| > The software is open source, so if the creators put crap into it for censorship they will rightly get called out for it Unless they sneak something into a binary. Or create a backdoor that doesn't get noticed for months or years. Or they just design the software to make it difficult to weed out incursion attempts from butt networks like we've seen Russia and China use to influence American opinions. Or they use the fact that basically everyone joins the main instance of these networks to run regular censorship and defederate with anyone who goes against that. There are many many have a news for abuse. We're only assume that because something is open source that it is trustworthy. When you make that assumption you're making a bad assumption and you're making yourself not secure. Security takes actual vigilance, and a lot of that vigilance comes in the form of trusting the person you're using the code of. > When people get the sense that their expressed political opinions can have lasting negative effects on their lives and projects, they become much more reticent At the end of the day my priority of not enabling Chinese control over our lives in society is far more significant than protecting the Lemmy developers feelings. I agree with you in abstract, we should hesitate to enact things like this unless it is strictly very important to do so. This is a case where it is strictly very important to do so. |
This is, I think, the problem. You're prioritizing your fear of an external threat over what I see as the much more real concern of growing democratic censorship within the US. I don't doubt that China is a threat, but all too often we become single-minded in defending against a single obvious enemy and lose sight of the much more subtle but no less dangerous threats that are closer to home.
EDIT: fwiw, I upvoted your top-level and wish that people hadn't flagged it.