Christopher Lemmer Webber is a user on octodon.social. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse. If you don't, you can sign up here.
> be me
> make server literally with the goal of making it easy and cheap to host, because i think it empowers people to host their own infrastructure
> 1 year later
> "hey Pleroma could be pretty good for people without many resources, even if the devs are all horrible people"
@lain

i think people are starting to realize that we are not horrible people :)

@kaniini I suspect a lot of the hate for Pleroma comes from two sources:

- Historic "political division" between GNU Social and Mastodon as in terms of leftie vs alt-right (which wasn't even GNU Social's developers' doing or desire really), some folks from that space moving to Pleroma and thus to a lot of folks Pleroma being mentally branded that way
- @lain is the fediverse's class clown and recent events have lead many people to associate that kind of irreverent humor with undesirable stuff

@cwebber @kaniini

@lain was literally one of the first people I muted on Mastodon and only a week or two after I muted them I realized "oh shit they're the pleroma person wtf"

Christopher Lemmer Webber @cwebber

@phoe @kaniini well.. I've subscribed to @lain and unsubscribed again before a few times, and looking at their timeline, stuff like pleroma.soykaf.com/objects/a72 and pleroma.soykaf.com/objects/b93 is why, and probably is why people get that impression.

(Lain, sorry to talk about you in the third person as if you aren't here. But consider that feedback I guess?)

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Serious question: how do you handle life if you can't handle these posts ?
@cwebber @lain @kaniini @phoe I honestly don't see how either of those posts could be construed as negative

the first is lain making fun of signs being the wrong way, the second is lain saying yikes to someone posting an obvious jewish stereotype

@pea @lain @kaniini @phoe not what I see when I read them. The first one looks like it's making fun of women organizing together, and the second looks like it's making fun of jewish noses.

And maybe you could make the argument that your interpretation is correct, but it's very hard to distinguish between ironic-social-commentary-meta-bigotry and actual-bigotry, *especially* in this era.

@cwebber @phoe @kaniini @lain my argument isn't even that it's "ironic-social-commentary-meta-bigotry" it's that you'd have to be already looking at lain from a certain perspective to see either as bigotry, ironic or otherwise, or you'd have to be going out of your way to see the worst in the things people say for some reason
@cwebber @lain @kaniini @phoe
>The first one looks like it's making fun of women organizing together
Yes and ?
It's a mistake people making mistake can be fun.
>and the second looks like it's making fun of jewish noses.
And ?
>*especially* in this era.
Are you saying that people who take quotes/images of other people and then interpret them elsewhere are a problem ?
Would you please elaborate. Making such responses does not help me to understand your point of view. The only thing that you let me understand from your post is disdain towards the precedent post.

@mangeurdenuage I'll elaborate, but only because you said "please".

> Yes and ?
> It's a mistake people making mistake can be fun.
You said "yes, and?" to making fun of women organizing. It looks like categorically like misogynistic skepticism that women can successfully organize.

>> and the second looks like it's making fun of jewish noses.
> And ?
Does it need elaboration? Right now when literal nazis are being normalized again?

That's as much elaboration as I'm giving.

>>You said "yes, and?" to making fun of women organizing. It looks like categorically like misogynistic skepticism that women can successfully organize.
This is where we are disagreeing but that's just because we have both different definition of misogyny and different interpretation of the scene, and that's ok.
For me it's just making fun of a silly mistake that some people did and that's all, I don't overthink to the point of asking myself if there's an inferior sex.
>>Does it need elaboration? Right now when literal nazis are being normalized again?
Again that's just because we think and interpret differently and it's very interesting for my pov.
Is it reasonable to think that everyone who makes a jokes about X stereotype is actively supporting a specific ideology ? I do not say that such people do not exist I'm saying that it is improbable irl to have people who really believe such things.
>>That's as much elaboration as I'm giving.
Thank you for being cordial.
I would like to exchange more in the future. I really would like to understand why there's such difference in our way of understanding/seeing the world.
Again thank you.

When I looked at those posts, I saw them the way @cwebber did, but what @pea sees also made a lot of sense to me. Either way, when I've seen these kinds of things from @lain , even when they do look "bad", they've never been very clearly bad. As someone who is very frequently misinterpreted (due to flat affect mostly) I don't think it's fair to project an interpretation onto lain in these situations, especially when lain has otherwise always said good/"progressive" things.

@kaniini @phoe

@jordyd @pea @kaniini @phoe Yeah I'm not saying @lain is bad and I agree that I've seen a lot of good things from them

what I'm saying is why a lot of people are getting that *impression*, and why I totally understand that

Notably, this is why I called Lain the fediverse's class clown :P

@cwebber
Oh no worries, this was more a general comment/perspective than a criticism, as I didn't see you as really making that claim either.
@pea @kaniini @phoe @lain

@pea @cwebber @lain
@kaniini actually it is not really about either of these two posts to me - it's more about me not being used to the fact that the tech leader for a project can be such a massive and shameless shitposter

@pea @cwebber @lain @kaniini TIL you can effectively shitpost using just the Mastodon favourite button

time to go to sleep

@phoe @kaniini @lain @cwebber i sincerely hope you never have to interact with half of the core developers and project leads i've interacted with on fedi :p
@pea @phoe @kaniini @lain @cwebber i shitpost pretty hard for a core dev

this is my private acocunt and dont discuss what I work on much here though. And I wouldn't dream of bringing up my fedi account to fellow contributors.

Lain can shitpost because lain is behind the shield of anonymity, and lain is working on a project that isn't serious buisness. I wish for that kind of freedom. All the more power to lain for pulling it off and having fun.

@phoe @pea @cwebber @lain @kaniini I sincerely don't understand why that would bother you

@sonya @lain @cwebber @pea @phoe

I mean I generally live my life assuming "hacker" "news" is a gigantic shitpost.

How is this any different?

@kaniini @lain @cwebber @pea @phoe maybe this is atypical or just varies a lot based on personality, but I enjoy shitposts!

that isn't how I would personally describe HN though, lotta effortful commenters on there

@kaniini @sonya @lain @cwebber @pea @phoe it's legit and natural that people would expect much higher standards from the development teams of projects with potentially large societal impact imo

@lichen @phoe @pea @cwebber @lain @sonya

sure but when shit gets serious were always serious at the table :)

@kaniini @phoe @pea @cwebber @lain @sonya it's good to hear, but also what is 'serious' depends a lot on cultural frameworks and it can be perceived differently depending on different privilege levels of the regarding angle. to put it simply, what's joke for somebody can turn out to be humiliation for others

@lichen @sonya @lain @cwebber @pea @phoe

generally speaking the jokes lain makes aren't really at anyone's expense

@kaniini @sonya @lain @cwebber @pea @phoe it's not my place to delve into specific examples, and I wasn't referring necessarily to just one developer, I instead wanted to point out that for a social media platform to be inclusive and attractive to a wide community the software itself is not enough, it takes a lot of effort and it needs input from multiple cultural fronts

@lichen @phoe @pea @cwebber @lain @sonya

considering we have many regular contributors who are not cis white men, I think we are doing quite well on that front.

@kaniini @phoe @pea @cwebber @lain @sonya then all the best wishes that this can get you to foster a truly inclusive community and counter-act the 'white-cis-male' prevalence problem that a lot of tech projects suffer of