this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
272 points (97.2% liked)

Lemmy.World Announcements

29164 readers
185 users here now

This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

Follow us for server news ๐Ÿ˜

Outages ๐Ÿ”ฅ

https://status.lemmy.world

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

Support e-mail

Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.

Report contact

Donations ๐Ÿ’—

If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.

If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us

Ko-Fi (Donate)

Bunq (Donate)

Open Collective backers and sponsors

Patreon

Join the team

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud
lwadmin
lwCET
jelloeater85
Serinus
lw_mod_notification
272
Lemmy is libre software. Don't want to get abused? Keep Lemmy libre. (self.lemmyworld)
submitted 2 years ago by autonomoususer to c/lemmyworld
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Lemmy is software anyone can develop and everyone controls, libre software, which makes it very hard for Lemmy to abuse us. To keep it this way, share the ideas of software freedom.

  1. Always check its software license: always check it is libre software (video guide here).
  2. Also avoid service as a software substitute.
  3. Libre software plus decentralisation [federation or peer-to-peer] is ideal.
  4. Remember, 'open source' misses the point.

If we focus on warning against individual apps, we must repeat our time and effort everytime new malware appears. So, target a common property: its software license.

With proprietary software, we are not the user, we are the used.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's important to note that both Lemmy and kbin are licensed under AGPL, which means that any instance using code based on Lemmy or kbin must publish their full source code. Not even the Lemmy devs can change this.

A number of Lemmy instances that have their own forks have unfortunately not upheld this license, as they only link to the LemmyNet github, not their own code. Nothing against the instance maintainers of course, everything is still very new here.

But yeah, it is possible that a Lemmy or kbin instance pops up that has reimplemented the Lemmy federation from scratch, withuot publishing their source code. Doing that is highly likely to be a form of "Embrace Extend Extinguish", and any instances doing that should be defederated as a matter of policy.

But yeah, the decentralized nature of Lemmy means that if any instances try to do anti-user things, then the users can just vote with their feet and leave, and still have access to all of their communities. The only limitation is that instances effectively control their communities and user accounts, but hopefully that will be improved in the future with user migration features and community federation.

[โ€“] possiblylinux127 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Technicly the Lemmy source code owners could change the license as they hold the ownership.

It does get a little blurry when there are many different contributors though

[โ€“] aspirate2959 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I see a lot of people misunderstand these licenses as binding for the original copyright holder/author, when they're allowed to dual license, or take the project private. They just can't remove the license from any code already released.