Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout (From the Lemmy Developer)
News
Good read, gives me a lot of hope for this project.
I look forward to an exciting future with all of you.
(Also- hopefully this wasn't posted already)
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout
This was written by the Lemmy devs.
I'm pledging $5/month each to mastodon.world and the lemmy devs. I recently quit drinking, so this is a drop in the bucket compared to what I used to spend monthly on alcohol.
Congrats man sounds like a really positive change 😊👍
you should start a lemmy community on stopping drinking!
Nice, fuck alcohol. I quit drinking years ago and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. My life is so much simpler and more fun now.
Hell yeah, bröthur, congratulations on the start of your journey
Congratulations and good luck my friend, stay strong 💪, resist all temptation.
I personally think, at this time, it appears to be a good cause.
It seems to have become a habit that most good things about the internet is linked to the EU. I'm really grateful. That being said, I hope that Lemmy can become a collaborative project uniting a lot of devs rather than rely on two people.
About the scandal; as long as their opinions do not influence the platform I don't see them as relevant to Lemmy. If they are illegal, let justice do its work.
I'm hoping that I need to worry about the morals of my admin more than the morals of the developers.
That said, I would expect the Lemmy project is going to need to scale based on the increase in users. Two developers isn't going to cut it.
Hopefully this defuses the "lemmy is a tankie network" rumour once and for all
Well of course they aren't genocide deniers. You can't deny something that never happened. Also note that they did not deny being Tankies - they denied being Fascists. Tankies don't recognize themselves as Fascists and will vehemently deny that they are. Here's another phrase for Tankie for the uninformed: Red Fascist
Here is one of the Lemmy devs denying that the Uyghur genocide in China is happening:
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xq49ct/deletedbyuser/iq954mu/
The Uyghur genocide is as real as white genocide. - Source
Here they are again denying it:
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xq49ct/deletedbyuser/iq951cv/
The holocaust was a genocide that actually happened, with all the evidence that goes along with it. There is no Uyghur genocide.
Do you believe in anything as soon as the word "genocide" gets attached to it? What about "white genocide"? Are you a white genocide denier? - Source
And just so nobody can deny that parentis_shotgun is a Lemmy dev: - "I'm one of the devs of Lemmy"
Direct links to the posts will not work but still exist on the user's profile page: https://old.reddit.com/user/parentisshotgun/ - hold PgDn until comments stop loading then Control+F. In fact feel free to peruse their history in general - it's quite interesting.
One of my favorite posts is their defense of the government of North Korea in /r/AskTankies: https://old.reddit.com/r/asktankies/comments/tb1836/okaybutdprkseriously/i04d1wu/
Now ask yourself why would someone who is not a Red Fascist Tankie piece of shit be answering questions on behalf of Tankies in /r/AskTankies while defending a totalitarian regime? Is it... perhaps because they're in support of such a regime because they are in fact a Tankie piece of shit?
They also lied about the "single user on Mastadon not providing sources". They did provide sources. The source were things said straight out of the dev's mouth.
Let's play a game of spot the difference between fascists (nazis) and fascists (tankies).
Nazis: Fascists who are directly responsible for the deaths of an estimated 12,000,000 people. Deny a genocide ever took place despite evidence to the contrary (Holocaust). Antisemites who forced minority ethnic groups to work in forced concentration and labor camps and starved them to death. These concentration camps began in 1933 and ended in 1945 lasting for a period of 12 years. Had a secret police known as the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) whose job it was largely to suppress political opposition by any means necessary including execution of dissenters and spy on behalf of the Nazi party. Torture and execution were common - including that of women and children.
Tankies: Fascists who are directly responsible for the deaths an estimated 26,000,000 people. Deny multiple different genocides ever took place despite evidence to the contrary (Holodomor being the most well known). Antisemites who forced minority ethnic groups to work in forced concentration and labor camps and starved them to death. This Gulag network of death prisons began in 1919 and only ended after Stalin's death in 1953 lasting for a period of 34 years. Had a secret police known as the Чека (Cheka) whose job it was to suppress political opposition by any means necessary including execution of dissenters and spy on behalf of the State. Torture and execution were common - including that of women and children.
I couldn't care less if they are actually tankies, just keep developing the code and don't try to inject malware (well it's open source they can't lol), believe whatever you wanna believe, I don't care.
A tankie is not a fascist. He denied being a genocidal fascist.
I've seen a lot of pro-China propaganda coming from Lemmy and I suspect tankie is still on the table.
Another phrase for Tankie ideology is Red Fascism.
