I don’t agree with these views at all, but I don’t agree with the view that no one should use lemmy because of the opinions of the developers. Its an open-source project, just don’t use anything hosted by them. Like I don’t support the US military, but that doesn’t stop me from using the internet.
Exactly. I probably don’t agree on everything with 100% of developers of the tool out there. I don’t want creators of technological tools (or anyone for that matter) to be subject to purity of ideology and opinion tests. I didn’t want Brendan Eich gone from Mozilla nor anyone else gone from the tools they develop.
This is just it. Software is software. You can spin your own instance and moderate it as you wish. It’s open source, so you can change and modify it.
But right now they’re asking for donations to run their instance and help with their code.
So before you donate money and your time/expertise/code - it’s probably a good idea to know who is asking for it. It’s not entirely clear, to be honest.
One sore point there is that the code comes by default with a donation link (the heart at the top) to join-lemmy.org. Even without the tankie issue it should rather go to a page local to the instance explaining donation options, and the default should be “The admin didn’t set this up, if you urgently need to get rid of money here’s a link to Doctors without Borders”.
OTOH there’s now a huge influx of people including tons of developers so I expect tankie influence to be drowned out sooner than later.
A bunch of developers isn’t going to do anything though if they retain control over everything. I think after learning about this background, and their weird claims surrounding it yesterday, the path forward I would prefer is for a strong fork to emerge of the original code that instances deploy instead.
I prophesied that to happen back on reddit but with FLOSS development culture being as it is pre-emptive forking is kinda considered the same as a pre-emptive nuclear strike. It’s just not done in polite company.
I’m about 100% that there’s going to come a make-or break situation where, if the developers don’t concede, there will be a fork, but it could also be that the devs are conscious enough of what’s happening that they’ll cave under the pressure and thus manage to retain some influence over the project.
