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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't worry, I trust that Beats By Nick will get not to read other people's answers before answering.
I really like this answer.
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my addendum is that php would have been a deal breaker. 😎
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)
Fuck php gang. 😎
deleted by creator
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.
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:
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.