The Funkwhale music platform is alive and in active development, and they’re working on a feature to filter far-right artists off the network. Some Fediverse self-hosters are divided on letting a third party decide what should be allowed in their library.
While that is funny and certainly deserved. Normally I would say that its not their place to decide that but fuck right wingers they deserve to be purged out of every single space they have.
I’m a bit torn on the idea, myself. On one hand, fuck fascists, don’t let ‘em have an inch. But on the other hand, this does kinda take away a users’ freedoms with the software.
Honestly, I think it’s fine if it’s a plugin or something that you can install at your own discretion or something. Or if it’s baked-in, it should be an opt-in setting. I’m of the opinion that the actual software, itself, should be apolitical. It’s something I can respect the Lemmy devs for, after all; even though I disagree with their politics, the actual Lemmy code is politically agnostic, and I think that’s for the best.
I’m sure people are still free to take the code and make the necessary adjustments if they really need to host a Nazi-friendly instance.
Which is an outcome I actually worry about, if they implemented this feature in Funkwhale. A fascist fork of the app existing and having a userbase gives it legitimacy. It immediately sells itself to those people: “Come to our free speech music platform” will bring in a lot of new users, very easily.
I mean, that’s the freedom you’ve been so concerned about only two posts ago. it’s a similar situation with Gab and Truth.social. they both use Mastodon’s code, but everyone else distances themselves from them.
Generally speaking, I agree. It’s just interesting to see a platform force a mechanism into itself that admins can’t turn off. The only thing that really bugs me about that is that admins are kind of supposed to have the final say on what their server does, and some of the infrastructure for this idea seems a bit shaky at best.
Its open source, the admins can turn it off by reverting the patch. The person who coded it has the final say on what their software does in an open source world if you dont like it you are welcome to fork it. The fork should still be able to connect to the network and interact as it did before.