How can you claim to be a liberal space even though you attack female leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris?
I was mostly just laughing at
you claim to be a liberal space
but yeah, definitely not that tough of question overall.
You’ve made reference to hating the libs, which I presume means ‘liberal’. But your community doesn’t seem conservative. What’s going on?
Does this hipster language choice reflect a hipster politics more concerned with affect than impact?
this is a such good one fuck
To be fair, we can be doing better with regards to making sure the source code for changes which are pushed to prod are immediately available on our public repository. We are in the middle of migrating from gitlab to a self-hosted gitea instance, and when we have CI deploying from gitea, this will be sorted out.
The GNU AGPL license is a very stringent license. Personally I love it because the silicon valley douchebros haven't found a way to undermine it yet. It works for Mastodon, and it should work for us - but it requires extra steps to be in strict compliance. Legally speaking, the upstream developers have access to our private development repository, and if anyone wants a copy of the code running on our public infrastructure, they are entitled to it upon request. We have incorporated git hashes into our version numbers so this can be verified.
it remains a niche language that will necessarily limit your available developer pool
Isn't like 90% of programming walking into a space that has some weirdly niche modified language that you have to first figure out before moving forward? Like, no one really learns all of the most used programming languages, you're bound to be forced to work with something you don't already know. A well trained developer has the skills needed to quickly adapt to an environment they're not used to, and use critical thinking (web search, stackoverflow) to find solutions to their immediate needs...right?
yeah. I knew absolutely no rust before this project. i come from nodejs/java/kotlin and at this point I'm fairly comfortable with it
I taught "Exploring Computer Science" for a couple years with very limited CS background.
The idea is that learning Scratch for problem solving/research/basic logic and then HTML5 and CSS for markup pretty much prepare you for learning most programming languages. Then you do whatever for AP and go on to maybe continue CS in college. But yeah, it all starts from being able to learn and research independently.
I was supposed to learn Java for my math major in undergrad, but it conflicted with my theatre major class, so I swapped to BA in math and BA in theatre so I didn't have to take it....I actually really regret not taking any CS in college.
there's still time to learn a language! I don't have a CS degree and I'm a developer in my day job.
Been working a bit on learning SQL, but largely stopped.
My work required knowledge of Ticketmaster Host and Archtics, which are both based in SQL, I believe, so I started looking there. Then I got laid off, so fuck it.
I really should learn Python, though.
It's super easy to learn. I leaned how to code basic front end stuff in like a month of practice. Get a GitHub account and you're pretty much good to go
I guess I always thought Python was a foundational language for a lot of the more applicable languages.
Since I'm really more interested in letting just to learn, maybe I should go with Rust, since I am here.
Okay, but why use Rust for a major open-source project?
It has only won Stack Overflow's "Most Loved Programming Language" survey for five years in a row (followed more recently in second place by Typescript, which makes up the other 50% of the Lemmy codebase). Personally, I come from a C++ background and I have found Rust to be the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Skipping forward to some inevitable questions:
But what about Trump? Do you not think he requires stopping?
So, like Stalin and Mao?
Anarchism? Like Mad Max?
Like the Drug Lord? What is your stance on Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán?
Like the Drug Lord? What is your stance on Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán?
if the answer to this is not YES, HUGE FAN i will be so disapointed
It's really easy to twist attempts at humor into making you look bad.
i am joshing around i know he will give the boring but correct answer "oh we took the name from the podcast which itself thought it would be a funny name, which is correct we still use it " or something of this effect
(You said it's a tech journalist so filling in questions from that perspective that are missing here.)
Why base your site on lemmy? Why your own fork? What's your stance on open source? Do you think federation is the future of the internet? How does your admin team ensure transparency?
What's your stance on the increasing radicalization of online spaces? Aren't filter bubbles bad?
[extremely Bee Movie voice] ...So, do you like bitcoin?
I get that the point of this exercise is posing questions for prep reasons, but this set of questions really strikes at the meat and potatoes of what we're trying to do here, so I'm going to toss my own testimonials in here.
Why base your site on lemmy? / Do you think federation is the future of the internet?
This is a good question. There are dozens of alternative message board and link aggregation platforms out there. Why choose Lemmy? We could have used Postmill, a much more stable, tested platform which does "the same thing." We could have used PHPbb, Simple Machines, or Tildes, or a variety of other message board platforms which have undergone much more field testing. In comparison, Lemmy is a relatively young project undergoing a rapid development cycle with changing APIs, a changing database schema, and is feature-incomplete - considering it's raison d'être is to provide federation.
Federation is ultimately the reason we chose it. I can only speak for myself, but in my opinion, the Internet has undergone a vast consolidation over the course of the past two decades. A handful of colossal platforms have monopolized social media, and seized an incredible amount of power over the public discourse in doing so. The key challenge to breaking these monopolies is overcoming the network effect, and I think federation is the strongest catalyst we have at our disposal to overcoming this challenge.
