I’ve been trying to make people aware of Lemmy on discord and Mastodon, but it’s always met with resistance citing “the devs are pro authoritarianism tankies.” Kbin seems to be picking up steam because of the developer baggage.
Do you feel like this negative perception will hamstring Lemmy’s growth?
No, it’s not a circljerk. Developer views turn into “we’ve surpassed benevolent dictatorship views”. It’s the same reason Twitter and Reddit are turning into crap - the absurd views of those in change absolutely impact the community whether we believe they don’t and it’s high time we stop shrugging it off and hold people accountable.
I hope the dev changes his views… but i’m not holding my breathe.
Development of the platform itself has nothing to do with what anyone on it actually does though. That’s the entire point. Reddit is a problem because the control is centralised in the admins who can unilaterally make mods on the site do whatever they want. Fediverse by-design is decentralised and absolutely nobody can be told what to do or forced into anything by any centralised power because none exists.
I’d argue that if the code is open source and the instances are independent, then the dev doesn’t matter beyond merely the marketing, and the marketing will be affected by the rise of larger instances, like Lemmy.world.