statement feel very Steve Huffman to me. It very clearly does deserve a response because the problem doesn’t end with just saying “nope lol that’s not us” and people like me have to go digging through all this bullshit just to figure out the facts: they believe anti-China news and similar is U.S./media propaganda and will moderate opposing viewpoints with “Orientalism” bans and similar. That’s not a hard statement to type, and if this viewpoint is in good faith then I struggle to see why they refuse to just say that and consistently resort to “if you don’t like our moderation policy feel free to join/start a different instance!” without ever actually clarifying the moderation policy. Even lemmygrad pretty much says outright “if you like capitalism, fuck off.”
I mean, dude’s not CEO, he doesn’t control the instances. He does own a very large instance, but I don’t think it’s even the most dominant instance post-redditting.
I disagree with his views, though I will admit to some sympathy on some aspects (not the genocide stuff), but ultimately, he’s just a dude who makes this software. He doesn’t own it, he doesn’t have a monopoly on its control, and really, the entirety of the Fediverse could, if he went full Huff, say “fuck you” and defederate his instance. That’s the power of a distributed service. Heck, your own instance, kbin.social, could lemmy.ml at any time and it’d have little impact overall.
Even were I to concede to him being “Huffman-like” (which I do not agree with), I don’t think he’s actually relevant enough in the real-world usage of the software to care about as far as that goes.
though I will admit to some sympathy on some aspects (not the genocide stuff)
I mean, no one is supporting a genocide or speaking in favor of one, and the US has a documented history of using atrocity propaganda that is completely without basis. Probably the most powerful thing about that particular genre of slander is that it is taboo to denounce it for fear of looking like a “denialist” in the manner of a Holocaust denier, allowing the west to cynically exploit the generational trauma of a genocide it subsidized in order to degrade the reputations of its opponents on the imperial periphery.
See, it’s all this stuff that really makes the
statement feel very Steve Huffman to me. It very clearly does deserve a response because the problem doesn’t end with just saying “nope lol that’s not us” and people like me have to go digging through all this bullshit just to figure out the facts: they believe anti-China news and similar is U.S./media propaganda and will moderate opposing viewpoints with “Orientalism” bans and similar. That’s not a hard statement to type, and if this viewpoint is in good faith then I struggle to see why they refuse to just say that and consistently resort to “if you don’t like our moderation policy feel free to join/start a different instance!” without ever actually clarifying the moderation policy. Even lemmygrad pretty much says outright “if you like capitalism, fuck off.”
I mean, dude’s not CEO, he doesn’t control the instances. He does own a very large instance, but I don’t think it’s even the most dominant instance post-redditting.
I disagree with his views, though I will admit to some sympathy on some aspects (not the genocide stuff), but ultimately, he’s just a dude who makes this software. He doesn’t own it, he doesn’t have a monopoly on its control, and really, the entirety of the Fediverse could, if he went full Huff, say “fuck you” and defederate his instance. That’s the power of a distributed service. Heck, your own instance, kbin.social, could lemmy.ml at any time and it’d have little impact overall.
Even were I to concede to him being “Huffman-like” (which I do not agree with), I don’t think he’s actually relevant enough in the real-world usage of the software to care about as far as that goes.
I mean, no one is supporting a genocide or speaking in favor of one, and the US has a documented history of using atrocity propaganda that is completely without basis. Probably the most powerful thing about that particular genre of slander is that it is taboo to denounce it for fear of looking like a “denialist” in the manner of a Holocaust denier, allowing the west to cynically exploit the generational trauma of a genocide it subsidized in order to degrade the reputations of its opponents on the imperial periphery.