this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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And this is why you don't trust tankies. It's very easy to compromise the software and put back doors into it.
Use kbin instead.
And this is not me saying that this is a case of that, this is me saying that this could be the case in the future
This is the dumbest possible take about the situation, my lord.
I realize that you're using 'my lord' as a bit of an exclamation here, but I initially read it as you addressing the commenter as your lord. it just made me imagine you with a heavily British accent, going full medieval peasant style to mock the guy. I found that quite humorous.
What are you referring to here?
The Lemmy devs are ideological fans of communist China.
They're likely to cooperate with them down the line and take actions that compromise their software, send data to others who are in their circle, and so on and so forth.
A lot of people say since Lemmy is open source you can trust it, but open source isn't a protection against malicious code. Here you can see an example of just how easy it is to sneak something by. Even though this wasn't a malicious example it still allowed admin accounts to be compromised
You seem to be coming up with conspiracy theories, don't you?
And you don't seem to know how (developing) software works, and that people aren't infallible when it comes to avoiding bugs.
Popularity just also increases the attack surface to a project, all these bugs can absolutely also occur in kbin. Unless software is mathematically proven (which is practically impossible in this context), it's always possible that there is a bug lurking around the corner.
I'm literally a professional software developer.
I'm also telling you that people are fallible, bugs are easily missed, and you shouldn't trust a project to be secure just because it's open source.
Yes.
And kbin doesn't have developers that have reason to attempt to create and support malicious code. You can trust them to at least attempt to keep the code base clean in good faith. You can't trust Lemmy to do the same.
Why shouldn't I trust Lemmy?
I mean the devs are now finally able to finance themselves via donations, after years of work on a project I've always aspired to make (but don't have the necessary drive and time for it). There are also a lot more developers now with lemmy.
Just because you obviously don't share their political view, doesn't mean that they don't want this thing to be censorship-resistant and impossible to take down (no matter whether it's a left or right authoritarian state/entity). They are closer to anarchism and marxism, than they're to Chinas (authoritarian) version of "communism" (as the right wing media likes to simplify this rather complex topic...).
Everyone is more or less political, but it's far fetched to allege the conspiracy that the devs are working together with the chinese government or something weird like that.
They are literally ideologically aligned with a state that runs the largest mass censorship program in the world.
Doesn't help. They're still potentially malicious actors.
It's just a sliiiight bit more extreme than a small difference.
I also love how you're jumping goal posts here after your other point totally failed to land.
They literally regularly praise and support China through their moderation and consider negative talk about China western propaganda.
Like you're on the other side of the spectrum (i.e. Nazi)?
Yeah in that sense everyone is a potential malicious actor, but it's much less likely if all the code is publicly visible (open source), that this happens. Now especially as there are now a lot more people watching over the code and potentially future contributions (code review).
I trust these guys a lot more than most politicians or big companies (whether they're obviously authoritarian like in china, russia or "democratic" like in the USA). Transparency is a much more important factor than ideology/political views IMHO (e.g. they could publicly claim that they're rightwing, while they're tankies and vice versa).
But to me all your comments feel like rootless conspiracy anyway...
No, I would consider them being a bunch of Nazis just as bad. Any idealistically extreme group should never ever ever control platforms like these in any way.
Cheap ass copout reasoning there. You're still trusting code you shouldn't.
In case you haven't understood my previous argument. I trust code I can actually read and reason about (compared to e.g. reddit, facebook etc.). And just to prove my point, I am already looking over the codebase of lemmy, because there are obviously a lot of things that can still be improved, but malicious intent I haven't found yet. And if I have missed something, other people will certainly find such things, and if that's the case (which I don't believe) then shit will certainly hit the fan.
kbin is also open source, and I'm happy that there are other projects with a similar vision as lemmy (the choice for PHP is an absolute mystery for me, but whatever floats your boat I guess). More (non-malicious) implementations always improve the fediverse in many ways.
Unless you're auditing the code yourself you can't. This is my point. The fact something is open source does not and will never protect you unless you go out of your way to do the herculean task of auditing it yourself.
And even if you audited it, guess what happens next week? Next year? The bigger the system gets the more valuable it is a target. I don't expect anything malicious to happen now. I expect it to happen once the growth phase is over.
At the end of the day it all falls down to trust.
Sorry, but I start to believe that you're not actually a(n experienced) software engineer with open source experience. The codebase isn't that big and complex, though admittedly it's big enough that I haven't checked every detail yet, but again, I'm by far not the only person that watches, reads, reasons and audits the code, and that's what makes open source so secure. Btw. I can absolutely reason about code I'm reading, I'm not exactly sure what you mean with auditing, but for me that is reading and understanding what the code does...
Well the bigger an open source project gets, the more contributors (not always, but definitely in this case) have insight into the codebase and more likely see malicious intent. So in that regard: it will get safer over time.
That's true, but it'll never be "safe" thanks to the malicious actors controlling pull request and being easily able to bypass most eyeballs with minor or major changes.
The world will never be safe... (increasingly accelerated by climate change). The point that the devs are malicious actors still has to be proven, and I don't see any evidence yet. They have their own instance that they control and censor/moderate (and openly so btw.), I'm totally fine with that, but the open source project certainly doesn't have the intent to be malicious (well to some regard in taking reddits userbase ^^).
Anyway I'm not continuing feeding the troll, have a nice day and please don't fall to conspiracy theories (believing that the lemmy devs are malicious actors is probably the first step in that direction...)
Alright, with this wild tangent I'm done here.
I know you're getting it from all angles right now, but
Do you have a source for their support of Communist China? I know they're purported communist, but I didn't notice any outright support of the Chinese form of communism.
Not trying to argue, but genuinely trying to stay informed
Check out lemmy.ml, which is the devs instance. You'll see it very quickly.
Spreading FUD over a group of people's intent with their software that they personally use is an odd take, when kbin could very well have similar vulnerabilities in its codebase. Federation is good as part of limiting the attack vector one of many implementations and a subset of all servers hosting and routing media content. Kbin is just another set of federated content servers, with there being no guarantee of who develops the software being inherently more competent than those who develop Lemmy.
This comment is so idiotic that its least stupid explanation is that it's a false flag by a tankie to make their critics look like idiots.
This is a ridiculous take and fairly toxic. Don't ruin any communities with unnecessary hate. It's unwanted.
Tbf, there are far more pressing reasons for distrusting Tankies... Instances getting hacked is for sure aggravating, but it isn't the gulag-backed paranoid ultra-corrupt authoritarian hellhole they so admire and wish to expand globally.
This is hardly a back door. The lemmy devs just screwed up.
Kbin had a fix for an SQL injection exploit the other week. Both probably still have security holes that haven't yet been identified.
There are more eyes on the software as the userbase grows, and people are going to find more flaws. That's just the way things go.
I literally said it wasn't in my comment, it's evidence of how easy it is to put one in down the line despite the fact this is open source software.
You must not understand how open source works