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Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

dev.lemmy.ml

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Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you feel restricted by rules preventing you from being hurtful towards others, the problem is you, not the rules.

If you can't speak out or express thoughts against the rules, you are ceding your own ability to ever change the rules. Allowing a small subset of people to control the rules for the masses has never, will never, and could not ever work in a free society. The small groups of Twitter and Reddit moderators are far too small to ever represent the diversity of human thought. You may think the rules prevent harm today, bu…

>If you can't speak out or express thoughts against the rules, you are ceding your own ability to ever change the rules. Allowing a small subset of people to control the rules for the masses has never, will never, and could not ever work in a free society.

That's funny, I find the moderators stifle talking about the rules on Hackernews via secret shadowbans, post rate limiting, and other secret punishments...yet here you are.

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t need to have a discussion with a guy who beats his wife because he never got help for his PTSD to know it’s wrong. Giving it a platform treats it like a point of view and not a gross fucking crime. I don’t need to talk to a Nazi to know that gassing Jews and gays is wrong. People seem to think that there are some unexplored ideas here that merit further discussion. We have already established that this shit i…

It’s just standard “both sides” crap

Bothsidism is a straw man argument designed to present arguments that compare practical effects of different ideologies in bad faith and give rhetoric to people who have no business making the argument in the first place.

Dismissing an argument based on rhetorical sophistry is keeping your head in the sand while trying to get others to do the same. It’s reckless.

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lastly, yes it is true that some points of view are just wrong. There are in fact bad ideas. Eugenics is a bad idea. Racism is a bad idea. Misogyny is a bad idea. As someone who has been looking for good anti-racialist arguments for a long time (along with explanations for why eugenics is wrong and why we think there aren't substantial sex differences that make the sexes on average more suited to different things)…

> As someone who has been looking for good anti-racialist arguments for a long time... Racism isn't useful and isn't actionable at a policy level. Let's suppose there is some trait X (could be IQ test score, high jump ability, whatever) that is statistically variant by rigorously defined race. Group A scores on average 98, group B scores on average 103. The median difference between groups doesn't actually matter, be…

You seem to be describing a meritocracy which, if I understand correctly, is an ideal promoted by white supremacists?

Would you mind if I flagged your post?

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, real world problems are hard. I'm not sure what point you're trying to convey though? We can't just say, "The boundaries of hate speech are unclear, so we'll do nothing and have uncensored speech." This experiment has been tried over and over again, with uniformly bad results.

My point was, that it is hard and the lines are blurry. But actually I do believe in the concept of unrestricted speech. But I really don't know when was the last time, that was tried. There were times, when certain topics were ok to speak freely about, like racism, yes, but at those times other topics were restricted, so what exactly are you talking about?

> I do believe in the concept of unrestricted speech.

Including illegal things?

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#546

How is lemmy going to avoid the fate of the last reddit alternative (voat)? Voat attracted the communities banned from reddit, e.g the worst of the worst: jailbait, creepshots, beatingwomen, etc. The users most interested in an alternative to reddit are on average, the exact wrong type of user to help with the growth of a healthy community. I don't see any information on how being "federated" solves the hard problem…

No post body was provided.

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#547
post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood the general goal the same way. As for CoC: I believe it's more of a signalling act than a reaction to past issues. Just like the KKK would add "no race mixing" to the rules, a left wing open source project needs to signal to their in group, and their main way of doing that is to say "no harassment based on [some criteria]".

"No harassment" qualifies as left wing signalling now?

"No harassment based on certain criteria". The old FreeBSD code of conduct is a good example. Instead of having a blanket ban on harassment, it listed specific criteria that you couldn't harass someone about.

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#548

How is lemmy going to avoid the fate of the last reddit alternative (voat)? Voat attracted the communities banned from reddit, e.g the worst of the worst: jailbait, creepshots, beatingwomen, etc. The users most interested in an alternative to reddit are on average, the exact wrong type of user to help with the growth of a healthy community. I don't see any information on how being "federated" solves the hard problem…

Nothing can prevent terrible people from using an open source project. Meanwhile, Reddit doesn't do much of anything about this problem either. For, example /r/metacanada exists, and white supremacists from there are also moderating /r/canada subbreddit, Reddit hasn't taken any action on that. At least the developers of Lemmy are very clear [1] about their stance regarding nazis, that's more than I can say for Reddit…

The Reddit admins don't meddle in who moderates what. They'll take action on subreddits against the ToS but if someone's a mod on both /r/EvilShitThatsProbablyIllegal and /r/Kittens it's not something they're going to do anything about — and rightly so, IMO.

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure what you mean by racism/sexism/eugenics being false. If you mean why they are bad ideas, I can only do so much in terms of links, since I learned that these ideas are bad before the web was popular. I guess here are some things you might want to consider: * Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Make sure to get the NC17 unabridged book for the non-sugarcoated version. * All humans are virtually genetically identical. Can’…

I greatly appreciate you taking the time to find things, it displays a good will and charitable nature that's often lacking in the world. :) That said, I have done a fair bit of googling and for various reasons, which would be too much of a digression to go into, have found most of those kinds of resources unsatisfying (e.g. the idea that differences are only skin deep is trivially refutable by racists). By possible…

What you are describing isn’t a situation of refuting arguments. If I tell you that you can’t find the resources you seek because the racists have bugged all your devices and are constantly messing with your search results and reading material, I wouldn’t refute your argument. I would simply be ignoring reality or outright lying. That’s the reason why it’s so easy for a racist to come up with a counter argument to “turns out we are not genetically different): their argument needs only to appeal to a feeling, not be rooted in fact. In fact, the speed with which they come up with counter-arguments indicates mental gymnastics more than knowledge of the subject. Arguments for racism often center around specific “self-evident” truths which if you examine closely turn out to be simply circular arguments. As an example, one argument is that black people commit more crime than white people. If you look at certain statistics a certain way, you could come to that conclusion. But this ignores certain facts. For example, crime is much more strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. A poor white town is going to have just as much crime as an equally poor town occupied primarily by any race. But because white people got a bit of a head start in the US (as in were not bought and sold as property and not worked to death against their will), the median income for a black family is lower than for a white family. And of course keep in mind that most white collar crime is committed by white men who make up the majority of the C level at most corporations. We rarely prosecute that kind of crime even though it can be a lot more damaging (as in murder of one person means a murder charge. Dumping toxic waste into rivers that leads to hundreds of thousands of birth defects and genetic dresses is “white collar” so we fine the company and fire the exec, but nobody goes to prison).

Look closely, and you will find inconsistencies in these arguments. Oh, sure there are plenty of them but none of them seems to really hold up to scrutiny. Few will cite scientific studies (some will go as far as saying that science is censored so you shouldn’t trust it which is an obvious red flag for someone making shit up), and ones that do often misinterpret or misquote it. If you’d like we can try it out: find the best written argument for any of these points of view and we can together break down exactly where the lies and fabrications are.

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#550
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you choose to opt out of email then you also choose to opt out of email support and being able to reset passwords via email. And the users will get mad and blame the service provider. That said users are dumb/wrong or whatever is irrelevant, what matters to the business is that they're pissing off users and getting a bad reputation. Thus, requiring emails from the user is entirely rational and in fact is a good…

No, making it a default makes sense. Users will not get mad if they get a warning telling them email support will no longer be possible. Alternatively you can opt with giving them a recovery code by which they can contact support or with which email will be enabled for an account when the user forgets their password. The only time you can't turn on email on your account is if you lose the password. Email is not secur…

What do you recommend to replace long form correspondence online? I cannot see anything that can replace it currently. Especially not in corporate, nothing beats email.
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