Why your own fork?
We really didn't want to. Ideally we would work as closely with upstream as possible, but upstream is hosting a handful of modest, low profile communities, and the r/ChapoTrapHouse diaspora was the exact opposite. We were a fast-paced, high-profile community which spent the past four years making enemies on every corner of the Internet. Our needs diverged from the upstream project, and it would be unreasonable to demand that the already hard-working folks who put their blood and sweat into this project drop everything they were doing and implement the changes we needed to accommodate our community.
That said, we are hoping to contribute some of our changes upstream, while trying out some more experimental changes as well. At the end of the day, we don't want get too carried away though, because federation is the ultimate goal of this project.
What’s your stance on the increasing radicalization of online spaces? Aren’t filter bubbles bad?
We're not the ones who chose to isolate ourselves :)
Our ultimate goal is to help avoid independent communities from being isolated in this way. Federation brings with it the promise of bringing communities together while allowing them to maintain their autonomy. Unless there is a universal consensus among the fediverse that these communities are toxic, they shouldn't become isolated.
I get that the point of this exercise is posing questions for prep reasons, but
Don't worry, I trust that Beats By Nick will get not to read other people's answers before answering.
We’re not the ones who chose to isolate ourselves :)
I really like this answer.
By the time I was convinced PHP was a mistake, I was still on Slashdot.
(No offence to anyone out there doing the thankless work of maintaining Internet infrastructure, or building new things)
I wouldn’t use the line about making enemies
Yeah, I don't know if I'd lean into it (I'm lying, I would). But if we're trying to avoid that sort of framing, I would leave it at the fact that we were a high profile target and needed to batten down the hatches.
unless we’re wanting to open that as an avenue of questioning and explain how the chapo label/brand differentiates itself, both from historic leftist movements/ideologies and from radical right-wing groups.
I think this is pretty important, and the more of this we can slip in, the better. We're modestly infamous for pissing off liberals and right wingers, but I think we genuinely piss off some genuine bona-fide Marxists as well. To be clear, I'm not proud about the latter. But IMO, we're really just a bunch of lost souls trying to make sense of the world we live in as it deteriorates around us. An anti-capitalist paradigm explains it better than any of the alternatives we've been introduced to, but many of us are still learning, and still have a lot more to learn. This shared experience is what brought us together in the first place
At the end of the day, we are trying to cultivate a counterculture. Something which can stand up as an alternative to free-market driven climate calamity, or the eco-fascist movements which inevitably spawn out of the failure of that process.
On one hand, we are privileged babies living in the imperial core. On the other hand, we are disadvantaged by having principled leftism stripped entirely out of our political culture, forcing us to figure things out from scratch. Few people here claim to have the answers, but we know which paths will certainly not lead us to the promised land. Namely, fascism and neoliberalism. Or more broadly, any form of capitalist apologia offered to us by our political class.
Going back to the earlier question:
What’s your stance on open source?
Free Software has always been a political movement. Free Software has always been defined by the power struggle between individuals seeking self-determination and self-actualization in their digital lives, versus the corporations which wish to centralize and commodify our digital landscape and turn the appliances we rely on into black boxes.
It has been a shame to see the direction of so many free software projects fall into the hands of silicon valley libertarians and venture capitalists. We're here to take it back. We're here to put the liberation back into libre software.
Free Software is the communist mode of production in practice, and witnessing the success of this mode of production was one of the first things that clued me in to the potential for an alternative to capitalism nearly two decades ago - before I even learned the vocabulary to describe what I was witnessing.
Why do you implore visitors who aren’t from the radical left to *checks notes* “post hog”?
Where'd the name come from? (Oh, like the drug lord?) Why were you kicked off Reddit? Does your website give a platform to Antifa?
Why were you kicked off Reddit?
(You can tell I'm a leftie because this is long, lol. Feel free to trim down.)
Well, to be blunt, our community fundimentally disagreed with the direction that the Conde Nast owned and operated website was heading. From the start, there were fundimental differences of opinion between the community volunteer moderators and the corporate-assigned accurate to say? Reddit 'content curator' Moderator staff.
Many of our members believe that promoting justice for all Americans also means nessicarily confronting uncomfortable events from our national past in a critical light and asking "how can we do better as a nation in our current political climate".
The particular incident that got our community exiled from Reddit were a number of positive posts about the abolitionist John Brown. Our members found him admirable because he selflessly advocated against the horrific enslavement of African Americans - at no benefit or need for himself - even at the cost of his own freedom and life.
Our assigned Reddit Admins (who are responsible for overseeing dozens of other different communities) took the very cursory and rushed opinion that our community was "condoning violence." This led to our community eventually being kicked off this corporate platform after a long "probationary period" with very little recourse to explain our position.
