I would definitely argue that there's a bit of wiggle room on freed slaves offing their oppressors though. It wasn't just him.

My hindsight take is that it was a justifiable action considering the history of humanity and how slave revolt tends to be handled. Wiping out the overlords instead of exiling them is a form of preemptive strike.

I'm legit surprised it doesn't come up more. Yeah, Dessalines the OG is a bit more obscure than Louverture, but the fediverse in general and lemmy in particular run heavy to folks that appreciate revolutionary history.

Hell, I'm not even that into Haitian history, and I've read a little bit here and there. Been ages, but still enough to recognize the name when I saw it. When you also consider some of the drama around lemmy dessalines, that nobody looked it up is surprising too

Yup, that's the main event under discussion.

Comparing one thing to shit and the other to piss is indirectly an assessment as to which is worse. I may be going out on a limb here but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people (without a scat fetish) find shit worse than piss.

Whataboutism would be using the problems with the Lemmy devs to distract from or justify what the Piefed devs do. If someone says Piefed devs are doing A but Lemmy devs are doing B which I find is worse, so I would rather go with Piefed, that's not whataboutism, that's chosing the lesser of two evils.

Eldritch commented on Desalines' choice of name without important context, as though to posit the question: Why name oneself after a genocidal dictator? I added context in case anyone else wondered the same thing and hadn't heard the name before.

There's no reason to believe I excuse anything.

For everything else, feel free to visit your local library.

1. It depends on what you're into, what you're wearing, and the ambient temperature.

2. https://theconversation.com/whataboutism-what-it-is-and-why-its-such-a-popular-tactic-in-arguments-182911

As someone who persistently forgets to give kbin a try for years already, I'm wondering if the lack of notable drama is in part at fault of why people don't know about it / don't use it...

...Or, with any luck, it's just me.

Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to consume faeces? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?

I don't know why he chose that name but it seems like a deliberate provocation. That violence begets violence, and still without violence we cannot resist the oppressors. And that you can only liberate yourself and others by getting your hands dirty.

So I think it's hypocrisy to reduce the historical figure Dessalines to a genocidal dictator. To use a thought terminating cliche about simplistic "good vs evil" ethics and derail a discussion that was about something else.

Every time you start a war you accept that war crimes will happen. It is inevitable in wars. There are no clean wars. War is slaughter, and when soldiers or the oppressed are put into extremis some will act like animals.

So how much of the guilt for the massacre lies with the slavers?

Yet liberals pretend that they do not put people into extremis. That their reasons were justified and intentions noble, that their wars and their hands are clean. But violence begets violence.

That is what the name of the user tells me, and what that comment tells me.

I really don't ask for a HUGE amount, I think:

1. The main maintainer of the codebase isn't a power trippin' bastard (if they are a PTB, then I don't trust them not to surreptitiously inject malicious code into it at some point)

2. The person who owns/runs the instance isn't a power trippin' bastard (if they are a PTB, then I don't trust them not to basically function as a malicious man-in-the-middle attack at some point)

3. The instance isn't hosted in the USA (if it is hosted in the USA, then I don't trust the instance to be resilient against governmental overreach and spying) or any other untrustworthy countries

That's kind of it, really. But so far, I'm struggling to get past point 1. Both Lemmy and Piefed seem to be maintained by nutjobs. I'm honestly considering going back to Reddit. Maybe kbin will be OK...

EDIT: I mean mbin. Apparently kbin is dead.

I’m considering rewriting the entire thing from scratch so we can use a license that requires attribution

From what I've heard from others around here, attribution is required with AGPL as long as the author puts a copyright in somehow. Beyond that I'm clueless, but this whole thing seems like people got really worked up over their own mistake. Lesson learned, I guess.

Oh so that makes it okay that they rounded up all the white polish etc minority on the island

Famously the one group that was spared.

Only to then be fucked by France and the United States for the next Century afterwards.

The US and France had fucked over Saint Domingue long before Dessalines was overthrown. It was Dessalines who was forced to sign the treaty which indebted the entire nation as price for their freedom. It came with support from slaveholders like Jefferson who correctly, saw the Haitian Revolution as an existential threat to their way of life.

The point is to highlight the concept of Critical Support. Dessalines isn't someone to idolize like Toussant, he was a ruthless thug. But Napoleon rejected the alliance that Toussant offered. So faced with the choice of re-enslavement under Napoleon and Rochambeau, I would've taken Dessalines any day.

Personal lifestyle choices are totally the same as the liberation of an entire nation of people from slavery.

This is the least intellegent response I've gotten in a while.

The sycophants worshipping his post is something else entirely. It makes me suspect there's like a team of people gassing up his ego.

Rimu initially made PieFed because he wanted more moderation tools that the lemmy devs didn't want. It was always about censorship for him.

All the original PieFed fanboy power users and slowly realizing that they picked a fascist over the communists.

The overlords, and their wives, and their children, and anyone else who looked like them regardless of socioeconomic class. Months after the fighting had stopped. Following assurances they'd be left alone... but weren't allowed to leave.

You're allowed to endorse the original cause for a conflict and still say that where it ended was kinda fucked up.

