Elon Musk made electric cars popular. Nazi scientists developed rocket technology. That’s all fine and good, but I’m still not going to give them my money.

So does nestlé, I still boycott them as our values don’t align.

I can certainly see that Hexbear and the other two are very vocal and toxic here. Engaging in some discussion or getting my views challenged is fine, I’d rather not close myself in a bubble, but it’s sad that they would be so quick to insult and ban you. It does worry that they have some of the biggest communities. I wish I could say “oh well the protocol is neutral” but I think that with most OSS projects it matters tremendously who is at the helm; also, another poster outlined quite well that these instances seem to be the showcase for the system.

Its supposed to be tankie TROIKA 😤

deleted by creator

Person1, since you’re new here, this is Cowbee, our resident tankie apologist/propagandist.

The most reasonable-sounding genocide denier and authoritarian regime supporter this side of the gulags. I highly recommend their alt’s comments on Hexbear if you’re interested in their more “mask off” persona. Also, remember the number one rule when interacting with hexbears: never directly engage them.

Edit: Here are some of Cowbee’s Uyghur genocide denial comments, for example, if anyone’s interested. Note the hardline tankie talking points, but couched in the classic Cowbee “reasonable” rhetorical style.

Nobody wants to argue with Cowbee

You are not banned from lemmy.ml

I had them blocked for misogyny, no wonder lol

Yeah? I dont agree its transphobic to want women to still be competetive in the sports they are competing in.

I dont think we should have men identifying as women, coming in and beating women in women sports.

Thats not transphobic, and even if it was, its my opinion still, whatever you label it as.

Tesla doesn’t open-source their plans so you can build your own, better version of the cybertruck.

Well, we will see. It would be stupid if Lemmy died because the users couldnt accept the opinions of two little devs, but sure, it may happen.

Then a lot of users will go back to big tech, and the ad business will profit once again. Because we couldnt accept that two devs on planet earth had opinions we didnt like.

Two people.

They’re asking for donations because they lost the donations they were already getting.

Nope, not even the tiniest bit. We know how vital lemmy is, and want to secure its long-term future by being entirely sustained by donations. We never at any point reached that goal, and given that nutomic had a new baby, this is more important now than ever.

hemorrhaging donation money

I have no idea what this means. We’re paying our daily living expenses so we can comfortably work on lemmy without having to find other work. The costs are food and rent.

this whole operation is a way too flimsy if it’s depending on these two people, alone, forever.

I’d love to be able to grow our co-op, and add more developers! Donations make that possible too, especially if they exceed 2 average dev salaries (we’re a long way off from that).

What happens if they finally get another developer that really knows Rust and wants to join the project but doesn’t “fit in”? How are they actually going to expand the team so this project can grow and not be so dependent on them when they have the reputation they do?

It’s clear you’ve never tried, because we’ve never and would never reject code contributers for petty reasons like “not fitting in”. If ppl don’t want to work with communists, that’s on them. Personally I’d never reject someone for their ideology, especially if what they’re doing is FOSS, which serves the common good.

I would like to see this platform expand beyond them,

We don’t stop people from forking lemmy and never would, that’s entirely their right.

As Dessalines replied, your assertion of losing donations is wrong.

But yes indeed, their views, those of .ml, and how both handle them, are driving some donors away. You’re asking them to lay down their views, hide or change their opinions, separate from the vocal community on their server (noting that .world is just as vocal, self-righteous and self-assured), in order to develop the software that you use freely (well, that you might then donate to).

Honestly I feel that makes sense and nonsense at the same time. I can see it making sense in some circumstances; but personally I don’t think so in these. Maybe the rhetoric I see on .ml just doesn’t impact me the same as you?

But as an overarching argument that for the sake of Lemmy they should change… That just seems too much to ask, over the internet. Maybe to ask politely and accept a no. Maybe in person, one might argue and counsel strongly. But people are entitled to their opinions and the internet isn’t actually such a good place to change them.

So if the devs keep devving Lemmy, let them. They’re providing a good thing for us, and I hope more people donate.

