The Funkwhale music platform is alive and in active development, and they’re working on a feature to filter far-right artists off the network. Some Fediverse self-hosters are divided on letting a third party decide what should be allowed in their library.
I fail to see how it’s even possible for an open source project to dictate what content is acceptable. Also, the entire idea is contrary to rms’ FOSS goals (for any purpose), other than being completely ineffective. I can understand the need for agency and contribution to whatever resistance can be mustered, but this is larping.
Perhaps, and I don’t see how that’s a problem. Saint IGNUcius isn’t the divine dictator of FOSS. The original Funkwhale announcement’s author makes it clear at the end that they don’t hold freedom-as-an-end-goal (liberalism) as their ideology.
Not LA nor RP, my friend.
As you hinted, a determined admin can disable the blocklist, it probably isn’t too technical to patch, but this makes a clear statement, which if you’ve seen any right-leaning tech forums, has a real impact on them (see their discussions on Firefox and Rust, or better yet, don’t).
It’s not even liberalism, it’s pragmatism. It’s simultaneously giving software as a commons and trying to restrict it, an extension of culture wars that’s so ineffective it gives the other side an easy win once they set up chudwhale as a script that forks the latest codebase but with no blocklist and a pepe mascot. Just time unspooling. I might be depressed.
I wouldn’t get too depressed about it, it would just be another niche bit of alt-tech if it were anything other than completely neutral. I can’t think of a case when an anti-left fork of a software was memorable as a self-hostable tool. The closest I can think of is Gab, which hardly qualifies, nor does it hold a torch to Mastodon.