Lemmy 的歷史

開發 Lemmy 的想法是多種因素結合的結果。

我這樣的開源開發者，長期以來一直關注著「五大巨頭（Big Five）」的崛起，這些美國科技巨頭幾乎掌控了全球所有的日常通訊。我們一直在自問，為什麼人們會遠離以內容為中心的網站，以及我們能做些什麼來顛覆這種趨勢，並以一種非技術背景受眾也能輕鬆上手的方式來實現。

The barriers to entry on the web are much lower than say in the physical world: all it takes is a computer and some coding knowhow… yet the predominant social media firms have been able to stave off competition for at least two reasons: their sites are easy to use, and they have huge numbers of users already (the “first mover” advantage). The latter is more important; if you’ve ever tried to get someone to use a different chat app, you’ll know what I mean.

我以前非常喜歡早期的 Reddit，不僅是因為它能將我感興趣的社群和主題的所有新聞整合在同一個地方，更因為每個連結背後的樹狀討論串。我至今仍收藏了許多這類討論，而且從連結背後的討論中獲得的收穫，遠比連結本身還要多。在我看來，正是這種以社群為中心、樹狀結構的討論方式，以及建立、發展和管理社群的能力，才讓 Reddit 成為全球排名第 5 的熱門網站。

But that ship sailed years ago; the early innovative spirit of Reddit left with Aaron Swartz: its libertarian founders have allowed some of the most racist and sexist online communities to fester on Reddit for years, only occasionally removing them when community outcry reaches a fever pitch. Reddit closed its source code years ago, and the Reddit redesign has become a bloated anti-privacy mess.

Its become absorbed into that silicon valley surveillance-capitalist machine that commodifies users to sell ads and paid flairs, and propagandizes pro-US interests above all. Software technology being one of the last monopoly exports the US has, it would be naive to think that one of the top 5 most popular social media sites, where so many people around the world get their news, would be anything other than a mouthpiece for the interests of those same US coastal tech firms.

Despite the conservative talking point that big tech is dominated by “leftist propaganda”, it is liberal, and pro-US, not left (leftism referring to the broad category of anti-capitalism). Reddit has banned its share of leftist users and communities, and the Reddit admins via announcement posts repeatedly vilify the US’s primary foreign-policy enemies as having “bot campaigns”, and “manipulating Reddit”, yet the default Reddit communities (/r/news, /r/pics, etc), who share a small number of moderators, push a line consistent with US foreign-policy interests. The aptly named /r/copaganda subreddit has exposed the pro-police propaganda that always seems to hit Reddit’s front page in the wake of every tragedy involving US police killing the innocent (or showing police kissing puppies, even though US police kill ~ 30 dogs every day, which researchers have called a “noted statistical phenomenon”).

We’ve also seen a rise in anti-China posts that have hit Reddit lately, and along with that comes anti-chinese racism, which Reddit tacitly encourages. That western countries are seeing a rise in attacks against Asian-Americans, just as some of the perpetrators of several hate-crimes against women were found to be Redditors active in mens-rights Reddit communities, is not lost on us, and we know where these tech companies really stand when it comes to violence and hate speech. Leftists know that our position on these platforms is tenuous at best; we’re currently tolerated, but that will not always be the case.

開發一個 Reddit 替代方案的想法原本似乎毫無意義，直到 Mastodon（一個聯邦式的 Twitter 替代方案）開始流行。透過使用 ActivityPub（一種社群媒體服務之間互相溝通的協定/共通語言），我們終於有了針對「先發優勢」的解決方案：現在任何人都可以建立或運行一個小型站點，但仍能與更廣大的使用者宇宙保持聯繫。

Nutomic 和我最初開發 Lemmy 是為了將其作為 Reddit 的聯邦化替代方案，但隨著它的成長，它有潛力成為新聞與討論的主要來源，並存在於美國的司法管轄與控制之外。