After the (temporary) defederation announcement of earlier i checked the Lemmy repo to see if there was already a ticket on the federation limiting option like Mastodon’s that people mentioned Lemmy doesn’t yet have. Not only i didn’t find it, i also saw that there’s about 200+ open tickets of variable importance. Also saw that it’s maintained mostly by the two main devs, the difference in commits between them and even the next contributors is vast. This is normal and in other circumstances it’d grow organically, but considering the huge influx of users lately, which will likely take months to slow down, they just don’t have the same time to invest on this, and many things risk being neglected. I’m a sysadmin, haven’t coded anything big in at least a decade and a half beyond small helper scripts in Bash or Python, and haven’t ever touched Rust, so can’t help there, but maybe some of you Rust aficionados can give some time to help essentially all of Lemmy. The same can be said of Kbin of course, although that’s PHP, and there is exacerbated by it being just the single dev.
The previous calls for forking were not convincing (political), but this post makes sense to, if the community is unable to contribute because of a lack of attention from external help.
I’m not sure if that’s the case and I’ll have to have a look myself.
I’m happy to contribute, and hopefully the process of new contributors (CONTRIBUTORS.md) is easy and straightforward, and the issues are triaged by someone dedicated, perhaps from the community.
Honestly I’m casting my support with KBin after hearing about the political affiliations of the main Lemmy dev. It’s worrisome because at this time of volatility, the community is going to be very fragile and stuff like that can really cause a massive problem when the community starts hitting critical mass
First, I respect you doing what you feel you need to.
That said, I think we need to be careful about how we decide what products to use or support based off the politics or history of their development. That seems like a risky game to me. How much slave labor was used in creating the very products we’re using right now, for instance?
I get that, there’s a bunch of unethical associations with everything we use. But right now the main developer of Lemmy has his profile setup with Chairman Mao as his background, his Github repo avatar is Che Guevera, and he has an entire repo filled with propaganda copy-pasta. In the past people have also pointed out that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml resolve to the same IP address although this is no longer the case. Lemmygrad supports the DPRK and transitively one of the most horrific dictatorships in the world, and yet it’s advertised on the “Join-Lemmy” website.
Even if the software itself is apolitical and we can see through the open-source nature of it that it is not going to be abused to further those agendas, there’s no doubt that as that knowledge becomes more commonly known that it could severely impact the whole idea of a Federated Reddit alternative.
I guess the most important thing to consider is that the software, being open-sourced, can easily be forked if this ever becomes a problem.