I shared my fly.io Lemmy project to Hacker News and one of the first responses was “Lemmy is for tankies.”

This isn’t the first time I’d heard this either. In leaving Reddit and researching alternatives I’d heard it a fair amount.

I think it’s basically untrue; beehaw doesn’t even federate with the big tankie servers. But that seems to require some understanding of what Lemmy actually is.

So… what’s the best way to talk about it and/or get around this optics issue?

  • aka_oscar@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    “That was before Reddit prollapsing into itself. Now lemmy has fresh new users with no extreme politics as their topic of interest”

  • catacomb@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve seen this raised quite often and, to be honest, it was kind of true in the beginning and that’s probably where the opinion came from.

    Ultimately, software like this is free and open to everyone; even those we don’t agree with. We’re going to have to come to terms with that fact because our own freedom rests upon it. There were going to be authoritarian left servers at some point, it just so happened to be at the beginning. There are also going to be authoritarian right servers if there aren’t already. The software doesn’t discriminate but it also doesn’t discriminate against anyone else.

    As for optics, I think all you can do is focus more on the beehaw community or whichever community you want to promote. This post was written to capture the spirit of the community if you need some inspiration. Some might not be convinced and that’s okay, we just need to convince enough of their friends :)

    If it really matters, suggest Kbin too. We can interact with Kbin magazines and users so Kbin’s success is Lemmy’s success and vice versa.

  • fiasco@possumpat.ioEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Purity testing is an absurd road to go down. Hacker News is full of techbros, and as I understand it, it’s run by Valley “angel investors.” If “Lemmy = tankies → Lemmy is bad,” then Hacker News is the worst thing imaginable.

    Which, I mean, Hacker News is awful. Point being, who cares what techbros think?

  • Lionir [he/him]@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think personally that we should just give it time. We don’t need to attract everyone and we’ve already got a lot of work to do.

    I personally believe that what we have today is enough to serve as a battery for organic, natural growth through word of mouth. We just need to keep going and convince people through genuine effort that we can do better as a platform.

  • gabuwu@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Explain that tankie and extreme political instances are consistently defederated, since its a federated platform. They can just find an instance that doesn’t interact with the tankie instances.

    • JillyB@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think we can say “consistently” when the largest instance federated with the largest tankie instance.

  • sideone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    How does (or should) one respond to “Lemmy = tankies”

    My first question would be: “What’s a tankie?”

    • WatTyler@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I believe it’s someone who is an idiot and an anti-capitalist. The kind of people who defend China’s genocide in Xinjiang or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

      • Poitou@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I just want to add that being anticapitalist does not suffice to make you a tankie, tankies are also apologists of authoritarian “anti-west” governments (Mao’s/Xi Jinping’s China, USSR, Ghaddafi’s Lybia, Putin’s Russia…)

    • mustyOrange@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      They are communists of the authoritarian vanguard party kind (known as marxism-leninism). There’s different brands of socialism - some, like anarchists, prefer socialism to be focused around unions and decentralized aid groups, while others focus around using governments and vanguard parties. Tankies are of the latter variety

      They’re the kind of people to deny genocides of communist government

      • themobyone@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        So they are basically saying they would like to live under the regime of Stalin back in the day(or a modern analog). A society where it didn’t matter how left your were, or how correct you had been living all your life. If you were “in the way” for someone important with connections you and maybe your entire familie goes to the gulag.