Yesterday I was reading the post about the FUTO keyboard where there were a lot of messages deleted by moderators.
I’ve commented there
What the heck happened with all the messages deleted by moderator?
And it got deleted. Right now you can only see 4, but I’ve counted 19 messages moderated and the post has been locked. Why?
I’ve had a look ad the modlog and the messages don’t seems to violate any policy (now they’ve removed them in the modlog too).
I’m pinging here lemmy.ml admin and the mods of the open source community where the post was posted so they can have their say about it and clarify the situation to me.
@kevincox@lemmy.ml @CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml @Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml
@Cloak@lemmy.ml @davel@lemmy.ml @dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml @JoeBidet@lemmy.ml @cypherpunks@lemmy.ml
If I’m getting something wrong, please let me know, I’m here to discus and understand if I’m getting something wrong or if something went wrong in the moderation. Thanks!
Down here you can see the deleted comments.
P.s. I’m writing here because I think that this post on lemmy.ml wouldn’t last long.
That was me. I’m tired of FUTO fans derailing discussions about FLOSS with advocacy for their obviously-not-open-source software and insisting that it is open source.
Every time Futo comes up, someone will insist it is open source, others will correct them, and soon more than 50% of a thread that is supposed to be about open source is people arguing about them.
I’m pretty sure that Futo’s (now recanted) position that they were open source (despite the term having a clear definition which is very internationally recognized and which Futo’s license obviously does not meet) was an intentional marketing gimmick - “there is no such thing as bad publicity” and every time a bunch of people are arguing about them there is a chance they’ll get more customers (some of whom might even believe it is open source).
Probably more than that even; more than I want to count. The modlog is public.
The What’s the best open source keyboard for android? post where you commented has not been locked, but most of the futo-related comments in it are deleted. Note that while your comment was not advocating for futo per se, it was (successfully) encouraging others to continue the offtopic discussion. You could have answered your question by reading the modlog.
I did lock another post in the same community (the topic of which is, again, Open Source), which was What are your thoughts on FUTO? (and I left a comment there explaining why).
I generally try to assume good faith but I’m pretty sure some Futo proponents are actually just trolling at this point.
I hope this answers your questions.
Yeah, Rossman getting in bed with people that are deliberately trying to dilute the meaning of open source really killed my opinion of him.
Who are some of those people? I’m still trying to get my bearings about this entire thing, I never heard of it before yesterday.
Louis Rossmann is a prominent right to repair advocate on youtube, I don’t like his videos personally, but he’s usually on the right side of things.
FUTO is a company owned by Billionaire Eron Wolf, they release several pieces of software under their own proprietary licence, that they originally tried to claim was “open source”. When they got called out on it not being open source they literally tried to redefine open source. Although they’ve since backtracked, and decided to use the term “source first” instead, it makes the whole organisation seem incredibly sketchy to me.
Rossman explained the dealio… daddy owner wanted this, it is his money.
Not ideal and there was some shoddy marketing. We still got a free app out of it.
But yes, this app is not OS and people should stop fucking arguing that it is.
If you don’t like it, don’t use it.
With that being said, i don’t see an issue with mentioning it as a viable alternative to OS but saying it is OS is bad faith behavior.
Rossmann’s billionaire patron is Eron Jokipii (aka Eron Wolf). As you can see here he comes off as a bit of a bumbling rube; it’s possible that he sincerely doesn’t understand the harm in what he is doing since he’s one of those people who became unfathomably rich by selling a company to Yahoo in the late 90s and has probably been surrounded ever since by yes men who can’t afford to contradict him.
Thanks for the level-heades and reasonable explination. These actions make complete sense
Unrelated but you should post one more comment
nice.
(although that is just the subset of my posts and comments which are visible on your instance; on mine i have more than twice as many…)
I would submit that even if it is misinformation and people are climbing all over the comments claiming that FUTO is definitely open source, removing the comments to leave only the remnant of it that is “truth” is often not the best way to handle it. The majority of the removed comments didn’t seem like they were saying that, some even specifically said that FUTO isn’t open source but blah blah blah, but even if so, here’s my feeling:
The way the conversation looks right now is just confusing. There are people who have no idea about FUTO who have the feeling that they’re just not allowed to talk about it, or to say true statements (for example, whatever you think of their license, they fund real open-source projects.) Because FUTO is officially “bad” and they might get banned or something for wanting to talk about it or ask questions. It actually doesn’t look to me like people are coming in primarily to evangelize. But regardless of that, my personal feeling is, you have to let people talk.
