• TheDude@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Any government or governing body should be open to criticism. They are suppose to be working for the people they serve. How is anyone going to know better if no one tells them what they are doing wrong? @wriggly3171@sh.itjust.works you have my support

  • jnj@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    The Lemmy project openly describes itself in its public documentation as anti-US, and was apparently founded around the idea that Reddit is fundamentally anti-China and pro-US: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html

    The doc starts off talking about open source, but it quickly becomes clear that the Lemmy project is primarily political in nature.

    To me this is concerning – what happens when largely pro-US Reddit refugees swarm a community (community in the general sense, not the Lemmy sense) which was intended by the founders to combat those peoples views? Sure, instances and people can choose to ignore the lemmy.ml instance, but the founders control the project at a much deeper level than that.

    Personally I hope that alternative implementations that are compatible with Lemmy arise, totally outside of the influence of the original founders. Yes there is kbin, but I actually prefer the Lemmy model (from what I’ve seen so far), and I think there would only be benefits of having another high quality implementation which is totally separate yet totally compatible with the original Lemmy. It would make the whole thing more resilient, and could be fertile ground for future improvements to flourish.

    • b_n@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Is that post really anti us and pro china though? To me it looks like anti pro us, and anti anti china.

      Also, how do you see the founders controlling the project more? Especially at the “much deeper level”?

      I’m a New Zealander living in The Netherlands, whether you choose to believe that or not.

      • jnj@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Is that post really anti us and pro china though? To me it looks like anti pro us, and anti anti china.

        I had already formed conclusions after reading through one of the founder’s comment histories (which I’d encourage), so my reading of it may have been biased. Either way it’s clear that the motivation driving them is, or at least was, largely political in nature.

        Also, how do you see the founders controlling the project more? Especially at the “much deeper level”?

        They own the github repo, they control what code gets committed, they control whether the project lives or dies really. They have the power to lose interest or decide to abandon the project, at which point the best hope the community has is that others pick it up. It’s not normally something I worry too much about with open source projects but again, strong geopolitical associations makes it feel precarious to me – if they don’t like where things are going, maybe they’d feel motivated to actively shut it down and discourage any peaceful transition of (code) ownership. Obviously this is all conjecture.

        I’m a New Zealander living in The Netherlands, whether you choose to believe that or not.

        I’m not sure why you think I’d have trouble believing that!

        • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Couldn’t someone just fork it and update current servers with that fork and still keep all of the data though? It should still just work the same but just not be from a codebase controlled by the founders

          • carbon_based@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I’d think if they would resist a “global citizen” approach in favour of the now de-facto “hegemonic nations” approach, that would be a good reason for offering such a fork. … It could quickly supersede the “old Lemmy” when people start to realise that the new system allows migration and resilience against domain-takedowns. :-)
            @CowsLookLikeMaps@sh.itjust.works

          • Cows Look Like Maps@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            That’s right. It’s a legitimate solution if the lead dev drives it into the ground. I don’t think lack of developers to fork or maintain it would be an issue. The only barrier I see is adoption of yet another platform. So in my mind, there’s always an option to just separate if Lemmy turns into one big tankie brigade. But forking is still a PITA and not ideal.

            • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              I don’t think using a fork would separate it into another platform. It would still be Lemmy. They would only need to separate of their code bases change so drastically between the two that going to other instances from the forked one starts breaking things. And even then workarounds could then be put in the former version so everything still plays nice.

    • ronaldtemp1@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Criticising pro-US doesn’t necessarily mean anti-US, you can be in the middle. Similarly, criticising anti-China doesn’t necessarily mean pro-China. Praising when something good was really done and criticising when something bad was really done, you can achieve at least some level of unbiased, rational and reasonable opinion.

    • Chef Rat@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Also lemmygrad is blocked here. As a person born in eastern block, fuck communism and tankies.

      • passport@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        just came over here after poking around some of the other instances and the quality increase from not having tankies brigading shit is truly amazing

        • Chef Rat@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Never actually met an immigrant who actually stays here in Eastern Europe but yeah communist shouldn’t come back. But I don’t want capitalism either, this shits wack for our people and workers. Guess there isn’t a place to create new economic structures that could surpass both of them.

