I wouldn’t get too depressed about it, it would just be another niche bit of alt-tech if it were anything other than completely neutral. I can’t think of a case when an anti-left fork of a software was memorable as a self-hostable tool. The closest I can think of is Gab, which hardly qualifies, nor does it hold a torch to Mastodon.
Also, the entire idea is contrary to rms’ FOSS goals
Perhaps, and I don’t see how that’s a problem. Saint IGNUcius isn’t the divine dictator of FOSS. The original Funkwhale announcement’s author makes it clear at the end that they don’t hold freedom-as-an-end-goal (liberalism) as their ideology.
LARP
Not LA nor RP, my friend.
As you hinted, a determined admin can disable the blocklist, it probably isn’t too technical to patch, but this makes a clear statement, which if you’ve seen any right-leaning tech forums, has a real impact on them (see their discussions on Firefox and Rust, or better yet, don’t).
[from the original announcement]
If you are a liberal or if you want to have fun, have a look at “Aamer Rahman: Is it really ok to punch nazis?” :)
haha, nice. And this makes the Funkwhale announcement author’s position clear: combating fascism is more important than defending lofty ideals, like their liberties. They treat Funkwhale as a community, not merely a tool.
Some of the points Sean brings up may be reasonable critiques, I don’t know enough about music tagging to know how easy or hard MusicBrainz is to use, and there is also the question about what if a formerly RW artist reforms (many, many have deradicalized or left the movement, fun fact: this is an important source of antifascist intel). I know about a dozen artists who, as teenagers, were in edgy right-wing circles and echoed that in their works, and are now very far away from that and regretful, but if they hadn’t taken up new aliases, they’d probably be lumped in with their unwelcome past works. So I do see merit in the complaint about that project lead failing to implement a way to handle special cases.
With all that said, I’m definitely in support of this move. I just hope they implement and improve it well - that will make or break it.
This reminds me of Mastodon (like Sean mentioned in the article) and Lemmy. I’m not experienced with Mastodon, but I am aware of how they reacted to Gab (formerly a Mastodon instance, before getting bullied by almost everyone), and how most of Lemmy divorced Wolfballs (run by a US-Libertarian, think 🧊🍑 + antivax, but soon populated by white supremacists and neo-nazis; eventually shut down, among other reasons, when the admin realized the Nazis on their instance weren’t just pretending for a laugh and that many were commercial bots. Probably didn’t help that their admin had a non-white partner and jewish friends) and exploding-heads.
These are examples when a FOSS tool takes a community stance, rather than an idealistic liberalist freedom-above-all stance.
This describes a general forum format, but you might mean chan imageboards specifically. There have been federated imageboards for a while, but they’re very niche and experimental and I don’t see the value. The two examples I’ve heard of are NNTPchan (2015-present, NNTP protocol) and Fchannel (ActivityPub protocol).
There’s the related imageboard webring, but there’s no actual federated interaction between the boards, it’s effectively just cross-advertising to allow easier discovery.