this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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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.