Fedigrow

Gonna go out-of-topic from the post but I need this to get this off my chest:

Do you know what prompted me to contribute to PieFed's code?

Recently, a developer of Lemmy straight up posted a link to a website to a China propaganda in a community in my Lemmy instance. Yes, a propaganda.

Tbf, slrpnk.net receives a lot of China-related posts, and that's due to China out-competing other countries in many sectors (EV, for example), and in those post OP usually critical enough to acknowledge that while China achievement is good, the crimes Chinese government has done shouldn't be ignored.

But the post is different. From the domain name, the "About Us" section of the website, the bias in the article. Clearly this was posted with an ill intention. A developer of a platform uses the platform to spread propaganda. Disgusting

I downvoted said post, but I hesitated to call it out. Because, I'm gonna be honest--I'm genuinely scared of interacting with those kind of people. And I don't want to have a deep discussion about politics or propaganda anyway. I'm not that kind of person.

This made me realize, I also don't tell people I use fediverse or don't reach out to other forums to open a community in Lemmy. This is because the fediverse, or at least Lemmy have a bad reputation: tankie.

There is a saying in my country that says "One person ate jackfruit, everyone got the sap". The genocide deniers ate the jackfruit, and everyone got the sap. The genocide deniers ruined fediverse's name and everyone else got the consequence. I don't wanna recommend people to use softwares made by those terrible people, and I doubt most people want to use softwares that has a reputation of being a genocide deniers playgrounds.

Honestly OP from the link in the post (https://feddit.org/post/4920887) kind of made a good point.

At this point, I would prefer just quitting Lemmy altogether.

But I remembered, the fediverse is an open source effort. I use open source software a lot. I feel like I need to give back something. And I have a community that still needed moderating.

And recently I found PieFed that is still in early days but show some great promise. I happen to understand HTMX (I use it in my personal projects) and Python (I learned it way back in junior high). Seems perfect to me, so I contributed one.

Honestly, it feels kinda unfair to me that software made by a genocide deniers gets the funding, meanwhile a software made by a good person (PieFed) has to be a hobby project.