It’s also a hypothetical, not the actual reality.
If it ever becomes a problem then it requires editing a single line of code (which could easily be setup to read a user-specified location).
Complaing about Lemmy while not doing anything to contribute to fixing the problem shows that some people are mentally stuck in Reddit and don’t understand open source processes.
There’s no product manager being paid to scan social media looking for complaints to relay to development.
If someone notices a problem or has a problem with the design then the answer is to create an issue on the issue tracker for the project. It’s even better if you edit the code how you think it should be and include a pull request.
The answer isn’t to misrepresent changes or discussion from the issue tracker in order to stir up anger and outrage.
In the FOSS world, if you want things to change then go change them.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
I don’t know if there is an English language issue here (understandable if there were), but that is literally not what I said. I added “to new instances”, which precludes the possibility of interpreting what my words here to somehow mean “communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances” - the latter wording itself seemingly implying existing instances, which runs completely counter to new ones.
Anyway, it is not a blocker as you are saying (that I said), but a discovery impediment, wherein lemmy.ml acts as the central authoritarian decider for what listing of communities is presented to new instance admins upon first starting up a lemmy instance.
And while you can turn that feature off, then Lemmy has to limp along without that leg to stand upon. Yes you could replace it entirely too, but once you start replacing code are you really running “Lemmy” anymore, or like a de-authoritarianized version of it? Basically a decentralized fork? At which point such an action would go along with my latter wording “unless we fight against it”.
So my point was basically that there are centralization trends going on inside the Lemmy code, which I pointed out. A similar event occurred several years ago where lemmy.ml decided that certain swear words were inappropriate, and hard-coded those filters. When asked to remove them, they said:
- Nutomic
But then later recanted after a huge outcry. It makes sense that lemmy.ml makes the Lemmy codebase to suit their own needs, and only considers the desires & needs of the wider world outside of that as secondary. My point though is that that is what is going on… “unless we fight against it”.
pivot_root@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I agree with your overall opinion, but I jusy don’t agree with how the problem was presented. Your statement, with more of the surrounding context:
The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”. Not acknowledging a community’s existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0’s piracy community because of EU laws, and it’s basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.
I wouldn’t have an issue with if you said a change in Lemmy “gives lemmy.ml exclusive control over promoting what communities show up as popular in other instances”. They don’t have the ability to censor the existence of communities that go against their views just the ability to censor their promotion. That’s a big problem, but it’s not as catastrophically bad as them having the power to censor the actual content on other instances.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
Begging your pardon, but that is not what I said. You included my actual phrase in your quote even:
(emphasis now added) I am not sure why you think we are disagreeing here, when it seems we are in perfect accord. e.g. in your words, it:
Yes, that, exactly. It only affects new instances, not existing ones, it is only discoverability, not acting as a blocker to actually bring in those communities, and yet it is something that admins need to be aware of now and turn off. Almost like the instance admins cannot trust that the code will run according to their principles, without some modifications.
I concede that my phrasing sounds entirely different when you leave out the “to new instances”… but that is precisely why I put that wording in there?
Anyway, getting back to the - ahem - central point (pun intended), the aspect under discussion here is that centralization gives admins & mods too much power, whereas defederation places that power into the hands of the people.
Lemmy.ml is extremely famous on the Threadiverse - dare I say, infamous? - for doing precisely this. And now those same developers are increasing the trend towards centralization by baking right into the code something that will increase the trend towards centralization even further. Not by an enormous leap of course, but step by little step is precisely how such things have always gone? I never said the word “catastrophically”, just that it was a step that I felt like was in the wrong direction.
i.e. “The Fediverse doesn’t work like that” is a statement that encourages complacency, as if it never happens here. It does, albeit to a MUCH smaller degree than on Reddit or Digg. If the statement had said “The Fediverse does not do that to nearly the same degree”, then I would agreed, but I took issue with the binary logic of exclusively only yes vs. no, and pointed to where the answer is not quite “entirely no / never” here on the Fediverse too. “we all can easily fall prey to authoritarianism, unless we fight against it.”
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day ago
No, that’s just relevant to the mass community lookup tool. Piracy communities can still be federated individually on the Piefedverse (so to speak), and I believe that Rimu has removed that term from that.