Lemmy.ml and its moderation, am I getting something wrong?

Every time Futo comes up, someone will insist it is open source, others will correct them, and soon more than 50% of a thread that is supposed to be about open source is people arguing about them.

In the removed posts that you can see in the screenshots I don't see anything you say.

Probably more than that even; more than I want to count. The modlog is public.

When I wrote the post, there were no trace of those messages in the modlog (or I've missed them, I'm not that into Lemmy, I admit that)

The What’s the best open source keyboard for android? post where you commented has not been locked

My bad, I must have confused them, sorry.

I generally try to assume good faith but I’m pretty sure some Futo proponents are actually just trolling at this point.

As stated above, I don't see any trolling in the comments scrreenshotted (and deleted). But over that, I think that deleting those messages is censorship. I still believe in free speech and I can't see any hate or misinformation in those messages.

Note that while your comment was not advocating for futo per se, it was (successfully) encouraging others to continue the offtopic discussion. You could have answered your question by reading the modlog.

It was a chit chat, what's wrong with that? It feels like school were you had to just pay attention to what the professor was saying and woe betide anyone who turns their head.

Yeah, Rossman getting in bed with people that are deliberately trying to dilute the meaning of open source really killed my opinion of him.

Thanks for the level-heades and reasonable explination. These actions make complete sense

Thank you for standing up for the free software definition. As someone who has been heavily critical of fauxpen source licenses including FUTO it's refreshing to see moderators taking a stance against it.

The main concern I have with this attempt (by FUTO and other organizations trying to "fix" open source) is that watering down the open source and free software definitions causes damage to the community/movement. Whether the FUTO EULA or any other proprietary license is "good enough" for an individual user is not the question (and I have even seen people argue in favor of fully-proprietary blob software on the basis of being "privacy friendly"); real free software disadvantages rightsholders in favor of users and communities, which is important in case those rightsholders go defunct or rogue.

I try to assume good faith as well but I am seriously considering the idea that FUTO is astroturfing free software spaces to promote its version of open source. Despite publicly backing down on their openwashing attempt Eron Wolf-in-sheeps-clothing seems very determined that open source is broken and needs fixing.

Holy shit. A .ml mod being reasonable and making mod decisions based on what'd best for the community instead of pure personal bias. Congratulations perhaps their is still hope for .ml to be redeemed and forgiven.

Unrelated but you should post one more comment

obviously-not-open-source

Yes: futo keyboard license. And also a contradictory license with that definition of 'use'.

I would submit that even if it is misinformation and people are climbing all over the comments claiming that FUTO is definitely open source, removing the comments to leave only the remnant of it that is "truth" is often not the best way to handle it. The majority of the removed comments didn't seem like they were saying that, some even specifically said that FUTO isn't open source but blah blah blah, but even if so, here's my feeling:

The way the conversation looks right now is just confusing. There are people who have no idea about FUTO who have the feeling that they're just not allowed to talk about it, or to say true statements (for example, whatever you think of their license, they fund real open-source projects.) Because FUTO is officially "bad" and they might get banned or something for wanting to talk about it or ask questions. It actually doesn't look to me like people are coming in primarily to evangelize. But regardless of that, my personal feeling is, you have to let people talk.

I feel like if there was a sticky comment from a mod / admin at the top of the comments, something like PSA: FUTO is not open source. The people that are claiming it is, are wrong, with respect to long-established definitions. (link) (link), then that would be fine. People can see the arguments, and presumably there's enough respect in place for the "leaders" of the community that they'll give a lot of weight to the sticky comment. But they still have the sense that they're allowed to talk about it and think about it on their own instead of being ordered to receive the correct interpretations from above, when they don't even have their bearings as far as what's even being talked about.

I'm not secretive about my strong disagreements with a lot of lemmy.ml moderation philosophy. I'm just making an effort, here, to explain why I have such a strong disagreement in a productive fashion, instead of just hectoring or being combative about it.

I think this would make sense in a Lemmy community that was OpenSourceInitiative who has a very specific set definition. But open source as a general idea is fairly open to interpretation. Some people think source-available is open source. I disagree, but that's just my personal opinion. Now if something was closed source, that's a very clear distinction.

