In the boiling chaos of reddit over the last few days, I scrolled past some allegations that I didn’t have a chance to thoroughly look into before today’s start to the blackout.

IIRC, if was something to do with a connection between Lemmy’s creator (or maybe the fediverse at large?) and neo nazi/white nationalist ideology, but that’s all I remember off the top of my head. I couldn’t tell at the time if it was just a loyal redditor’s sour grapes, ragebait, or if it had something to it.

Obviously, I’m not going back over to reddit right now to find the thread, and a web search is mostly pulling articles about Motorhead’s Lemmy, lol. Does anyone have any info on this or an idea if why this might have been passed around? I’m new to lemmy, so I don’t know much of the backstory on the page.

  • maegul (he/they)English
    2•1 year ago

    Yea, so, the “Chinese whispers” of negative rumours are super toxic. The rumour you’ve heard is probably the most untrue I’ve heard in a long time.

    The devs are communists and a pretty staunchly anti-Nazis and racism. The reason you have to apply to join lemmy is that a while back a bunch of nazis came in here, and so to prevent that from happening ever again, the devs made the sign up process harder.

    They’ve also hardcoded some anti-racism filtering into the codebase, which has attracted a good deal of criticism from “free-software” types while the devs just don’t want their software to be used by any racists.

    If there’s controversy, it’s over the magnitude of their communism and the extent to which they happily defend china etc. From what I’ve seen, their position is mostly that western media/propaganda hypocritically exaggerates issues. Even if their defences go too far, I think this is a valuable perspective (because beyond “fake news” rubbish, the media is absolutely biased). Additionally, capitalism, even if you think it’s the best system, could do with a critical beating at the moment.

    Beyond all that, this is FOSS and the devs have been nothing but supportive of people making new instances, communities and forks for a diverse ecosystem.

    Back to the rumour shit. I’ve seen a bit of it on the fediverse and basically concluded that it’s a social media habit from big social platforms that really needs to die. On bigger platforms, it’s more harmless as the umbrella organisation running the platform is untouchable and the most likely victims are big powerful people that have actually done something wrong.

    On the fediverse, basically no one is powerful. Instead, you’ve got volunteers and people trying to do their best, however much they might need to learn something. And it’s not one big shadow company keeping the place together, it’s just people. So any rumour is likely to be friendly fire against the fediverse as a whole. So unless you know something and are willing to look into it, it’s probably not worth thinking about. If someone says something is the case, ask for receipts or evidence. Often there won’t be a reply. Asking as you have here isn’t bad, but the weirdly wrong rumour you’ve acquired probably deserved more scepticism based on its source.

    The big exception to this is racism. If someone who is the subject of such things says it’s happening it should be presumed true.