I'd specifically like to highlight that someone who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp - so has firsthand experience with a fascist regime - described the Soviets as the following, emphasis mine:
Kurt Schumacher, who was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, but survived WWII to become the first post-war SPD opposition leader in West Germany, described pro-Soviet communists as "red-painted fascists" or "red-lacquered Nazis"
So in what ways exactly is a tankie not a fascist?
a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
that exalts nation
"We did not hesitate to shoot thousands of people, and we shall not hesitate, and we shall save the country." - Vladimir Lenin
often race
https://www.britannica.com/event/Holodomor
that stands for a centralized autocratic government
The State
headed by a dictatorial leader
Lenin;Stalin
severe economic and social regimentation
Five year plan
forcible suppression of opposition
Cheka secret police.
If Tankies are not fascists - then neither were Nazi's.
I'm old and out of the loop but that astroturfing was so blatantly obvious it pinged my BS meter immediately.
What astroturfing? The tanky astroturfing or astroturfing about the place being tanky?
Because before the influx, Lemmy.ml was absolutely tanky. It's just been completely drowned out by the flood, so it barely matters anymore.
Like, this entire platform has arguably gone through one of the most dramatic changes in a week in the history of the internet. What was here before is almost irrelevant now. What the devs believe is also irrelevant because it's open source and decentralized. Literally the whole point of this is to not be beholden to them.
I've never heard of that. Where did that rumor come from?
Here are some mod logs from lemmy.ml (which is an instance run by the Lemmy devs) from a few years ago: https://raddle.me/f/TankiesGonnaTank/89852/the-lemmy-ml-admin-is-banning-anyone-that-mentions-stalin-or
Here's one of the Lemmy devs (you can tell it's them from their profile activity) denying genocide: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xq49ct/deleted_by_user/iq954mu/
Insisting that fascists are good, actually not fascists at all, as long as their nationalism makes them oppose the US (because the enemy of my enemy is a totally good guy!): https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/vgg2x3/thoughts_on_slavoj_zizek/id2cxb8/
There's more here: https://raddle.me/f/lobby/159606/-/comment/294792
Moron, morons everywhere
Perhaps, it is possible some communities do follow... uh, whatever that is. (I am oblivious to what a tankie is).
But, like reddit, there will ALWAYS be echo-chambers, or less desirable places/communities.
Remember, the_donald? Despite- that sub basically dominating the top feeds all over reddit, reddit never got ousted over it.
I feel, lemmy will be the same way. There will be... areas you likely want to avoid. As any platform.
I am here for the platform itself, and the communities on it.
I've never subscribed to any of these things, due to multiple reasons like being broke, because I knew I'd never remember to cancel it if I quit using the service, hating subscriptions, realizing most of these collapse almost as fast as they skyrocket, among many other reasons. I know I'm a pessimist.
But it's time to put my money where my mouth is, even if I just want a Reddit alternative. I'm old and grumpy enough to be sick of companies using people the way they do, and since I can't code, I can pay.
If you've read this far, I implore you to really sit down and think about what this project means to you, what it could mean to you, and what it's worth to you. Everyone does the whole coffee analogy - give up coffee for a day and you can support X. But as a Reddit refugee, I think that if I was willing to give Reddit a couple bucks a month to an app for their API access, why on earth wouldn't I do the same here (even before all of Reddit's recent BS)?
You can either pay or be the product being sold.
I’ve never paid Reddit a dime but I’m going to signup for at least whatever gold costs. Fuck spez.
And to those of you who are developers, consider submitting some PRs! I'm certainly gonna take a look at the code
This was a very well written statement and gives me a lot of hope for the future of the platform. I’ll be more than happy to invest my time and effort into it.
I just want to say I'm fairly vocal about bugs/issues/confusing things. But I totally understand lemmy wasn't prepared for tens of thousands of new users overnight, it was just so sudden and unexpected. So even if me and other users sound grumpy just know that at least this one is aware it's going to be a bumpy ride for a while as the internet adjusts to this massive upheaval.
Not only did reddit break reddit, it broke lemmy too! (but for different reasons)
Hey, even with all of the bugs and issues-
I have had much more enjoyable conversations on Lemmy, then I have on reddit in a LONG time.
For that- I can endure the bugs. Worth it IMO!
How many people were turned away by the whole tankie thing I wonder..hmmm
Imagine hearing some vague bs and making a distinct and principaled opinion about an entire universe of information.
Even if they are some flavor of doo doo, we take it, and make it what we want. I just don't see the point in outright noping. At least in this instance.
