Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

There's threads denyng the oppression of Uyghur muslims (this oppression has been well documented by NGOs, for example: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/4137/2021/ug/).

Other posts deny that North Korea is oppressive.

Meanwhile, another suggests celebrating Stalin's birthday as he was such a great guy.

(Incidentally, I have receipts, DM me if you want to see them for yourself.)

4/6

China: “Like We Were Enemies in a War”: China’s Mass Internment, Torture, and Persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang [Uyghur] - Amnesty International

Choose a language to view reportDownload PDFArabicArabic Chinese English French Indonesian Kazakh Kirghiz Russian Spanish Tajik Turkish Uyghur Uzbek Download PDF

^{Amnesty International}

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

p.s. I put the wrong link for Amnesty, the Uyghur report is here:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/4137/2021/ug/

China: “Like We Were Enemies in a War”: China’s Mass Internment, Torture, and Persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang [Uyghur] - Amnesty International

Choose a language to view reportDownload PDFArabicArabic Chinese English French Indonesian Kazakh Kirghiz Russian Spanish Tajik Turkish Uyghur Uzbek Download PDF

^{Amnesty International}

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

p.p.p.s. There was an older "reddit for the Fediverse" project called Prismo which had some working instances at one point.

Perhaps someone could resurrect it, to provide an alternative to Lemmy?

https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo

prismosuite / prismo · GitLab

Federated link aggregation powered by ActivityPub.

^GitLab

Tech in general isn’t neutral, but there’s nothing within the source code of Lemmy that endorses denying genocides.

Like, I use Soapbox, but I’m not a TERF

@Erik

I don't think tech is neutral.

I am not comfortable about tech created by people who have a bad attitude towards human rights.

Content warning: Lemmy Reveal/hide

Content warning: Lemmy Reveal/hide

@Erik

As far as I know, he has zero connection to Mastodon today and no role there.

Whatever role he may have had no longer exists, as far as I know.

I’ve just come back from a long shower in which I thought about your comments, and I think you’re right, hence I will be moving to Mastodon (#MastodonDE) soon (just called a friend, we’ll setup a server in Frankfurt or sth)

Just to legitimize my beliefs to some degree, here’s why I thought what I thought:

Sure, I use Soapbox and Rebased, but I’ve never given a penny to Gleason. As a matter of fact, I am very open about my opinion on him and tell everyone who asks about the software my instance uses or shows interest in Gleason’s software why I think they should rethink their actions. I do that on here as well as a moderator on r/Fediverse.

My instance is promoted on his website, so whenever someone who is a TERF or something along those lines (libertarian, alt-right, etc.) wants to join a Soapbox instance, they might just join mine and get introduced to an alternative viewpoint (an ultra-woke radical leftist perspective in which trans rights are, obviously, human rights).

My idea behind it was something like “just because there was one Nazi punk, punks didn’t stop identifying themselves as punks”, so instead of leaving something that is now problematic because it was annexed by the far right, you ensure that it won’t become another symbol for them. If they want to use climate change as a means to push for ecofascism, you don’t let them, if they annex Christianity to push christofascism, you don’t let them. If they develop software to promote “free speech”, you don’t let them. If more leftists and trans rights activists used Soapbox than any other group, the problem would shift to the side of Gleason: continue developing a software that now mostly pushes for something that is against his ideals, or stop entirely. I liked that idea more than moving away from a sinking ship and letting Soapbox develop into a larger and more radical bubble to the extend where instances using it become Auto-defederated.

However, I am not sure how realistic that was. Considering I needed a lot of help with bugs and stuff from Gleason, I also wasted lots of his time for which he didn’t get paid - another example of why possibly using software from problematic devs is a good thing rather than a bad thing. Yet getting more leftists to open Soapbox instances is probably harder than I thought.

Yet I cannot measure the amount of people that saw my instance and software, decided to give Soapbox a try, and possibly donated money to Gleason due to me, it’s probably zero people, but I can’t tell, and as long as the software my instance uses links to a GitLab under his name, your point stands and continues to stand indefinitely.

The argument that Lemmy’s frontpage displays lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml is valid, but it also displays ~70 instances that have no genocide denying opinions whatsoever, so the Lemmy mods are left having to develop software for people who do not support their ideology or opinions whatsoever.

