This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/lemmymigration by /u/TheArstaInventor on 2023-06-09 20:05:15+00:00.

A user recently commented on one of my posts, bringing to my attention the issue of human rights oppression associated with Lemmy’s developers. I would like to learn more about this topic, but what I have gathered so far is that this issue would not matter if I were to spin up my own instance with my own rules, as Lemmy is open-source. However, there are other open-source and decentralized alternatives available, such as kbin and zapddit, that don’t have these known issues in the first place.

Before becoming a supporter of Lemmy, I had been on Mastodon for years. One of the accounts I followed on Mastodon was Fedi.Tips, who was also a big supporter of Lemmy at the time. However, I recently learned that Fedi.Tips decided not to support Lemmy after all. The user linked to a post from August 2021 that I had missed, in which Fedi.Tips expressed concerns about human rights oppression and other issues surrounding Lemmy. Fedi.Tips made another post on June 2nd, 2023, quoting the old post and confirming that the situation regarding Lemmy still has not changed.

What worries me is that even after two years, it appears that the Lemmy developers have failed to address Fedi.Tips’ concerns. They have remained silent since 2021. Fedi.Tips is not only a reputable account with long-standing and active following in the fediverse, Fedi.Tips is also known for it’s website/guide helping users join and understand both Mastodon and the Fediverse as a whole. If these concerns were false, Lemmy had ample time to address them.

If Lemmy were the only open-source alternative, I would still consider supporting it, but not the main server run by the developers themselves. However, now that I am aware of these issues, I am considering other alternatives such as Zapddit (I actually got in-touch recently with their devs, after my message to them weeks ago) and Kbin since alternatives do exist. I believe in valuing human rights and peace, and I need to think twice about supporting Lemmy.

I don’t want to force anyone to stop using Lemmy, but I recommend you to consider using other instances instead of lemmy.ml or even lemmygrad. As always, please feel free to educate me further on this topic. I wasn’t even aware of what “tankies” meant until today, and I now know it doesn’t have such a great meaning.

As always please feel free to educate me, all feedback and info is welcome, if you know any other alternatives, that’s welcome as well.

For those who truly joined Lemmy (lemmy.ml especially) because of my own posts, I am truly sorry, I wish I learned this earlier, this certainly puts me in a difficult situation, this is not something I thought i’d have to consider as I have always been focusing on favoring platforms for being FOSS (free open source software) like Lemmy, though these issues that I have discovered makes me slow down and reconsider. I certainly don’t want to see such form of oppression, Reddit already has it’s own censorship here.

I will make another post later when I have more concrete plans, thank you for those who supported me in the meantime, again truly sorry about this, especially for those who do respect human rights like I personally do.

EDIT: Shared by some of the community members here, about the way Lemmy’s developers held conversations: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622

And my follow-up post here!