As to the technical aspects, it just feels like an emotional outburst. FOSS projects’ maintenance is always hard, and there are always difficulties. We do our best. They are trying to. And if a community came along that loves Lemmy and wants to develop it, they could either contribute or fork. Perhaps their fork would last longer? Perhaps not. But for now this Lemmy is here, and is Free, so we are glad to use it.

If the community were going to fork it, they would have forked it by now.

Why bother? Mbin, PieFed, nodebb, flarum, the list of alternatives goes on and on. Lemmy is fairly mature, that’s true, but also the devs kept adding new features, so there wasn’t a need to fork it. Plus, each individual instance already somewhat “forks” it each time they do an update - what I mean here is that some like Hexbear.net and Lemmy.world have extremely heavy modifications that they have made, affecting only their own instance (to clarify, the latter is more code checking iirc while the former was actual modifications).

If anyone needs to they could fork Lemmy at any time. But who wants to learn Rust, a language that is super difficult yet unfinished, compared to e.g. Python that PieFed uses, or Mbin is PHP (and Sublinks iirc is Java, etc.)?

Best to break away free from Lemmy entirely. Have you noticed how Lemmy is even more authoritian than Reddit? Yes modlog, but no modmail, no notification of a moderation event, no ability to contact a mod to ask why or discuss, no “right” to even know which mod it was - you simply submit your content, and if a mod decides that they don’t like it, then it disappears, without leaving a trace (in contrast, Reddit leaves removed posts still accessible to anyone with the URL), or without warning. The closest thing I’ve ever heard of that is like this is when Reddit “shadow-banned” someone. While on Lemmy, every single post removal is that way. The admins have total control using Lemmy, and mods have a lot, but regular users? Naw, that’s a different story… you all get much fewer freedoms than even Reddit offered (usually, unless they actually did shadowban you).

I much prefer PieFed tbh:-). It has a ton of ideas pushing for democratization of moderation features, putting control of such matters into the hands of the individual users rather than forcing mods to have to do all the work of moderation. e.g. if someone doesn’t ero see posts containing certain keywords like “Musk” or “Trump”, a user can elect to filter those out (the available options there are: All, None, and get this: Some, which is very nice!:-), rather than making a moderator have to decide for the entire community as a whole (they still can do that, but now they don’t have to, bc the software provides another alternative for those users who want to, leaving the users who don’t want that filtering to see that content, while still sharing the same space, rather than having to make a new community:-).

I am sorry for your bad experience on Lemmy. Most people fall into the same trap, and more often than not, leave altogether. I am currently at 100% of the people that I’ve told about Lemmy actively chiding me for having done so, due to them having come here, seen that, and immediately noped out.

It doesn’t help that Google points people to Lemmy.ml (DuckDuckGo properly points to Lemmy.World, as the most active instance, but lemmy.ml has an older history), which to a guest account shows only Local (rather than globally All) posts, which ofc are full of people making fun of the Western world and society - even to the point of saying that people who do such innocuous activities as having bank accounts should be killed (sadly, I’m not joking, although the people making such claims likely were… and yet… were they, were they REALLY?!).

Nobody likes to be made fun of, so it’s no surprise that the likes of Reddit’s r/RedditAlternatives is filled with such stories of people encountering such and never coming back. But I am glad that despite Lemmy.ml’s efforts to hide it, you managed to find the nicer portions of Lemmy where we can actually enjoy conversations.:-)

I’m just being pedantic, but also the problem seems easily solved by having someone else moderate that instance, while they focus on just the coding.

Of course they are 100% free to do as they choose and I would not dream of wanting them to do otherwise.

Then too, the people deciding whether to donate can do the same - and it seems that the rather unusual moderation practices of lemmy.ml are a sticking point for whether they want to contribute funds or not. The amount of those funds, whether the devs have the “right” to do so or not, that is all besides the point. Some people just don’t like to fund things like genocide, period.

But now we are veering into political territory that I know less about. Thank you for sharing those facts about the situation, as I continue to learn about it that is very helpful:-).

Why? So more users like you can come to this platform and use it while shitting all over it by contributing nothing to it?

As I already said, go back to Reddit

People will be more willing to give them money if they shut down lemmy.ml

That’s because it’s not really part of the triad. It’s the developer instance, and it happens to be tankie adjacent cause they are