Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
They can when they bake it directly into the lemmy code.
Here’s the two primary devs arguing to do exactly that during a discussion on github regarding the slur filter.
The ended up allowing instance admins to enable / disable that filter as well as customize it but it shows how power they wield across all instances.
i dont think you can take an instance of the devs considering maybe possibly baking in a poorly thought out slur filter and then being told what a stupid idea it is by the commuity as evidence that they can’t be trusted not to bake in features controlling which topics are allowed to be discussed.
Such a feature would be orders of magnitudes harder to develop and maintain and it would most likely not work properly anyway. If it makes lemmy unusable then that would be the point that someone should fork it
Lemmy has a lot more contributors and eyes digging into its codebase now compared to 2021 so I think this is very unlikely to happen.