I shared my fly.io Lemmy project to Hacker News and one of the first responses was “Lemmy is for tankies.”

This isn’t the first time I’d heard this either. In leaving Reddit and researching alternatives I’d heard it a fair amount.

I think it’s basically untrue; beehaw doesn’t even federate with the big tankie servers. But that seems to require some understanding of what Lemmy actually is.

So… what’s the best way to talk about it and/or get around this optics issue?

  • Zamboniman@lemmy.caEnglish
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    1 year ago

    Maybe say something like, “That’s like saying Reddit is for /r/TheDonald. It’s just not true. Those guys are really niche. Lemmy is not that.”

  • Kaldo@beehaw.orgEnglish
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    1 year ago

    I think people responding to this with “just defederate them” or something in that vein are missing the point - the software lemmy is still being developed by “potential” tankies. It’s not just an issue if they will ban you from the main instance if you speak against CCP, they decide what gets added to lemmy repo and in which direction they take the development and who’s allowed to contribute.

    I don’t know enough yet to make a decision about it so i’m using both lemmy and kbin for now. Just wanted to point out that “ignore them” is not really an answer that solves everything. And besides, it is always good practice to be skeptical about who you’re giving your data and money to on the internet.

    • sophware@beehaw.orgEnglish
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      1 year ago

      Which one is the main instance? I want to test if I speak against CCP if I get banned. If I don’t, that is one data point this issue isn’t what people are saying. Plenty of data points are needed, I’m sure; but we Leftists are misrepresented and are not just one monolithic group. I meant to type “we know Leftists” are misrepresented but will leave the slip just the way it is, lol.

    • Rhabuko@feddit.deEnglish
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      1 year ago

      Lemmy is open source. Worst case is people fork it and the community has to pay the new developers. But I don’t think it will come to this. Now that the project is rolling I doubt that the devs will risk it. But wouldn’t hurt to donate maybe a extra buck, if you already help your server instance, to finance another independent full time contributor.

      • isosphere@beehaw.orgEnglish
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        1 year ago

        Open source and AGPL licensed, we can separate the code from them at any time and we do not need permission.

        Agree re: $ towards instance admins; I have a tiny Mastodon instance and it isn’t cheap.

  • Lionir [he/him]@beehaw.orgEnglish
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    1 year ago

    I think personally that we should just give it time. We don’t need to attract everyone and we’ve already got a lot of work to do.

    I personally believe that what we have today is enough to serve as a battery for organic, natural growth through word of mouth. We just need to keep going and convince people through genuine effort that we can do better as a platform.

      • Lemdee@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        1 year ago

        that the tankies under the bed aren’t going to get them.

        Are you really ready to make that promise? I have a pretty tall bed and I haven’t asked everyone under there what their ideologies are.

    • deadcyclo@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      1 year ago

      Not only do we not need to attract everyone, we cannot attract everyone. At least not short to mid term. If everybody on reddit suddenly jumped on the lemmy bandwagon, the whole network would go down faster than you could blink.

  • aka_oscar@beehaw.orgEnglish
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    1 year ago

    “That was before Reddit prollapsing into itself. Now lemmy has fresh new users with no extreme politics as their topic of interest”

  • gabuwu@beehaw.orgEnglish
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    1 year ago

    Explain that tankie and extreme political instances are consistently defederated, since its a federated platform. They can just find an instance that doesn’t interact with the tankie instances.

    • JillyB@beehaw.orgEnglish
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think we can say “consistently” when the largest instance federated with the largest tankie instance.

  • fiasco@possumpat.ioEnglish
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    1 year ago

    Purity testing is an absurd road to go down. Hacker News is full of techbros, and as I understand it, it’s run by Valley “angel investors.” If “Lemmy = tankies → Lemmy is bad,” then Hacker News is the worst thing imaginable.

    Which, I mean, Hacker News is awful. Point being, who cares what techbros think?

  • sideone@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    1 year ago

    How does (or should) one respond to “Lemmy = tankies”

    My first question would be: “What’s a tankie?”

    • WatTyler@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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      1 year ago

      I believe it’s someone who is an idiot and an anti-capitalist. The kind of people who defend China’s genocide in Xinjiang or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

      • Poitou@beehaw.orgEnglish
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        1 year ago

        I just want to add that being anticapitalist does not suffice to make you a tankie, tankies are also apologists of authoritarian “anti-west” governments (Mao’s/Xi Jinping’s China, USSR, Ghaddafi’s Lybia, Putin’s Russia…)

    • mustyOrange@beehaw.orgEnglish
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      1 year ago

      They are communists of the authoritarian vanguard party kind (known as marxism-leninism). There’s different brands of socialism - some, like anarchists, prefer socialism to be focused around unions and decentralized aid groups, while others focus around using governments and vanguard parties. Tankies are of the latter variety

      • themobyone@beehaw.orgEnglish
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        1 year ago

        So they are basically saying they would like to live under the regime of Stalin back in the day(or a modern analog). A society where it didn’t matter how left your were, or how correct you had been living all your life. If you were “in the way” for someone important with connections you and maybe your entire familie goes to the gulag.

    • hallettj@beehaw.orgEnglish
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      1 year ago

      The definition on Wikipedia seems relevant. I don’t have much context on this; but it looks to me like the summary in this case could be: people who defend or are apologists for authoritarianism and violence, especially in China, Syria, or North Korea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

  • pootriarch@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
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    1 year ago

    to a techie, i’d say, it’s open source and if they ever overpushed politics, they’d find they’d become the fork as the community would fork away.

    to a non-techie, i’d say, everyone’s an asshole a different way, but they don’t own the whole place like spez and musk do.

    and i wouldn’t argue. let them walk away haters. this platform isn’t ready for everyone to come right now anyway.

  • catacomb@beehaw.orgEnglish
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    1 year ago

    I’ve seen this raised quite often and, to be honest, it was kind of true in the beginning and that’s probably where the opinion came from.

    Ultimately, software like this is free and open to everyone; even those we don’t agree with. We’re going to have to come to terms with that fact because our own freedom rests upon it. There were going to be authoritarian left servers at some point, it just so happened to be at the beginning. There are also going to be authoritarian right servers if there aren’t already. The software doesn’t discriminate but it also doesn’t discriminate against anyone else.

    As for optics, I think all you can do is focus more on the beehaw community or whichever community you want to promote. This post was written to capture the spirit of the community if you need some inspiration. Some might not be convinced and that’s okay, we just need to convince enough of their friends :)

    If it really matters, suggest Kbin too. We can interact with Kbin magazines and users so Kbin’s success is Lemmy’s success and vice versa.