We believe that on large corporate social media platforms, the real-world humans that post their thoughts and opinions there are nowadays too often just treated as numbers to feed into an algorithm. When these sites become too large, they struggle to personally and thoughtfully moderate their platforms, and err too conservatively.
With Chapo.Chat, our goal is to provide a fully community-led experience free from corporate meddling that respects and includes it's members in the decision-making process.
My only argument is that glorifying John Brown was just one aspect of the ban. There was a lot more going on which "technically" broke the rules, and we should be prepared to answer for it and defend it. There were the landlord memes as well.
Ultimately I think what did us in was was the BLM protests and our refusal to clamp down on revolutionary discussion. We got banned for "hate" and "promoting violence," but at worst we were just talking about the self defence of oppressed communities. Self defence entails violence. It was our tenacity and lack of hesitation to side with the freedom fighters resisting oppression by whatever means they had at their disposal which lead to us getting banned.
The John Brown memes were a marvellous PR coup, but no one really gives a shit about an abolitionist who died 150 years ago (except nerds like us). We were banned because we wouldn't get with the program with regards to events that were happening at the current moment. We were banned for openly celebrating the people's ability to frustrate the forces of state oppression in realtime.
And I don't know the inner-workings of Reddit... but just from my average poster POV it really does seem like the John Brown stuff is what did us in. That's sort of the event directly traceable to the eventual ban. Out of curiosity, after a sub is quarantined, has there ever been a circumstance where it's been "un-quarantined"?
Seems like the Reddit higher-ups plan all along was to quarantine - with no intention of re-opening - and ban the sub at an advantageous time to them. If the quarantine discouraged new users, then that was just a bonus. Just a theory.
Where’d the name come from? (Oh, like the drug lord?)
Our community started off as a fan site for the popular political comedy podcast "Chapo Trap House." This podcast choose their name as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the drug kingpin "El Chapo" Guzman (because they thought it would be funny to name their clearly-not-gangster podcast like a rap group). Over time our community evolved to include a wider audience than just podcast fans, but the name stuck.
How is your community different from the insular right wing communities of the internet? Will it over time just devolve into the same kind of toxic echo chamber?
"Our members feel very passionate about issues such as social justice, economic equality, and promoting diversity of opinions. We care deeply about the often marginalized in society including our fellow LBGTQ citizens, Black Americans, and the impoverished. That's what sets us apart from the often hateful insular communities. We look at the diversity of experiences of our members and ask - 'How can we all contribute to build a better system together?'"
I'd change Black Americans so it's something like "..LGBTQ and black citizens..." or just "poc/racial minorities" so it's not as America-centred, but idk
we have zero tolerance for right-wing extremism
"How is this different from some ban-happy chud forum?"
Banning someone for bigotry is not the same as banning someone for opposing bigotry, because only one of these moral positions is bad.
this isn't a question, but i am consistently impressed by the effort and care all of our favorite cops and admins put into carefully managing this site and protecting its userbase. i love that this thread is not only evidence that the site runners are knowledgeable in design and code, but more importantly are observant, responsive and ideologically consistent. the site's only existed for a month and some change and its future is still up in the air but i think this is extremely promising.
edit: fuck it, no jokes. its sincerity time, baby
One thing in particular to be aware of is the political framing that’s going to go into the final article. Unless this tech journal is a fair bit more politically literate than average, the politics of this community will likely be foreign to them and as such may be represented inaccurately in the eventual article (assuming it even makes it into the publication).
With that in mind, I think it’s important to think about ways that we can incorporate small doses of political education into this interview. This is justified because our community is political by nature, so as such it makes sense to explain its politics. Specifically, it must be made clear that our politics are not simply “progressive Democrat”, since often that‘s what people assume when you say “leftist”, but rather a big-tent of leftists including various types of marxists, anarchists, and other variety of communist (among others). This distinction itself probably needs a bit of an explainer, clarifying what makes our politics left and why the Democratic party et al aren’t that.
Obviously we don’t want to turn people off by hitting them over the head with a book of theory, but to the extent that it’s possible to control political framing, this should be a focus.
we don’t want to turn people off by hitting them over the head with a book of theory
No, but we do want to turn them on by hitting them over the head with a book of theory.
but rather a big-tent of leftists including various types of marxists, anarchists, and other variety of communist (among others). This distinction itself probably needs a bit of an explainer, clarifying what makes our politics left and why the Democratic party et al aren’t that.
Capitalism bad crew
What data do you collect about users of your website?
What is the average age of a chapo.chat member?
What are your website's gender demographics?
Do you find this problematic?
How are you working towards correcting this?
Do you love this shit? Are you high right now? Do you ever get nervous? Are you single? I heard you fucked your girl is it true? You gettin money? You think them comrades you with is with you?
