The Funkwhale music platform is alive and in active development, and they’re working on a feature to filter far-right artists off the network. Some Fediverse self-hosters are divided on letting a third party decide what should be allowed in their library.
[from the original announcement]
If you are a liberal or if you want to have fun, have a look at “Aamer Rahman: Is it really ok to punch nazis?” :)
haha, nice. And this makes the Funkwhale announcement author’s position clear: combating fascism is more important than defending lofty ideals, like their liberties. They treat Funkwhale as a community, not merely a tool.
Some of the points Sean brings up may be reasonable critiques, I don’t know enough about music tagging to know how easy or hard MusicBrainz is to use, and there is also the question about what if a formerly RW artist reforms (many, many have deradicalized or left the movement, fun fact: this is an important source of antifascist intel). I know about a dozen artists who, as teenagers, were in edgy right-wing circles and echoed that in their works, and are now very far away from that and regretful, but if they hadn’t taken up new aliases, they’d probably be lumped in with their unwelcome past works. So I do see merit in the complaint about that project lead failing to implement a way to handle special cases.
With all that said, I’m definitely in support of this move. I just hope they implement and improve it well - that will make or break it.
This reminds me of Mastodon (like Sean mentioned in the article) and Lemmy. I’m not experienced with Mastodon, but I am aware of how they reacted to Gab (formerly a Mastodon instance, before getting bullied by almost everyone), and how most of Lemmy divorced Wolfballs (run by a US-Libertarian, think 🧊🍑 + antivax, but soon populated by white supremacists and neo-nazis; eventually shut down, among other reasons, when the admin realized the Nazis on their instance weren’t just pretending for a laugh and that many were commercial bots. Probably didn’t help that their admin had a non-white partner and jewish friends) and exploding-heads.
These are examples when a FOSS tool takes a community stance, rather than an idealistic liberalist freedom-above-all stance.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 16 hours ago
While that is funny and certainly deserved. Normally I would say that its not their place to decide that but fuck right wingers they deserve to be purged out of every single space they have.
deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Generally speaking, I agree. It’s just interesting to see a platform force a mechanism into itself that admins can’t turn off. The only thing that really bugs me about that is that admins are kind of supposed to have the final say on what their server does, and some of the infrastructure for this idea seems a bit shaky at best.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 13 hours ago
Its open source, the admins can turn it off by reverting the patch. The person who coded it has the final say on what their software does in an open source world if you dont like it you are welcome to fork it.