        • Chef Rat@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          We’ll it’s all true but there are some smaller differences, I live in ex Yugoslav country which was in eastern block but more liberal than Soviet puppet states.

          Most people aren’t racist or xenophobic (except Balkan rule: hate thy neighbor). We are just an extremely introverted and paranoid society, that’s why many empires fell around our people. We never had any colonies because our people were used as labour for other empires, so we never developed a superiority complex to other races.

          We’re just anarchy that’s preserved through community.

          • can@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            That’s interesting. Thank you for sharing your perspective. As a paranoid and anxious person I can empathize with a whole society with this issues.

    • Alkalyon@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Yeah. This is kinda gaslighting:

      We’ve also seen a rise in anti-China posts that have hit Reddit lately, and along with that comes anti-chinese racism,

      No. Anti-china posts are not racist. We all hate Hitler Germany. Does that mean we are racist against Germans?

      This sentence is fundamentaly flawed and shouldn’t exist in the documentation.

      • jasondotjson@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        To push back on this a little: there’s definitely historical precedent for anti-regime sentiment bleeding over into anti-populace sentiment. To use your example of WWII, a lot of the anti-Japan sentiment bled over to anti-Japanese sentiment in the US in the form of internment camps.

        Of course this was in the 1940s and I like to think that we’ve become a little bit less racist now. But I’ve noticed a lot more racist “jokes” on Reddit as anti-China sentiment has risen. Don’t get me wrong, we should still criticize China for its many human rights abuses and imperialistic practices as well as their violations of personal freedoms in their citizens etc. etc. but we should also be aware that these criticisms will be used by racists to justify their views and their actions, and call it out when it starts becoming more about the people than the government.

        • Ergonomic_Keyboard@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I think it’s because people nowadays are brought up to to ***follow ***what they read.

          There is so much importance of memorising facts one is informed like a computer, then alongside this, are informed by media and abrihamic based religions repeatedly, that life is binary good and bad.

          And as such, when an average reader attempts to criticise China, or Israel, UK or US present governmental practices for instance, they struggle to not generalise and lump government, people, race, and more all into one.

          To educate massess of people into being able to criticise policy is a surefire way to get the masses to be critical of the practices of a present government, and get you out of power.

          Binary identity politics however, will keep you there, in power, forever.

    • Confused Llama@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      It’s from the people developing Lemmy the software, not the creators of independent instances like this one or lemmy.world and many others. I think there’s not much to worry about since the software is open source and if they start to “leak” their ideologies/politics into the software (no idea how 😆), people will fork it quickly.

      However I worry that this is so off-putting to some people that they stop doing anything to help Lemmy grow when they learn about the developers’ politics. A good example is Lemmur, an Android app for Lemmy, whose author stopped further development on it, due to “lack of interest and political differences”, which is sad.

    • Tree6024@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Technically correct, much like you can’t do anything about what your neighbour does in their own home.

      However, what sh.itjust.works and lemmy.ml can do is block ‘bad server’ communication.

      They can also enforce rules on their own ‘home’ as it were.

  • upperleft@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    The Chinese Communist Party is absolutely not above criticism, but I always found the China obsession on reddit to be odd. While I don’t think it should be banned outright, I think y’all ought to consider what is motivating such a weird fetish (because frankly that is) for a specific government.

    • scrollbars@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Yup, the flip side of the coin is that reddit really has a hate boner for China. The anti-CCP side has its own collection of nutty people, with a lot of the talking points tracing back to the cult nice people that send out all those Shen Yun flyers.

      Shit’s complicated. That said, banning all criticism of the Chinese government isn’t the answer. We need to be smarter about the information that we digest.

      • God@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        You’re somehow implying that being an anti-ccp “fanatic” is basically crazy, and that people should reconsider their position… because… ? hate boner for china? what does disliking the CCP have to do with “hating china”?

        • nLuLukna @sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I think he’s talking about the people who don’t do anything but look for hateable things about the CCP

          • God@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            why should we look for likeable things about the ccp when they’re committing genocide? lmao. and why should we spend effort looking for likeable things about the ccp when they have millions of genzedongers around the world (example: lemmygrad.ml) to do it for them?

