How Lemmy's Communist Devs Saved It
How Lemmy's Communist Devs Saved It
There are various reasons Lemmy succeeded as a Reddit alternative where others failed. One of the underappreciated ones is probably that the devs were communists. I know that sounds a little strange
The main thing that made Lemmy succeed was structural: no matter how bad an admin team is, you can limit their impact on your experience, by picking another instance.
The main focus of the text is something else though. It's what I call "the problem of the witches".
Child-eating witches are bad, but so is witch hunting. People are bound to be falsely labelled as witches and create social paranoia, and somewhere down the road what should be considered witch behaviour will include silly things with barely anything to do with witchcraft - such as planting wheat:
- if you're planting wheat you'll harvest it.
- if you harvest wheat you get straw.
- if you get straw you can make a straw broom.
- if you make a straw broom you can fly on the sky
- conclusion: planting wheat is witchcraft activity.
However, once you say "we don't burn witches here", you aren't just protecting the people falsely mislabelled as witches (a moral thing to do). You're also protecting the actual witches - that's immoral, and more importantly it's bound to attract the witches, and make people who don't want witches to go away.
In other words, no matter how much freedom of speech is important, once you advertise a site based on its freedom of speech you'll get a handful of free speech idealists, and lots of people who want to use that freedom of speech to say things that shouldn't be said for a good reason.
That harmed a lot of Reddit alternatives. Specially as Reddit was doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (getting rid of witches not due to moral reasons, or thinking about its userbase, but because the witches were bad rep). So you got a bunch of free witches eager to settle in whatever new platform you created.
This really sounds like a reformulation (with more accessible language and preferable IMO) of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. I have it below for your convenience:
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance:
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. (in note 4 to Chapter 7, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1)
Yup - it is, partially, Popper's paradox of tolerance.
However there's a second risk that I mentioned there, that Popper doesn't talk about: that the mechanisms and procedures used to get rid of the intolerant might be abused and misused, to hunt the others.
I call this "witch hunting", after the mediaeval practice - because the ones being thrown into the fire were rarely actual witches, they were mostly common people. You see this all the time in social media; specially in environments that value "trust" (i.e. gullibleness) and orthodoxy over rationality. Such as Twitter (cue to "the main character of the day"), Reddit (pitchfork emporium), and even here in Lemmy.
[from your other comment] There is another solution. Make it so witches cannot cause harm, everyone gives a little bit to make everything work for everyone.
It is trickier than it looks like. We might simplify them as "witches", but we're dealing with multiple groups. Some partially overlap (e.g. incels/misogynists vs. homophobic people), but some have almost nothing to do with each other, besides "they cause someone else harm". So it's actually a lot of work to prevent them from causing harm, to the point that it's inviable.
This is also more or less the case across the fediverse.
In the case of lemmy though, I think there are also other more subtle value at play, like for instance the devs disinterest in running a flag ship instance and motivation in creating a platform to ensure communities not welcome elsewhere can make their own home (which arguably balanced well with the disinterest in fascy free speech rubbish).
A major difference is how they interact with feedback - the main reason I never did my own mastodon instance is the developers attitude. "We're not interested in helping you because you didn't set it up exactly as in the guide" was (and maybe still is) all over the mastodon bug tracker.
That was the first thing I looked for when lemmy became popular - and found they were taking deployment issues to even the most absurd system seriously.
Additionally they treat suggestions seriously - even if they personally think it is stupid - and even implement some of that. Pretty much no chance of anything of that happening with mastodon.
Yea nice. Not to take away from the lemmy devs and your praise ... but mastodon certainly seems problematic in this regard. While gargron has done a lot in building that platform, and kinda deserves, I suppose, to "own" the platform, it certainly seems (from what I've gathered) a lot of people's work in building up the software and its userbase has been easily ignored or dismissed by gargron, and of course, as you say, he's really not that interested in what others want or need from the platform.
Dessalines o7
Considering the article used "tankie" unironically and referred to a far right instance owner as being "pretty chill" I think it's safe to guess the political leanings of the author.
Whatever the authors leanings are, they make a good point. Lemmy has followed Karl Popper's maxim "Tolerant societies must be intolerant of intolerance." It's just that simple.
I mean moderation doesn't neccesarily support that. You can be tolerant but remove stuff that is far in the fringes. Lemmy has quite a mix. World hates left wing, ml is left wing. Ee is pretty open.
Being intolerant does not necessarily mean complete exclusion. Like one-way federation is still allowed right? So if some folks wanna comment they can still get the same content, the folks who don't won't. I think that's a decent middle ground for the meantime.
People at Fediverse care too much about the devs. 95% libs on Mastodon, 85% Reps on Soapbox/Pleroma, 70% commies on Lemmy, etc. Never gave a shit about it since nearly all federate with each other.
I mean they were also the admins of the biggest instance for a while
oh is that not the case anymore? is that because world is the biggest instance now? might be preferable if most don't appreciate their politics. Also like, I wouldn't want server downtime or anything to effect the devwork of lemmy...
Well that explains a lot of the generally left / communist propaganda de we on lemmy. Here's the thing, I've got nothing against communists in fact I have a few friends who are die hard communists and that's a perfectly fine, reasonable and interesting way of thinking.
With that said I do have a problem with the gender/identity bullshit people - those who end up yelling to politicians about children not getting free gender conversion therapy and whatnot - because unfortunately they get mixed with communist groups/parties that don't particularly share their views but agree to "bite the bullet" just for the numbers. Numbers are all fun but this will eventually backfire once those same communist groups became associated with those people and lose all their credibility.
I've even got a black friend!
😂 😂 😂 😂
Like all things on the internet, you can safely ignore everything before the ", but"
So I actually want to engage with you. If some stuff ends up being like "collapsed" or "hidden by default" because some just had a one-off bad experience with users from a particular community, do you think you'd agree that it is an OK compromise or is that relenting too much for freedom of expression?
Yeah, thanks. /s For turning Lemmy into a left wing echo chamber. Because we all know how good echo chambers (right or left) are. 🤦♂️
My favorite line from this is, "There were no vaunted ideals of free speech...". Because they said the quiet part loud. That was nice of them.
The existence of lemmy.world which you're part of, proves that lemmy tolerates right-wing instances if you ask me.
Make use of the decentralized nature of lemmy, the devs won't knock at your door for creating or posting on right-wing instances.
I’ll admit lemmy is left wing, especially compared to sites like reddit, bluesky, voat, or any one of those fascist twitter clones like parler. But unlike the fascist twitter clones, I’d say many of the more popular instances here aren’t echo chambers, just spaces with larger overton windows.
there were no vaunted ideals of free speech
So? Even as someone who loves free speech (i am literally an anarchist), I recognize that speech has consequences, and sometimes those consequences are getting banned or defederated. This article talks about how not being a free speech absolutist makes a site more appealing by removing fascists, and lemmy’s issue with tankies by being more open to them. The second issue sorted itself out using federation and defederation.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing if people don’t want to see hate speech and wanf moderation. That was the feature that got me to join lemmy at first, beehaw was my first instance and was certainly the least toxic place I have found online.
Echo chambers aren't as prevalent or as problematic as you think. The biggest echo chamber is actually most likely your own neighborhood. The internet, even small communities, is where you're most likely exposed to diverse viewpoints. Shit, just yesterday I saw someone saying they were hurt by how we talked about Slavs. Where the heck am I gonna see that in Maryland?
That may be so, but in the other scenario, lemmy wouldn't exist and we'd all be miserablely sitting in reddit still
Free speech is a good thing. Absolute free speech is the excuse shit people use to air their shitty opinions.