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.
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.