Ethical/moral support gets thorny with open source software, and even more so with networks like the fediverse. There is a limit to how much you can impune the creators of a tool relative to its usage, and vice versa.
There’s quite a few far-right and fascist Mastodon instances and forks (Gab, Truth, Parker, etc.) The creators of Mastodon can’t really stop them from using the software with the license they initially have. But they wouldn’t exist if Mastodon was closed source either (and perhaps neither would we). Is it morally better that no one use Mastodon because bad instances are able to exist because of them? I personally think not.
Now, fortunately, because of the federated ActivityPub system, servers can actively choose to cut off, and even hard block instances, and most have done so to these services. This also came up with lemmygrad, an instance that had worse tendencies with tankie concerns with lemmy/ml. Many have now chose to defederate with lemmygrad or are considering it.
Several communities have been established on the lemmy software, and those intermingle with kbin as well. They have been willing to defederate with problematic instances as well, despite the problems this poses in the threadiverse model vs the federated microblogging/social posting model (many times you have to isolate the entire instance instead of just specific communities, which means of you encounter bad actors you may be forced to orphan larger communities people from other instances participate in, etc; see the recent beehaw sijw/lw defed debacle). Does this mean that using the lemmy software, despite the instances’ and users’ opposition to the potential views previously discussed is morally bad? Again, I personally think not.
With situations like with GitHub employees protesting contracts with the DoD, the opposition to providing support on ethical grounds is understandable, as it’s active, deliberate action that goes toward an organization that perpetuates violence. But for a system that can very quickly shun a project owner or section of a community or even fork just as quickly? I view it as no different than protest forks.
Ethical/moral support gets thorny with open source software, and even more so with networks like the fediverse. There is a limit to how much you can impune the creators of a tool relative to its usage, and vice versa.
There’s quite a few far-right and fascist Mastodon instances and forks (Gab, Truth, Parker, etc.) The creators of Mastodon can’t really stop them from using the software with the license they initially have. But they wouldn’t exist if Mastodon was closed source either (and perhaps neither would we). Is it morally better that no one use Mastodon because bad instances are able to exist because of them? I personally think not.
Now, fortunately, because of the federated ActivityPub system, servers can actively choose to cut off, and even hard block instances, and most have done so to these services. This also came up with lemmygrad, an instance that had worse tendencies with tankie concerns with lemmy/ml. Many have now chose to defederate with lemmygrad or are considering it.
Several communities have been established on the lemmy software, and those intermingle with kbin as well. They have been willing to defederate with problematic instances as well, despite the problems this poses in the threadiverse model vs the federated microblogging/social posting model (many times you have to isolate the entire instance instead of just specific communities, which means of you encounter bad actors you may be forced to orphan larger communities people from other instances participate in, etc; see the recent beehaw sijw/lw defed debacle). Does this mean that using the lemmy software, despite the instances’ and users’ opposition to the potential views previously discussed is morally bad? Again, I personally think not.
With situations like with GitHub employees protesting contracts with the DoD, the opposition to providing support on ethical grounds is understandable, as it’s active, deliberate action that goes toward an organization that perpetuates violence. But for a system that can very quickly shun a project owner or section of a community or even fork just as quickly? I view it as no different than protest forks.