Was it Rimu who downvoted you? hehe

GPT bots

Just wanna say the new themes slap, got my vaporwave fix.

Anyone downvoting over Dessalines should try telling him that Russia has ever done anything wrong.

You don't need all that. Just put a blurb for copyrights and license in each file, then it's against the licence to remove it.

one of the biggest for me is the ability to disable downvotes for people who aren't from trusted servers. we have a lot of :slopper: downvoting anything genAI they see. restricting downvotes to exclusively FAF instances wiped out the problem.

Well TIL, thank you.

... fucking hell, goddamnit.

I appreciate how the lemmy developers keep their views and moderation decisions separate from the software. Opinions and moderation are unavoidably divisive topics. Keeping that separate from the software itself is smart. I don't hold their views against the lemmy platform because of that separation.

I wish Rimu would see the wisdom in keeping those things separate. Its damaging to piefed, which is otherwise quite good.

Fucked up, yeah. But we're still talking about people that were enslaved, raped, beaten; had their children raped, beaten, and stolen from them, and had ancestors in the same situation.

I would call the massacre assisted suicide on a historic scale.

I use the term “rank” now, because pylova/fed already implemented comment voting, as in, if you post a question, anyone can vote for answers. It's meant to give pylova stackoverflow behaviours: best voted answer get pinned up. Ranking a comment or post doesn't affect how folks pin comments on a question post.

Some people still believe @dessalines@lemmy.ml and @nutomic@lemmy.ml are out to get them I guess. It's ironic because every talking point about developer overreach and unilateral decisions applies to piefed more than it does Lemmy.
I know it has more features and it feels like Lemmy 1.0 is taking forever, I'm still holding out hope for it and making do with what we have here.

This is my first hearing of PyLova, could I get a rundown? Is it a fork of piefed? Seperate project? Are there things it has that piefed doesnt, or things piefed has that PyLova doesnt currently? What's the state of app support (I assume not there presently, which is totally fair)

It's a fork of piefed that's currently more feature advanced. If you scroll through the comments on this post somebody else posted more details about said features.

App support is identical to piefed, since the api is the same.

Some people still believe Dessalines and Nutomic are out to get them I guess.

But then they can come to Mbin instead of Piefed! We don't have any of these issues.

Well good news, Mbin doesn't have a "main" maintainer, so it should clear number 1 easily. It was forked specifically because Ernest was too hands on with /kbin, so they adopted a more open by design model for Mbin's development.

To quote their Github:

a community-focus project embracing the Collective Code Construction Contract (C4). No single maintainer.

I mean, they need to be able to see the red flags for them to get them to leave.

This community doesn't exist on piefed.social, so anything posted here isn't visible to anyone there.

I wish Rimu would see the wisdom in keeping those things separate. Its damaging to piefed, which is otherwise quite good.

Sadly it isn't possible as they're less making a federation software as trying to make their own vision of what social media should be.

Going off the extra mod tools/features,it's very much rimu wants to try and make the next version of social media. One that makes reddits control over users look like child play in comparison.

Basically if you don't act like how rimu wants the walled garden to be you get progressively filtered out

They have pr accounts, so undoubtedly

You're the second person here to blame the victims of an atrocity for their own genocide.

This was a formalized extermination program by an ethnostate. I was assured y'all consistently opposed to that sort of thing. Now I wonder, if things suddenly flipped around in Palestine, how many would be downright gleeful about Israeli medics and journalists being hunted by snipers. Like it's only unforgivable if the wrong side does it.

What the actual Nazis did was plenty fucked up, but we did not turn around and eliminate Germany, or Germans, or German. Genocide cannot both be the worst possible crime against humanity, and also 'oh well you get what you deserve.'

Well, we've hit a snag.

Who is "y'all" in this case?

See, by that sentence that started "I was assured y'all", you're in/out grouping and making an assumption that not only is there an out group for you to categorize people into it, but that I'm a part of that group.

Secondary to that, I've never seen a discussion where someone starts thinking in terms of "me vs them" that ended in anything but ugliness. I'm willing to accept that this might not go that way, but I'm dubious as fuck. So, if that's where you are, do us both a favor, don't respond to this, and just block me. I don't have time or patience for that bullshit.

Besides, it's why I so rarely engage in discussions about the subject matter of a post in this community. It isn't the place for even gentler debates, much less those that run hot.

That being said, if you're drawing parallels between a slave revolution in haiti and the Israeli pogrom going on currently, be aware that Israel is the slave masters in this case, not Palestinians. The direct equivalence would be if Palestinians got armed and took back their lives. Then, any remaining Israelis were put to death instead of shipping them back home.

See, you expect a degree of over reaction by oppressed and tortured people. It doesn't make it good, but it is totally understandable, and can even make good sense strategically.

To redraw the comparison, let's say that Palestinians, now running their own independent nation, had allowed their previous oppressors to remain for similar reasons. What are they supposed to do with them? integrate them into Palestinian culture? When their oppressive neighbors are still planning death and mayhem, and the Israelis inside their borders are just as likely to side with their oppressors?

