I just wanted to correct you, development didn't start last year, it has been ongoing for several years.

Source: I was marginally involved in the project early on, before political ideology got in the way.

what political ideology got in the way

The developers are avowed hard line Marxists, and they did not want contributors who did not toe the line on that.

It should be noted that this isn't an exaggeration. For a long time they actually had in the sidebar on lemmy.ml that it was the main Marxist instance. I'd link an archive but the site's design makes every one I can find pull the new info.

I mean is this really a reason to not use something? Just because you don't agree with the views of the people running it?

I never said you shouldn't? I was only backing up the other commentor's claim since many people might think he's being hyperbolic rather than them overtly spelling it out on their site.

Not at all but is a very strong reason not to collaborate.

Can't work with someone who is radicalized, they tend to take criticism as attacks and will attack back, sometimes preemptively if they get paranoid and start seeing ghosts.

In those cases only use it if you can maintain it and fork it. Because you can't trust that someone with so extreme political views will not remove the software because they don't agree with whatever downstream group using it.

> they tend to take criticism as attacks

Makes sense, but it might as well not be the case.

True, but from experience with family and former friends it's a prevalent trend with radicals (left, right, religious). It's not something I'd look forward to.

I guess it depends in exactly what they believe and how they think it should be achieved, since I've met people who were extreme in their positions, but capable of accepting others and staunch critics of their side.

Thinking about it, I guess the main difference with these two guys was that they didn't preach and were old as hell. Probably age earned wisdom, who knows.

Well it depends, right. If their views are just their views then no, not really. But if they outright tell people they want nothing to do with them unless they think exactly alike, yeah, why would you want to contribute to that? When I say they're Marxists, I mean they're not shy in saying what they think of you if you're not one. These are not weekend "what Mao did was wrong" socialists man, they don't want to hang around you either.

If they're unwilling to work with people who disagree with them politically?

With federated services, then at very least the people making the technical decisions around the protocols should try to be politically neutral.

The cost of the actual implementation being under the control of political idealogues is less, since forking doesn't impact the API - but it's still not desireable.

Yes, because you're giving them more power to disseminate their views and later suppress yours if they so choose. In this case it's a bit different, since it's a federated model, so you can just run your own node, but I'd rather not support the work of people with extremist views.

Pretend for a moment it's a Nazi-espousing group. That's how some are seeing this group even though they swing the opposite direction into Marxism.

Would you want to be associated with people who openly and unironically praised Hitler?

Read the About page.

Not necessarily political in ideology, but the tool included a fairly cruddy hardcoded slur regex that instance admins couldn't configure. It was prone to picking up false flags (someone tried for example to make a Stardew Valley community on it but it got censored out by the slur filter).

The stated reason for not removing it or making it configurable was "to make it as difficult as possible for far right instances to use Lemmy", but all it really seems to have resulted in is a dozen or so forks dedicated to removing the slur filter and at least one missed customer who doesn't like dealing with "computer says no" nonsense (by which I mean me, I always like trying out fedi tools).

It eventually did get configurable if memory serves me right, but that took several years. I'm sure there's more, these sorts of ideology driven projects always end up with similarly crappy anti-features.

I found it very amusing when I learned that Mastodon, a decentralized Twitter alternative, was created because its creators thought there wasn't enough censorship on Twitter.

This seems to be along similar lines (though considering how other Reddit alternatives ended up, I guess that's fair enough!)

True. First commit was Feb 10, 2019.

> before political ideology got in the way

you mean the guy who uses che guevara as profile picture on github has some strong political views?

Not only one but two. The first dude has Che Guevara and the other one Fidel Castro.

I bet they'd be all riled up if someone used Mussolini or Franco as their profile picture.

They are open about not being interested in working with or federating with far-right groups, you don't have to make a bet.

It was a comment on the irony of their profile pictures.

It shouldn't be acceptable to glorify neither of: Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, Fidel, Guevara, Hussein, Pinochet, Ceaucescu, Gaddafi, etc.

My point is that authoritarian murderers are authoritarian murderers no matter their political affiliation and should not be glorified. You can be against one extreme without supporting the other.

you forgot to include Bush.

Too many people to list.

Although I'd say the tag kind of fits, but Bush is in another category. All the people I mentioned had in common the persecution, imprisonment and execution of their own people at a massive level and maintained power by force. Bush went after other countries and was voted out in the end.

> It shouldn't be acceptable to glorify

Profile pictures are not necessary used for glorification. It often used for trolling also, especially on classic forums.

What a ridiculous false equivalence to make.

They were almost the same in their practices, just happened to have different political ideas and better propaganda.

Fidel Castro, but yeah. And that's him watering it down for the public.