        • scrollbars@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          You can dislike the CCP without hating China, or being fanatical about it. There are people that have trouble with it, though. As an example you could say that the CCP sponsors campaigns of corporate espionage on a large scale to steal technology from other countries. That one is pretty uncontroversial. But some people have trouble preventing themselves from taking it further and making generalizations about how creative the country’s citizens are, as an example.

          • God@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I haven’t seen that. First time I see a suggestion such as that you’re mentioning, that the Chinese could be uncreative. I read lots of Chinese books all the time and if anything I’d say they’re more creative than western authors in many respects.

            • scrollbars@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Glad to hear, I’ve been meaning to pick up some Chinese sci-fi myself now that more of that stuff is getting translated.

              • God@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                novelupdates.com has a lot of translations of asian novels in general, most terrible quality bc they’re done by amateurs but some are great, and sometimes it doesn’t matter cuz the stories themselves make up for the shitty translation.

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        It really isn’t that complicated. If Chinese politics is to be taken seriously, then there is a ton of low hanging liberal fruit for the picking. There is no reason for the Chinese legal system to not have public trial, for starters. There is no reason for China to censor the internet or speech or free association the way it does. And most importantly, there is no reason for China to not confront the very real sins of Mao and Deng in public.

        I agree there is complexity which exists beyond this kind of stuff. But these are first principles for free society, and political agency, and should be taken seriously.

        • scrollbars@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I’m sympathetic to what you listed, and it would be nice to see those things come to pass. I’m just cynical about anything that starts to sound like “regime change” after watching the US campaigns in the middle east these past couple decades.

          Even though Tiananmen was a long time ago, there have been more recent cracks in the facade like the unrest over lingering COVID zero policies. It’s encouraging to know that people do have limits, but I don’t know how popular those sentiments are across the broader population.

          • Quit_this_instance@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            It’s always nice to hear from someone else that recognizes how similar all this saber rattling is to the buildup to the first iraq war. All of a sudden after years of radio silence, everyone seems to care really deeply about the situation in another country.

    • your_mind_aches@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      There’s a crazy amount of sinophobia on Reddit, but let’s be clear, the people who fervently defend the Chinese government are being just as disingenuous.

      • God@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        It’s not sinophobia to criticize the CCP. I haven’t seen anyone saying anything about the Chinese people. What’s more common is criticizing the CCP and its actions as the ruling party of China. I don’t think there’s generalized “sinophobia” as you claim.

        • Jefe@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          The commenter above made it pretty clear that criticism of the government, i.e. the CCP isn’t the issue. The issue at hand is that there most definitely is casual racism on some very popular subreddits that are tolerated more than I’d like. Redditors have blindspots, just like anyone do, but their particular blindspots include casually racist attitudes towards Chinese people. I hope that you’re just lucky in the types of threads and subs you frequent, but I 1000% have seen more than just casual sinophobia that had nothing to do with criticizing their government.

          • God@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            idk maybe i am indeed very lucky cuz i have not seen that, and instead have seen a lot of criticism against ccp being re-purposed as “sinophobia” by the genzedong community.

            notice, for example, how we ended up talking about racism in a thread about criticizing the CCP. coincidence? i think not.

            • Jefe@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              I don’t really know who they are, but it’s still important to consider even if some bad actors also bring it up disingenuously. The alt-right likes to call everyone groomers now, that doesn’t mean grooming is a convenient smoke-screen that isn’t real.

              • God@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                i don’t know what you’re talking about here. what’s important to consider? that criticizing the ccp may be racist? and what does the alt-right calling ppl groomers have to do with the topic? sorry i don’t see the connections here.

                • Jefe@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  I’m saying that it’s important to consider that just because disingenuous people call attention to something as a way to dismiss your argument, it does not mean it’s not real. It just means they know how to dismiss your argument really well.

                  What does that have to do with the alt-right? Because lately any time someone says that it’s not evil to be gay and that pride month isn’t some national holiday to turn everyone gay, instead of trying to defend their insane stance they just call you a pedophile or groomer and leave it at that. They don’t actually care about pedophiles or groomers, otherwise they’d actually do something about the church or conservative congress members either being investigated for or charged with sex crimes against minors. All that matters is whatever works to shut you up.