I feel like if there was a sticky comment from a mod / admin at the top of the comments, something like PSA: FUTO is not open source. The people that are claiming it is, are wrong, with respect to long-established definitions. (link) (link), then that would be fine. People can see the arguments, and presumably there’s enough respect in place for the “leaders” of the community that they’ll give a lot of weight to the sticky comment. But they still have the sense that they’re allowed to talk about it and think about it on their own instead of being ordered to receive the correct interpretations from above, when they don’t even have their bearings as far as what’s even being talked about.
I’m not secretive about my strong disagreements with a lot of lemmy.ml moderation philosophy. I’m just making an effort, here, to explain why I have such a strong disagreement in a productive fashion, instead of just hectoring or being combative about it.
i totally agree that it is often preferable to allow misinformed comments to remain so that they can be refuted.
in the case of futo, though, i feel like there are often actually some bad-faith actors who just want to keep the discussion going, and will continue to repeat their misinformed arguments in the face of any and all evidence.
and, in this particular case, it is even a thread in the Open Source community so any discussion of Futo is inherently offtopic. (and all of which is also effectively promotion for them; again see succès de scandale.)
the thread as it is now has lots of comments about open source keyboards, and a link to this thread for anyone who wants more information about all the deleted comments than they can find in the modlog. if you think it would be better if that thread was still mostly people arguing about Futo… well… i’m glad you’re not a mod there.
Oh, no, I was talking purely about the second post, about FUTO itself. I agree about protecting the first post, about open source keyboards, against being overshadowed by a big argument about FUTO which isn’t an open source keyboard.
In the removed posts that you can see in the screenshots I don’t see anything you say.
When I wrote the post, there were no trace of those messages in the modlog (or I’ve missed them, I’m not that into Lemmy, I admit that)
My bad, I must have confused them, sorry.
As stated above, I don’t see any trolling in the comments scrreenshotted (and deleted). But over that, I think that deleting those messages is censorship. I still believe in free speech and I can’t see any hate or misinformation in those messages.
It was a chit chat, what’s wrong with that? It feels like school were you had to just pay attention to what the professor was saying and woe betide anyone who turns their head.
I believe in free speech too, and I think moderated spaces for discussion help enable it. (Think about this…)
Nobody claimed there was hate in any of messages in that thread; you observing that there wasn’t is knocking down a straw man, and using the word censorship here is just hyperbole.
There are however unambiguously factually incorrect assertions in some of the offtopic messages I removed from that thread.
I don’t see any misinformation on the deleted messages, if you can see in the ones that I’ve screenshotted, please tell me which one.
Again, please tell me what is offtopic. Is offtopic asking why FUTO is bad in a post where someone suggested a FUTO keyboard? If so, then a message like this one
should be remove, and so this one:
But the world is not only black and white (every single message MUST have an open source software in it), but its a shades of all colors!
IMHO free
speachspeech is let people write what they think, moderate misinformation only when there already is no clarification from others so that it’s clear to everyone that a message is misinformation.But Arthur, you’re a moderator of your server where you make the rules. I now understand what others were saying about your instance and I’ll just leave it. All the best!
Edit: typo
imho “free speach” is a typo, and one often made by people with the funny idea that free speech means any form of content moderation is a violation of their rights 😏
look again; two of the comments in your screenshots (and many more that i deleted) are explicitly claiming that futo makes open source software:
click to expand for screenshots of your screenshots
and, the rest of them are discussing and/or promoting futo, which, again, is a commercial product which many people incorrectly believe to be open source due to its maker’s now-recanted false statements to that effect, and therefore offtopic (“spam” would also be a fair label for some of it) in a community about open source.
also, note that i did not even delete 100% of the comments about futo in that thread! i left enough that any good-faith reader should be able to see why further discussion of futo is offtopic there, and, i even linked to this thread you started, to give anyone who wanted to discuss it further a place to do so.
if you still believe that deletion of (most, and not even all in the thread) offtopic/spam comments is a free speech issue… ok, i don’t know what else to tell you. all the best to you too.