alternatives I’d heard it a fair amount.
I think it’s basically untrue; beehaw doesn’t even federate with the big tankie servers. But that seems to require some understanding of what Lemmy actually is.
So… what’s the best way to talk about it and/or get around this optics issue?
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“That was before Reddit prollapsing into itself. Now lemmy has fresh new users with no extreme politics as their topic of interest”
Yup, this is why I’m here at least.
I think personally that we should just give it time. We don’t need to attract everyone and we’ve already got a lot of work to do.
I personally believe that what we have today is enough to serve as a battery for organic, natural growth through word of mouth. We just need to keep going and convince people through genuine effort that we can do better as a platform.
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that the tankies under the bed aren’t going to get them.
Are you really ready to make that promise? I have a pretty tall bed and I haven’t asked everyone under there what their ideologies are.
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The solution to pollution is dilution. Every sane user and instance weakens the grasp of the insane.
Also pretty sure it’s just lemmy.ml, not all of the federated servers.
“Hacker News is for pedophiles.”
Purity testing is an absurd road to go down. Hacker News is full of techbros, and as I understand it, it’s run by Valley “angel investors.” If “Lemmy = tankies → Lemmy is bad,” then Hacker News is the worst thing imaginable.
Which, I mean, Hacker News is awful. Point being, who cares what techbros think?
How does (or should) one respond to “Lemmy = tankies”
My first question would be: “What’s a tankie?”
They are communists of the authoritarian vanguard party kind (known as marxism-leninism). There’s different brands of socialism - some, like anarchists, prefer socialism to be focused around unions and decentralized aid groups, while others focus around using governments and vanguard parties. Tankies are of the latter variety
They’re the kind of people to deny genocides of communist government
So they are basically saying they would like to live under the regime of Stalin back in the day(or a modern analog). A society where it didn’t matter how left your were, or how correct you had been living all your life. If you were “in the way” for someone important with connections you and maybe your entire familie goes to the gulag.
I mean, it’s not like they think that’s how it was in the USSR.
I believe it’s someone who is an idiot and an anti-capitalist. The kind of people who defend China’s genocide in Xinjiang or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I just want to add that being anticapitalist does not suffice to make you a tankie, tankies are also apologists of authoritarian “anti-west” governments (Mao’s/Xi Jinping’s China, USSR, Ghaddafi’s Lybia, Putin’s Russia…)
Fair enough, thanks
Fair enough,
thankstanksFTFY
I’ve seen this raised quite often and, to be honest, it was kind of true in the beginning and that’s probably where the opinion came from.
Ultimately, software like this is free and open to everyone; even those we don’t agree with. We’re going to have to come to terms with that fact because our own freedom rests upon it. There were going to be authoritarian left servers at some point, it just so happened to be at the beginning. There are also going to be authoritarian right servers if there aren’t already. The software doesn’t discriminate but it also doesn’t discriminate against anyone else.
As for optics, I think all you can do is focus more on the beehaw community or whichever community you want to promote. This post was written to capture the spirit of the community if you need some inspiration. Some might not be convinced and that’s okay, we just need to convince enough of their friends :)
If it really matters, suggest Kbin too. We can interact with Kbin magazines and users so Kbin’s success is Lemmy’s success and vice versa.
Maybe say something like, “That’s like saying Reddit is for /r/TheDonald. It’s just not true. Those guys are really niche. Lemmy is not that.”
to a techie, i’d say, it’s open source and if they ever overpushed politics, they’d find they’d become the fork as the community would fork away.
to a non-techie, i’d say, everyone’s an asshole a different way, but they don’t own the whole place like spez and musk do.
and i wouldn’t argue. let them walk away haters. this platform isn’t ready for everyone to come right now anyway.
I think people responding to this with “just defederate them” or something in that vein are missing the point - the software lemmy is still being developed by “potential” tankies. It’s not just an issue if they will ban you from the main instance if you speak against CCP, they decide what gets added to lemmy repo and in which direction they take the development and who’s allowed to contribute.
I don’t know enough yet to make a decision about it so i’m using both lemmy and kbin for now. Just wanted to point out that “ignore them” is not really an answer that solves everything. And besides, it is always good practice to be skeptical about who you’re giving your data and money to on the internet.
Lemmy is open source. Worst case is people fork it and the community has to pay the new developers. But I don’t think it will come to this. Now that the project is rolling I doubt that the devs will risk it. But wouldn’t hurt to donate maybe a extra buck, if you already help your server instance, to finance another independent full time contributor.
Open source and AGPL licensed, we can separate the code from them at any time and we do not need permission.
Agree re: $ towards instance admins; I have a tiny Mastodon instance and it isn’t cheap.
Explain that tankie and extreme political instances are consistently defederated, since its a federated platform. They can just find an instance that doesn’t interact with the tankie instances.
I don’t think we can say “consistently” when the largest instance federated with the largest tankie instance.
