I have seen that the lemmy.ml mods will openly ban discussion about the CCP. I am wondering if the sh.itjust.works team allows criticism of government bodies, while still banning racism.
I have seen that the lemmy.ml mods will openly ban discussion about the CCP. I am wondering if the sh.itjust.works team allows criticism of government bodies, while still banning racism.
I had already formed conclusions after reading through one of the founder’s comment histories (which I’d encourage), so my reading of it may have been biased. Either way it’s clear that the motivation driving them is, or at least was, largely political in nature.
They own the github repo, they control what code gets committed, they control whether the project lives or dies really. They have the power to lose interest or decide to abandon the project, at which point the best hope the community has is that others pick it up. It’s not normally something I worry too much about with open source projects but again, strong geopolitical associations makes it feel precarious to me – if they don’t like where things are going, maybe they’d feel motivated to actively shut it down and discourage any peaceful transition of (code) ownership. Obviously this is all conjecture.
I’m not sure why you think I’d have trouble believing that!
Couldn’t someone just fork it and update current servers with that fork and still keep all of the data though? It should still just work the same but just not be from a codebase controlled by the founders
That’s right. It’s a legitimate solution if the lead dev drives it into the ground. I don’t think lack of developers to fork or maintain it would be an issue. The only barrier I see is adoption of yet another platform. So in my mind, there’s always an option to just separate if Lemmy turns into one big tankie brigade. But forking is still a PITA and not ideal.
I don’t think using a fork would separate it into another platform. It would still be Lemmy. They would only need to separate of their code bases change so drastically between the two that going to other instances from the forked one starts breaking things. And even then workarounds could then be put in the former version so everything still plays nice.