this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Gosh, I felt like I was going to make this post, albeit not from a username titled "communist" 😅 .
Now, I always implore anyone who'll lend an ear - please, hold your horses on labeling devs as "tankies". Let's not instantly stamp them good or bad. Rather, let's mull over the behavior of a community that decides its course of action based on whether it's supposedly tainted by a particular ideology. Try to think of the bigger picture of how people act as a whole based on information and what those actions benefit.
Let's level with each other here. The GPL? It's got more than a dash of Marx, if you ask my humble self (and heck, I think that's a good thing). But has that deterred folks from assembling magnificent creations under the banner of a collective project? So, where do we end up if we tread down this logical path? Do we forsake Open Source software, just because its bedrock principles share a striking resemblance with Socialism/Communism? Is this selective ideological litmus test the norm now? And what fuels this selective disposition?
Now, just imagine, if I were a bigwig at a deep-pocketed corporation, wouldn't it be a walk in the park to sow the conspiracy that ALL Lemmy devs are rabid tankies (ALL of them, seriously? If I pitch in, does that make me a hardened communist?). Couple this with the palpable fear that Reddit might just bulldoze their way to victory, and voila, you've got a fearful, active amygdala ready to perceive an "enemy" - no matter how illogical. Outrage, my dear friends, is among the most contagious of emotions. Curiously enough, this entire conspiracy/misinformation hinges on just that - unbridled outrage.
It's almost as if there's no call for outrage, provided one possesses even a smidgen of understanding about open source development, its inherent messiness, and the swirling ideologies around it. Now, those are the nuggets worth pondering. But, who am I to say, right?
The problem with tankies has nothing to do with communism, i'm a communist, that's not the problem at all.
The problem with tankies is that they're authoritarian genocide deniers. The GPL doesn't have any authoritarianism or genocide denial in it.
The LEAD DEV denies the genocide Uyghurs in china. It's much worse than you're assuming.
Yeah! Definitely, I understand that! But in my neck of the woods "tankies" are more just boogeymen that people throw around when they want to cast an entire group as immoral. It's not that they don't exist, but they aren't gaining power either. It just seems like an appeal to fear (a reasonable one at that), but using illogical framing that doesn't at all represent reality. That's the fundemental crux of it for me. It may come to bite me in the future too! Growing up in conservative parts in the U.S. I've grown numb to people claiming others are communists - it comes across as more a technique for division than any real concern of community harm.
I'm not trying be an apologist for the devs opinions or detract from them as much as I'm trying to state that open source, and this project - given its git history - doesn't appear to spread authoritarianism. I didn't sign an agreement to violently seize the means of production upon cloning the repository. Had this information not been swirling around on reddit (and now lemmy) I would've never known that I had to "cancel" yet another thing.
I mean, personally, I'd rather fork it and make it into a vision that the people of Tucson want in their social media experience. Lemmy is a bit better architected, and I think the codebase is a bit more mature for such thing.
See from my own neck of the woods, 'tankies' describes something with actual power, albeit very minor and entirely online. I've seen a shocking amount of online leftist communities infiltrated and taken over by them, with real earnest critiques about housing prices and wealth inequality diluted by worship of whichever anti-US dictator has caught their attention today. They'll suck all the air out of the room, ban dissenters as 'libs', and then using the excuse "No Punching Left" remove criticisms of their weird ass views about Kim Jong-un and Putin.
I get that this might not be a widespread usage, but in left leaning online spaces it's a useful descriptor just because it keeps fucking happening and it actively shits up whichever community it happens to. I wish they were fucking boogeymen, honestly.
The fear, I guess, is that given how many there already are in lemmy (I guess including the devs? yeesh), they might pre-emptively poison the well in some way.
Yeah, that tracks. I'll grant you that there are those left spaces on reddit that can get really tankie really quickly. (I don't go to the ones in the fediverse - might eventually lurk tho with a critical mind of course).
I just find myself dismissing them pretty easily and making my own space. Left politics got really weird and counterproductive, so I found /r/TraumaAndPolitics and made that a small space that had some pretty interesting leftist conversation through a language of trauma. (I had made /r/TraumaInformedPolicy, but only found /r/TraumaAndPolitics a few days later, but we made the subs around the same time, oddly enough).
I suppose I shouldn't dismiss the experiences of those who stayed at the expense of authoritarian communist propaganda and have likely been damaged in some way because of it.
It's just that I find this fear counterproductive when it comes to building communities, if we're betting that most people aren't going to like Authoritarian Communisim (and that's a damn good bet) then the idea is to get as many people into the community as possible as fast as possible.
I have some on-the-ground ideas that I'll experiment with for tucson.social and report back when we see how that works.