this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
168 points (80.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43120 readers
1537 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nobody ever directly engages the devs on the articles that created this whole affair. They simply accuse them of some vague "human rights denial" "genocide-supporters" "tankie" without any real substance. Go ahead and search out the articles. I read through some of them.
Yes, they are leftist essays. The devs didn't write them, they just compiled them together. I skimmed through a couple and read the titles of the rest. Some of them deal with topics such as Maoist China and the number of deaths from the Cultural Revolution. The article puts together an argument, with cited sources, that the common death figures are overblown.
Maybe the author is wrong, I don't know. I'm not an expert in this field nor do I have the energy to do as much research as I'd need to feel comfortable leaning one way or the other. But from reading the article, at no point does the author condone genocide.
Is this what we've come to? Someone can't post an article challenging one small piece of the narrative without all of a sudden being totally disavowed? I think it's absurd. Wrong or right, people should be allowed to discuss and share reasoned analysis.
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, my point is more steeped in caution. The uninformed don’t know there is a difference between the software and the instances run by the devs, I just don’t want this federated space to be associated with controversy while it’s young. There is plenty more we can say to promote reddit alternatives.
Eh, the core dev is a bonafide tankie though, which immediately apparent when you check his activities on Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad, but who cares. The software is open sourced, with plenty of contributions from people all over the world in the past few months. The moment the dev brought politics or other shenanigan into the software, it'll going to get forked immediately.
Yeah this is where I fall in my thought process. Lemmy is a tool like any other software, it can be used by good and evil for good and evil. I just want to exercise caution when advertising a reddit alternative that one such alternative is already experiencing controversy (earned or not).
Maybe a “viva la fediverse” would make more sense if someone wanted to cause a stir on r/place
I think stuff like this: https://lemmy.ml/post/1167199
is what's more provably worrying. Modlogs are public, and if I'm interpreting this information correctly, I think the devs are engaging in scummy practices.