And that applies to the trans cause. The bourgeoisie is weakly opposed to trans rights because they get in the way of reproductive labour (trans people are less likely to have children, so they aren't pumping out as many new proletariats as cis people do). However that opposition is not strong enough to make the bourgeoisie ignore pink money, since pink money is still money and money is still power under capitalism.

It's also worth noting that the bourgeoisie doesn't just compete for power with the other two classes (proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie) - it also competes internally. And for that, different factions within the class will seek external support from different groups, and align their discourses to those.

In that situation, what do you expect to see? The bourgeoisie flinging back and forth between lip service towards LGBTQ+ people+communities, and a transphobic discourse. Rainbow-wash something today (it's a cheap and effective marketing tactic!), go transphobic tomorrow; business A plops up a trans flag, business B tears it down. Flush, repeat.

And, well, it's exactly what you see here.

I also encourage specifically Trotskyists to read this text, as it explains way better than I could how the transgender agenda and class struggle are not orthogonal in nature. (Stalinists: be warned that Sybil Davis rambles quite a bit against Stalinism.)

And... on a moral level, let's be frank - you need to be inconsistent like a puddle of jelly, to be a communist but not defend trans rights. At the end of the day, what a good communist should defend is freedom of oppression; and what are those LGBTQ+ activists saying, if not "we don't want to be oppressed based on gender, sex and sexuality"? It's all about human rights dammit.

On-topic: I think that the "forums side of the Fediverse" (nowadays mostly Lemmy and Kbin/Mbin) would benefit immensely from additional platforms; that's why I'm excited for projects like PieFed and SubLinks. I am grateful for the Lemmy software but I can't help but see the people in charge of the project as a liability.

And they would still be a liability even if they had any skill building a healthy community (they don't, they suck at it). Relying on a single platform is like putting all your eggs within the same basket, once that basket goes down everything breaks.

[–] kshade 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It’s also worth noting that the bourgeoisie doesn’t just compete for power with the other two classes (proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie) - it also competes internally. And for that, different factions within the class will seek external support from different groups, and align their discourses to those.

And if someone were to ignore that and view them as a single-minded monolith it can easily be explained as divide & conquer tactics.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

This too - even monolithic agents can play both sides, or do lip service for one side while supporting the other from the shadows.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And they would still be a liability even if they had any skill building a healthy community (they don’t, they suck at it).

I agree with you here (and generally the whole post, glad to have found it here). While I think they do suck at community building (and might even admit to as much or defend the need for it) I would add that from my perspective the amount of reflexive dog-piling and harsh criticism hurled their way just for or triggered by their being communists/tankies has probably made it pretty difficult. And unfortunately and problematically so I'd say. Now such may just be the way things are and it had to be navigated if they were ever to build a better community ... sure. And being open communists may then as just a matter of practical reality hinder their community building capacities. But I feel like it's worth acknowledging.

Also, their position of opposing a somewhat consumeristic culture of having a demanding relationship with open source developers is also worth recognising. I wasn't receptive to those arguments in the past, but have since come around to it TBH.

And, the way they've approached federation and presenting their own instance has enabled the lemmy-verse to not have a single monolithic community or culture. They chose before the migration to not push their instance as the flagship and never seemed to want that. They always promoted other instances, and have always federated their own instance fairly widely. So in a way, they've ensured that they didn't have to be the primary community builders for the lemmy space, and I think that has paid off rather well given the relatively small user size here (apart from lemmy . world being too big).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don't rule out that a lot of the complains are motivated by red scare, instead of saner stuff. And I'm also genuinely grateful for not making ml the flagship instance, it would've made any problem worse.

However I think that, to be a good open source developer, you need to be at least decent at community building. Because a good part of that development is to gather support so other people can submit you code.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Because a good part of that development is to gather support so other people can submit you code.

Yes, for sure … totally agree. I think I saw desalines even acknowledging that they’ve dropped the ball on this somewhat. TBH, from their perspective, I imagine it’s hard to see through the red scare stuff though.

That it’s rust also creates a barrier to entry (I actually started a community for learning rust to help with this and it’s gone ok so far).

But yea, I think they could do with a community manager of some sort. Nutomic in particular seems to have difficulty with engaging with the user base (this post’s source included).

[–] j4k3 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is the best stated argument I've seen by far for alts for Lemmy. Still, I don't see anything wrong with the statements made being neutral. Not everyone is going to be an ally, but that does not make them an enemy. This post smells like someone trying very poorly thought out psyops instead of simply making their own thing. Lemmy is written in the benchmark of coding languages. The alts appear to target the least secure convenient high level languages. Based on what I've seen, I would be quite hesitant to run my own instance on one versus the other. I've seen a ton of whining here and there, but I haven't seen anyone that has an answer to why they have not submitted pull requests for Lemmy. I find that most concerning. There appears to be a desire to steal Lemmy. I find that deeply disturbing. I left for awhile once before because of similar nonsense. If some one can do better, great, go prove it on your own. If your confidence in your abilities does not exceed envy of what already exists, I already feel completely uninterested in the alternative. There is a lot of nonsense about politics that ultimately have nothing to do with the platform. It feels like deeply destabilizing drama that makes this place toxic.

There is still thinly plausible deniability about the psyops nature of this post, but it is too strong of a pattern for me to ignore as chance. The original message chain was not posted. One side of a conversation proves nothing whatsoever and making conclusions about intent without full context is a fool's folly. The consistent jump to Lemmy alts in comments shows a decided intent and bias.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

For context, here's the original message chain. The discourse conveyed there isn't just neutral, it's dismissive - in that chain Nutomic does play down the trans issues and needs.

While we could argue that the original user is jumping at the gun to some extent (and falling into the same idiotic false dichotomy as Nutomic himself), it's hard to claim that she's psy ops, after a quick glance of her profile. She simply sounds vocal about the issues that she cares about. I think that it's the same deal with the OP of this thread, it doesn't look like psy ops for me.

I ain't no programmer, so take what I say with a grain of salt: while performance is important I don't think that it's the whole deal. One of the benefits of Python is that a lot of people know it, can read its code for issues, and can contribute with the project. (This is not a dichotomy, though - I think that an alternative coded mostly in Python, with Rust on critical parts [to address performance and security] would be the best of all worlds.)

But even another codebase in Rust would do great in my book. Besides the whole deal of relying too much onto a a single basket, every new alternative would bring on new ideas, and try to tackle the same problems in different ways. Kbin for example tried to mix microblogging in. And oddly enough it would be a great way to shut up all those "waah devz r commiez!" complains ("ah, you don't use software made for commies? Use [alternative] then."), while still allowing them to reap the benefits through federation and open source.