If people really care there's also kbin, which is the same content just with a different (imo better) UI.
I just happened to get on lemmy at first. It was largely coincidence. Perhaps I'll try kbin, but this working how I need. I'm not real picky. I just like to write comments tbh.
I wish it was easier to setup an instance and manage it
Yeah I'm a pretty left-wing guy myself but I just like the kbin interface more. I think it's really cool how this stuff all works together. That's the real dream of communism!
Pledged on their $5/month tier on their Patreon page now. That's the least I can do given what I understand they're going through right now. :D
Same. If this is going to be my new online home, I'd like to contribute somehow. Especially since I cant code, this works
Saying they don’t support genocide isn’t really addressing the issue…
Most complaints are that they deny China’s treatment of Uyghurs and seem to conflate criticism of that with racism against “China” (conveniently ignoring the plethora of ethnicities in such a huge country). If they want to detach themselves from the controversy they should be making a statement denouncing the Chinese government’s treatment of people in Xinjiang. Their statement could be clearer.
One can quite easily twist "we deny genocide is taking place" into "we don't support genocide." It's easy to say you don't support genocide when you're saying there's no genocide in the first place. Frankly, everything I've read about these guys is repellent and there's no way I'd be donating money to them. I gave money to Ernest, the developer of kbin, instead.
That said, though, this is completely true:
We are individuals with our own opinions. If you disagree with these, it is no problem! You can still freely use the Lemmy software on different instances. If you host your own instance, we have no control over it at all and are unable to censor what users say.
It's an open source program operating with an open protocol and they can't stop the rest of us from using it. If they ever try it'll just get forked. So I see no problem with having Lemmy be a major part of the Fediverse's infrastructure.
Exactly. I have no issue using the lemmy software (lord knows the developers of most other major social media platforms I've used in the past have had some messed up political views). But there's absolutely no way I'll be donating a penny to them. Ernest and admins of other major lemmy instances, yes, but not the tankie devs.
moderator of
r/ABoringDystopia
r/capitalismindecay
r/InformedTankie
r/JucheGang
r/fediverse
r/asktankies
r/GunZedong
r/CapitalismInAction
r/CommunistGaming
r/Communism1O1
Yeah they confuse criticizing China with racism against Chinese people. Additionally they claim that any source from and news agency or journalists in the US that says anything bad about the USSR or China is CIA propaganda and should be ignored but then exclusively site Chinese propaganda websites.
There's also a lot of other evidence: https://raddle.me/f/lobby/159606/-/comment/294792
They say the same nonsense when Australian media also rightly criticizes them so it's not just a US issue. Just look at the way they tried to strong-arm Australia when they were called out a few years ago, they tried cutting off a range of imports to try economic pressure (which didn't work since plenty of other places will happily take wine, meat and product imports)
https://lemmy.ml/comment/471382
Here is Dessalines denying that any genocide is taking place.
it's a blurb in the linked announcement.
The rumors actually got to me. I've still been using it but wondering when that would be mentioned by the creators. Glad to see it's false
I'd never seen any of the rumors, went to lemmy.ml for the first time (thinking I might join) and one of the top threads was a complaint that a post with anti-CCP analysis had been taken down by the admins and within 5 minutes of further research I was able to verify that, yes, the admins/devs are tankies. It's definitely not false.
So I backed out and switched to kbin.
Yea see, the only instances that the devs control are lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, every other instance is not run by them. For example, the instance I use (lemmy.dbzer0.com) is run by an anarchist.
Yeah, it's bad. I'll probably be looking into hosting my own kbin instance on principle soon.
I was completely unaware as well. I'm off to kbin. In my opinion, there is zero chance this doesn't cause issues down the line and it makes me feel uncomfortable using Lemmy.
It doesnt even matter if its true, if a non fascist/tankie made the same code, none of you would be complaining. Why should anything be different just because the devs happen to be a fascist/tankie/ whatever they believe in. They cant control what each instance does once they publish the code. The code is public now and its free for anyone to use. They can't censor what we say in instances that they don't control. I mean try it now, you can flip them off right here, right now and they can't do anything about it, they don't run lemmy.world. Only the owners of lemmy.world can do something about it.
This completely ignores the influence that flagship instances have.
People don't become Neo-Nazis without spending time among other Neo-Nazis listening to Neo-Nazi talking points. People don't become Tankies without spending time among other Tankies listening to Tankie talking points.