But, you’re right: if there are alternatives, promote those, if there aren’t, make a fork. You shouldn’t support something with the name, logo, and link to where to donate by people who have problematic views to this degree.

Software, media, and especially social media software are tools, it’s our task as admins to ensure we maintain control over our platforms and do not inadvertently support increasingly problematic people or viewpoints by using their software. Even if the software itself seems to have none of the admin’s viewpoints hard-coded now, a future update can change that, and then you’re left to decide whether you want to go through the effort and migrate to another software, or accept the problematic updates and give people whom you do not support more control.

To remain independent of problematic admins means not to support or use their software.

@Erik

Thank you for that.

I know we don't agree on everything, but it's really nice to see you taking the time to lay out your thoughts carefully!

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

It's not about support for one country or another, or one political viewpoint or another.Trying to present it as such is missing the point and giving it a misleading political cover story that it doesn't deserve.

The red flag is the consistent denial of well-documented human rights abuses. That kind of denial is never acceptable from anyone under any circumstances.

If human rights are abused, and those abuses are well documented, people must not deny the abuses took place.

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Lemmy Reveal/hide

I agree 💯 %

This "#bothsidesism" is dangerous. Just look at #US mainstream media. And the #BorgSite.

@Erik

"👉If you use a platform, it tends to give more power and more resources to the person developing it. 👈People are supposed to donate to projects they use, 👉so it is important to consider where the money is going.👈

Also, it allows the official channels to 👉advertise the instances owned by the project...👈

https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110513887064852774

FediTips has moved!

2023-06-09 10:54:51

It's more than just code.

If you use a platform, it tends to give more power and more resources to the person developing it. People are supposed to donate to projects they use, so it is important to consider where the money is going.

Also, it allows the official channels to advertise the instances owned by the project. In Lemmy's case they are promoting lemmy.ml and lemmygrad on the official Lemmy website.

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

@Erik

We on the smart normal side made this ours. But they caught up and organized an insurrection: Jan 6

They made this theirs. We are just hanging on. It's across all levels now. And stupid. So far behind it is not funny.

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

@tony @csolisr @edendestroyer @NanoBookReview

We don't have to passively wait to see what happens. The idea of the Fediverse is that its users build it and own it.

Kbin will do better if we can help it!

Non-programmers can donate at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin

Programmers can help at https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

It doesn't resolve to the same IP address? At least, not for me.

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

@Erik Hello from a month in the future!

Not sure if you've been following this thread and its conclusion but after thinking about what you wrote and what my change in beliefs truly should mean as consequences, I've put together a diverse mod & dev team and spent probably every day since our conversation planning what infrastructure such a server would take, transporting hardware across Germany, mounting racks, drilling holes for networking cables, and opening a new Mastodon Server on https://mastodon.de/

I've had the help of many Fedizens as well as data centers across the country that donated old hardware for this to become a reality (especially the DENIC eG). I guess if there's a will there's a way, although a month ago I wouldn't have believed myself if I made that statement.

Thank you for your help with this- you may not have moved mountains or carried a server rack for 650km from Frankfurt to Norden in one day using only regional trains, but you've convinced me and gave me the motivation and wake-up-call necessary to realize that I needed to change. Such words alone can change the course of history - let's hope for the better!

I cannot thank you enough, the past few weeks have been wonderful, and I'm happy to have kickstarted such a lovely new project, with newfound good friends, without the bad sour aftertaste of supporting a developer with horrid views.

Keep doing what you're doing! #MastodonDE will always be in your debt!

Yours sincerely,
Erik Uden

MastodonDE

The Most Powerful Self-Hosted Mastodon Instance! From East Frisia for the Entire World!

^{Mastodon hosted on mastodon.de}

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression Reveal/hide

@Zeno Libre @Fedi.Tips

Tech is only nutral on a very basic level. 1s and 0s are neutral. But a software reflects the way it's developers think. How does it handle privacy? How does it handle data security? How well does it support federation? How fine grained and effective are the moderation tools? How much control has the individual user over the content, they are shown?

These are all questions that reflect how the developers think. And the answers to those questions change, for whom a software works well and for whom it doesn't.

Content warning: Please use Lemmy Reveal/hide