I've seen communities die out over mods enforcing their personal definitions. The Linux subreddit and Lemmy Linux community had issues with this a few years ago where the mod was deleting comments of people talking about what fell outside of their idea that Linux discussion should be FLOSS-only (people discussing closed source apps that ran on Linux, etc).

I think deleting does more harm than good. It's better for people to discuss when things are a problem so they can understand them better. The Free Software Foundation is way more strict as to their licensing ideas, but even they still discuss and have a page full of alternative licenses where they discuss some are better than others (and even a bad open source license is better than a non-open source license). They don't ban the mention of conflicting ideas.

Deleting just leaves people confused (and in my case I would have appreciated knowing the issue instead of just seeing a thread full of deleted comments and remaining ignorant). And it does a greater harm because people casually searching on search engines or whatever won't find any sort of discussion or push back.

what nice bootlickers you have here lol no matter how many they are, it is still not enough to deny the truth

(Ironic because they always accuse .world and other instances like .ee of becoming echo chambers)

I had someone from lemmy.ml tell me "I’m happy that you libs have your own instances!", and apparently mean it sincerely. In their mind, maybe, the 4,530 active users on lemmy.ml+lemmygrad+Hexbear are "Lemmy," and the 39,721 other users are on "their own instances."

Not that being in the majority means you're right. But if you're in the minority, and you don't know it, that's often a warning sign.

I didn't know, I'm mainly active on lemmy.world. How can that instance have so much traction?

Apropos of nothing, I take issue with calling stuff that isn't open source "free" (even little-f "free," let alone "Free Software"). Even if it costs $0 it isn't "free" if it costs you your freedom or privacy.

Personally, I have never had any issues either, although I have seen many people who have. People looking for an international decentralized community will have no problem with .ml, as with all other existing instances. Those looking for a reddit clone will have their own good reasons to detest .ml.

I’ve had no issue on .ml

Wat

Lemmy.ml is explicitly affirming of the idea that the moderators determine what is the "right" opinion and remove all the wrong opinions. Ask them about Tienanmen Square or the Uyghurs. It's a little unusual that it goes outside of the realm of geopolitics and into the realm of software projects, but it's completely in keeping with their overall philosophy about what the right way is to run an instance.

The person who is removing posts is, I believe, not a moderator of that community, they're an admin. So complaining to the admins is unlikely to get you anywhere.

"Don't go to lemmy.ml" is my advice. There are replacement communities for almost everything that's available there, for exactly this specific reason.

I don't know, it's the first time that I see such a behavior.

You’ve never had an ML issue? I… don’t believe you. Even when you’re not talking politics, their constant attempt to ruin your mood is pretty annoying.

Are any of them able to have a full conversation without making unfounded personal attacks? I’ve never had that experience.

I’d probably be all-in for communism if it weren’t for them.

can you explain? appreciate the insight...

To be accurate, mentioning accounts in the body doesn't ping people

Meh, it's no different than creating a report. I get an email for every report made on programming.dev, someone pinging the admins isn't/shouldn't be a big deal.

I agree with this. Discussion of moderation on a topic-based community (as opposed to a meta-community) is fully fine and fair to be removed as "off-topic" imo.

They even pinned their comment stating as much. Fuck off

flame war bullshit

Holy shit don’t you have anything better to post about

who shat in your cereal, lmao

Actually, that's not true, or not complete.

The mod deleted a bunch of comments in a post about open source keyboards, because discussion of FUTO was offtopic, because it's not open source. So then there was a separate post about FUTO specifically, and a little bit of lively discussion about whether FUTO was the good guys or the bad guys, with the mod deleting comments drawn from a specific 50% of that division, and finally they said:

I am locking this thread to avoid needing to remove misinformation and advocacy from Futo fans who think they should be allowed to redefine a term which there has been consensus about the definition of since before they were born.

So, they were okay with discussion of FUTO, just not with people saying things they didn't agree with, and they considered it tedious to have to remove so many of the comments under the post leaving only the comments they (edit: disagreed) agreed with. So they locked the post.