People are more likely than not to join the flagship instance than any of the smaller instances and significantly more likely than starting their own instance. Some of them will realize the kind of people they have found themselves surrounded by and leave. Many more won't - especially due to general ignorance about Tankies (see this entire thread and the absolutely bizarre common defense of Tankies not being equatable to Nazis when they absolutely are and have resulted in more deaths and suffering than the Nazis ever have or will.) The people who stick around might start thinking the Tankies make some good points. This is how you end up with more Tankies. More Tankies is always a bad thing just like having more Neo-Nazis is always a bad thing.
Most people have a good sense to not surround themselves with Neo-Nazis. That good sense appears to be missing when dealing with Tankies.
Apart from everything else that has been mentioned I would add that a very real factor is that every instance to my knowledge has a donation button which cannot be removed without forking the project that goes directly to the devs. Plenty of people in this post are saying things like "Wow, glad they cleared that up! I'll definitely be giving them money" and very likely don't have the full context. Assuming Lemmy does continue to grow exponentially it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that these devs will probably receive a large amount of money in donations from people who may not all be okay with supporting them if they were more informed. So spreading the truth about the devs and not taking their pitiful denial as absolute truth is important even if you believe in the project as a whole.
It's not false, they are lying to you.
I'm not down to subscribe ongoing (because I definitely will forget and think some fraud popped up), but I made a one time donation, and will likely make additional donations in the coming months and weeks. I'd love for this platform to thrive and have no qualms throwing up a few bucks for that here and there.
I'm going to donate to these guys. It's the least we can do considering how busy they have been since the reddit uprising.
Absolutely! Here's the direct link for donations: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
I hope we see more donations. I for one will for sure make a few over time
Dang these guys are so committed and it's definitely understandable what they've just gone through. It's definitely up to the community to help out wherever possible as that's kinda what the fediverse is all about
This is a very well written post. Love to see a rust project grow so large!
Super excited for these guys, and happy that they're happy too!
Nice. I hope this momentum continues to grow.
I personally think it's going to explode in size, even more so than it already has.
The small, vocal minority of reddits (ie, most of us) came over to try it out as soon as we thought it could be a viable alternative. That caused a MASSIVE include in users to lemmy.
Next- since we are building lots of content here- lots of the other reddits will soon figure out- Wait, everyone who writes shit worth reading, went to lemmy. What am I doing in this toxic cesspool echo-chamber. And- more will come.
Yeah, these developer guys seem great, I’ll donate for sure. I love their vision.
Not sure if I'm getting wooshed or not, but you should know the lemmy devs are tankies who deny the Uyghur genocide. Your money is better spent going to non-affiliated instance admins to keep their servers running.
Cool, I’m definitely not ok with the tankie stuff and the denialism you refer to. I actually live in China and am critical of such points as much as I dare to be considering I have family here. I already have my own instance (lemmy.pro) on a robust server so yep, that’s a good way for me to contribute and I’m already doing that.
Donated. Glad to support this project,
Thanks for sharing.
I love Lemmy, but I'm not a fan of the pressure for recurring subscriptions. Via Opencollective I was able to do a one-time payment.
Feels so common to me as a web developer to find another instance of people seeing Web Sockets as really cool, and then tragically deciding they don't fit due to scaling problems.
The occasional live comment update is kind of nice, but the glitches and other performance problems it causes weren't generally worth it.
Holy smokes, growing 25 times larger in 2 weeks. Keep up the good work! I just need a good mobile app for iOS, beta is full according to test flight lol.
Its absolutely growing massively, I don't think the DEVs could have expected this level of growth.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Yeah, this has been one of those black swan events. Nobody could have predicted Reddit would shoot themselves so vigorously in the feet like this.
Well, nobody could have predicted when or how Reddit would shoot themselves so vigorously in the feet. I think a lot of folks have been expecting them to do it eventually.
Yes, explosive growth and it's a bit of a miracle we can post here right now.
I'd say it's an achievement that it survived the chaos and hasn't yet buckled under the traffic or the chaos of managing the influx of users that probably don't even bother reading rules.
I mean, this place was absolutely not prepared for this, and it definitely has a ways to go yet, but it's come out a week later in a much healthier place than I expected.
I joined the TestFlight for Memmy today
Also using Memmy, loving it so far.
Thank you!! Just tried it and so far love it! Has everything I missed from Boost so far
Also testing Memmy, and so far loving it!
And those are out of date numbers. User count is now past 150k
To be precise, they were talking about monthly active users in the post, not total user accounts, which you are talking about. Might be that their stats only count people who actually voted/commented/posted something.
I joined the TestFlight for Memmy today