Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go “Lemmy is getting worse and worse,” or “I’m leaving Lemmy,” or worse, “I’m leaving for Beehaw.”
If you’re using Beehaw, then you’re using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don’t like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don’t get our terminology right.
Just a remark: “Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid” admins or lemmy.ml ARE the devs of lemmy software. Moreover, they developed lemmy because they where thrown out of reddit for did something “stupid”.
I just had a look at Lemmy’s GitHub. Of the web interface alone, the second biggest contributor only joined two weeks ago. And there are many others. Those are new developers. So in essence: lemmy.ml admins are some of the software developers and are actually now in the minority, unless I missed something very obvious.
This might be a stupid question, so forgive me. Who controls what happens to the actual software? Like, if a hundred great ideas get added to the GitHub, who controls which ones make it into the next version of Lemmy?
Lemmy.ml devs own the repo, it’s just licensed as open source software under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE. You can read the license in the repo files. So you can fork off it and run your own instance. If you go to GitHub.com/LemmyNet you see the two people who are members of the project, with the accounts, both have Fidel Castro avatars.
Personally I think having a bunch of socialists run the software, is by definition the best way to have it avoid corporate interests.
Whoever has permission to merge into the main branch of the code repository would have final say. All pull requests for the lemmy repo are currently public though, so you’d be able to see an abuse of power if one were to happen. More users can also be granted the ability to merge code into the main branch as well, which more than likely will happen with the biggest contributors.
If the main project start doing something stupid, other devs can just fork the project as a new lemmy project with a new kind of government of how codes are merged into the project.
At the same time though since it’s all open source, if things on the software side get out of control the software can fork.
People like this are actually the best ones to have running such a project. For them it’s not just a pet-project to pass time, or a small way to show their skills. It’s a necessary step for them, to be able to keep their online presence.
You’d be surprised at how effective people can be, when they’re doing something out of spite.
Seriously, if you don’t understand the politics of the lemmy devs, you’re functionally not understanding the point of lemmy. I think people believe in more socialist ideas than they’ve been lead to believe, especially with the rampant conflating of “leftists” in media to mix it with liberals as a tactic from the right. Lemmy is inherently political, and that’s a GOOD thing.
Let’s be honest. In Western Nations. People aren’t taught what socialism is ever. I mean I can only honestly speak for myself and the 1980s. But all we were really taught about as far as socialism is that Commies/ML bad. Which is fair enough. Capitalists are bad too. The problem being that we were never educated in any way shape or form about other left-wing ideologies. We’re to go out to the average person on the street and ask them to describe or define anarchism I can guarantee you. But most of them would have no real sense of the actual ideology and just give you some sort of reply coming down to chaos. Likewise the majority of them have no knowledge of or concept that libertarianism is a left-wing ideology. And has only been recently co-opted by the right wing to do damage in recent history. Almost every single person you ever asked about libertarianism would wrongly describe it as a right-wing ideology. And that is all on purpose. Because it behooves the wealthy to keep us uninformed.
Not everything here has to be misconstrued to be done out of spite.
I could be mistaken, but I truly believe that a large part of these forks and communities are about providing an alternative platform where there is opportunity for dogma agnostic discussion and constructive criticism beyond name-calling.