The lemmy.ml authors appear to be communists. Their ideology and support of China doesn’t mean they are somehow funded or corrupted by China. That is an irrational and conspiratorial line of thought.
Or would you prefer to ban communists and their ideas from the internet? What would that make you?
I think you’re going to have to be more specific with what you mean by “authoritarian control” because I have a feeling that there are some fundamental differences between the way China operates and the way an open source message board project operates.
The Chinese government reserves the right to ban censor and shut down any form of online speech going on in the country.
In fact, they reserve the right to throw you in jail for doing it.
Where is ever an event or a situation or a topic of discussion which the state does not like they flip a couple of switches and all across the country firewalls begin blocking words, banning access to VPNs, and generally preventing those topics from being able to be discussed.
They believe this is good because it promotes social stability, when in reality it's just a massive system that empowers the government and ensures that the people can never easily disagree with it.
Anyone who supports such a system or a country who runs such a system should not be running and open source message board.
I really don’t think the argument that because China is authoritarian, by your measure, internet communists will do ??? to mess with private instances holds any water.
I'm making the argument that because the developers of living support China and their forms of authoritarian control they are likely to publish updates and make changes to their software which enables and helps to promote those ideals that are ultimately against the ideals of all things open source.
And at the end of the day unless you want to be running software on the public internet which is out of date, you're going to be running their updates, which gives them long-term control and ability to mess with the network after time.
Plus the basic fact that writing such a large and popularly used piece of software gives you a fair amount of social credibility and attention which is not served by those people.
If someone is willing to go and do the legwork of doing a full audit and commit to maintenance of the project in the future I would totally run that code.
Until someone does, you should stay the heck away from it.
Or would you prefer to ban communists and their ideas from the internet? What would that make you?