“Don’t hang out with these people, they’re tankies!”, the liberals in the walls told me, and an apparent 90% of my fellow anarchists concurred, “We do NOT fraternize with the tankies!”

Thus I hesitated, seeing the link to !chapotraphouse@hexbear.net appearing on my screen. My heart pounded; I felt like Indiana Jones about to swap the golden idol for a bag of sand. I knew that what I did next could haunt me for the rest of my life. Thoughts raced through my mind: what if I ended up in some sort of dreaded echo chamber and became one of… them?

— My stomach turned, but regardless, Lady Curiosity in that moment descended behind me. She grabbed my trembling hand, moved the mouse cursor over the link, and clicked it.

…

…

…

“What the fuck these people are all gay and based as hell”

Hell yeah comrade

the code is tankie! just using lemmy gives them power! the tankies are in the walls!

the written word itself is tainted by the ideology of sumerian landlords

The politics of the authors matters. The politics of the authors sets the project priorities, determines which features are essential and which features will never be implemented. Running a social media site is a commitment. It requires maintenance. It requires interaction with the developers to troubleshoot problems, fix bugs, add features, etc. I absolutely would not run a social media platform developed by fascists. That would put me in a position where I rely on fascists for technical support, where the fascists understand my own infrastructure better than I do. It would also mean that no features which undermine fascist ideology would likely be developed.

In addition to being a piece of tech, Lemmy takes on the form of its authors’ politics. Despite them being Communists, this form is a vaguely anarcho-syndicalist one. A federation of autonomous communities. It is a form which allows each community to set their own standards and operate as they see fit. If one believes them to be the stereotypical censorious authoritarians, this should introduce some cognitive dissonance. If a person like this can look at the tech and appreciate the form, but then reject it because “tankies,” it demonstrates a lack of understanding about the underlying problems. They can try to replicate the project in a “non-tankie” form, but they won’t succeed unless they deeply analyze the landscape they are operating in. And if they did deeply analyze the landscape they are operating in, they would more-or-less arrive at the same conclusions as the Lemmy devs vis-à-vis the political economy of social media.

It’s because liberals contribute nothing useful to society but are more than happy to steal and take credit for other people’s hard work like the leeches they are.

Getting mad at everything built using open source because stealing is wrong

Edit: It looks like the license issues has not been solved yet even though the author of postmill reported the issue about two months ago, for more info see here: https://raddle.me/f/fediverse/170274/a-reminder-that-kbin-is-still-violating-the-zlib-license-of

The original post is exaggerating (not all the Kbin code is stolen code), but the Kbin creator used code from a different open source project without any attribution, so for a while it was, to an extent, similar to “stolen code”. Last I checked, the issue was resolved ~amicably, the kbin person provided attribution, and the original creator was satisfied (although I did read her say she was discouraged from continuing her project because she would have appreciated contributions to hers, instead of forking/not attributing).

First I’d hear of this. I looked at the source code of both repos (the raddle.me repo is called Postmill). There’s no relation at all. Both repos have history going back at least a couple of years. Kbin says in the readme it is inspired - not based on - Postmill. But even if it was, they’re both open source! The whole point of open source is that you can reuse other people’s code to make your own thing!!!

Their discussion was two months ago, but the licencing issues have still not been solved.

EdgyEmma’s face when her open source project is forked:

Apparently there was an issue with attribution that was resolved

Raddle is cringe. Too bad they have good trans content.

I think it really depends. There is definitely some good info out there in some places (although I couldn’t point you there off the top of my head). The questionable advice based entirely or almost entirely on anecdotes definitely is a thing that happens though and it really annoys me.

The most recent example I can remember was someone with a pretty large platform on Twitter saying “i would highly recommend all trans women get up to AT LEAST 8mg estrodial [sic] ASAP” (direct quote). Like even ignoring the fact it doesn’t mention how you’re getting it (although in this case I know they mean oral or sublingual), it’s just such an absolute statement to make for no reason other than like, your own experience. I got into the target range on less than half that dosage, but I’m not going around telling everyone they need to have my dosage. Yes doctors can suck and you should probably know enough to see if something isn’t right and advocate for yourself, but your doctor not immediately putting you on 8mg is not an attempt to sabotage you or whatever.

I think people have been starting to wise up to his shit recently, but everything surrounding Dr. Powers bothers me too. Even aside from his terrible politics and transphobia, he just likes to make pronouncements on the right way to do trans healthcare based on not a whole lot, and because of his sort of celebrity status I’ve seen a lot of trans people just take his word and run with it. In some cases you can’t even tell if you didn’t already know that it came from him, because it ends up passed around as just like ‘general knowledge’.