What then? Send those people back to Israel, where their resentment and sense of entitlement will continue to be a problem? Or wipe them out and be done with it? Sending a message at the same time of "stay the fuck out".

Now, is that morally "good"? Fuck no, we're all supposed to take the gentler path when we can. But put yourself in the place of either peoples. Are you so certain of your moral superiority that you wouldn't make the strategic decision to eliminate a threat? A proven threat in both cases. Remember, the Haitians were coming off of centuries of slavery, rape, torture, and not just "regular" slavery, chattel slavery. The Palestinians? Holy fuck, for it being a relatively recent reoccurrance of violence against them, they've had a violent boot on their neck for generations too.

Me? I'm not that confident in my ability to pretend moral superiority in the same situation. Hell, I'm pretty damn confident I'd be willing to do the killing. I'm a nice person, but I am not a good person when it comes to protecting me and mine. Oh, I could be talked into holding off if leadership had a good plan in place, after all, the cycle of killing is hard to stop just because you were justified; that's how we get generational warfare.

It's also interesting to look at the ww2 comparison. Me? I have said publicly that the worst mistake humanity ever made was in letting nazis live. Some shit needs to be crushed as hard as possible. Not because it prevents the insanity from coming back, but to draw a line in the sand and say "nope, if you pick up that banner, you will share the same fate."

I think that's what the Haitians did back then. They said nope, fuck slave masters, and anyone thinking they can try it again.

Is it a moral good? Nope. But I am absolutely okay with an oppressed people making bad choices while they get their feet back under them.

Maybe you're a better person than me. Since I don't believe in a real deity, I suppose only the collective consciousness of humanity can be the judge of that. But I just can't find it in me to care that a bunch of ex slaves went hard. I don't blame them. Maybe if they hadn't been treated worse than animals, they would have had a chance to be the kind of people that don't make the choice. But they were, and I suspect that any group of people so treated would as well. Which seems to me a matter of ideals vs reality, not a pure morality

Rimu goes by he/him pronouns please don't misgender.

Piefed implinents pronouns in a way that doesn't seem to be compatible with lemmy. I can only seem his pronouns on his profile when viewed through piefed.

If he's manipulating how the fediverse looks so much, maybe a defederation is in order.

Wall of text in response to 'is genocide bad y/n.'

The direct equivalence would be if Palestinians got armed and took back their lives. Then, any remaining Israelis were put to death instead of shipping them back home.

That would be what I wrote, yes. And you'd endorse it? You, personally? Invidually? Would that not fit with-- okay what the fuck would "back home" even mean for-- beside the point. What is the difference between 'Palestine genociding Israel would be okay' and 'Haiti genociding French descendents was okay?' Why the fuck is genocide ever okay?

Calling it "understandable" or "strategic" is NOT what you said, when you called that explicit progrom "suicide." You are unambiguously blaming the victims of the genocide, for their own genocide.

When their oppressive neighbors are still planning death and mayhem

This is the rhetoric of every fascist action. 'We must be unforgivable before they get us!' because being better than the fucking genocidal maniacs is somehow unthinkable. Nobody bayonetting a child while shouting 'take that, complicit oppressor!' is engaged in serious philosophy. They're just doing ingroup / outgroup violence.

You can say the cycle of killing is fucked up. You don't have to excuse it, as you do here, repeatedly. It can be difficult to break, and still be evil.

I have said publicly that the worst mistake humanity ever made was in letting nazis live.

Oh, you're pro-cycle-of-killing. Okay. Glad to have that laid naked.

They said nope, fuck slave masters, and anyone thinking they can try it again.

Children.

Is it a moral good? Nope. But I am absolutely okay with an oppressed people making bad choices while they get their feet back under them.

That's calling it a moral good.

You, personally, are endorsing this genocide. 'It's whatever' is not meaningfully better than 'I love that for them.' You are excusing a pogrom while patting yourself on the back for considering it just super terrible in an abstract sense where you still get to say it's fine.

Maybe if they hadn’t been treated worse than animals, they would have had a chance to be the kind of people that don’t make the choice.

Fun fact - Haitian soldiers mostly ignored the initial order. They were totally fine with letting these people live. Dessalines personally showed up in town after town to force these forces to commit this atrocity.

Which you endorse.

I get where you're coming from but they are is not me trying to do any gender.

Plus it's hard to want to give respect to someone who gives zero respect to anyone else especially the Trans community

Edit I love my instance bur damn does it's unstable nature make it hard sometimes

Wow you're pathetic.

That would only happen if lemmy world admins disagreed with rimu

Yes, nothing is inside your head.

Based on some of the comments in this thread it's people who are still ignoring red flags, projecting onto others, and still would rather insult others that aren't those dirty fucking tankies than be willing to acknowledge any flaws with rimu or the piefed code

A MWoG poster supports slavery, I'm not shocked.

Well we have PyLova as an option now, and it's coming along nicely now it's been largely stripped of Rimu's dark patterns. It's definitely worth considering moving your genAI comms over to AN because they would be more protected from trolls.

That's probably a good idea. I'll look into it.

Awesome sauce :)

EDIT: I mean mbin. Apparently kbin is dead.

I forget that about three times a day, don't worry :p