TL;DR: Please search and subscribe to !homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org on your instance to cache it on your instance so we can get visibility. We're moving to our own hosting. Thanks for everything Ruud!
I'm excited to announce some big changes for our Vegan Home Cooks. As many of you know, Lemmy has been our platform of choice and we are hosted on the largest Lemmy instance lemmy.world. However, it's time for us to evolve and move to our own instance. Let me explain why.
Lemmy.world, while a significant player in the Lemmy universe, has diverged in its vision and management from what we seek in a platform. The admins there have different political and operational views that don't align with our goals. This is no slight against them; it's just a matter of different paths.
It's important to recognize that Lemmy is, at its heart, a passion project. Developed by talented individuals driven by their ideals rather than corporate goals, it operates on a scale that's more hobbyist than mass-market. This has its charms, but it also means that development isn't as rapid as one might expect in a more commercial environment.
The thing is, this approach works for many in the Lemmy community. The developers, supported by donations, have been content with this pace and scale. Even major instances have been okay with this grassroots, community-oriented approach. For a platform born out of a communal ethos rather than a corporate one, this isn't surprising.
However, things started shifting when Reddit made some API changes. Suddenly, Lemmy was thrust into the spotlight as a potential drop-in replacement for Reddit. This influx of users, many with expectations shaped by the slick efficiency of corporate tech, put an unprecedented strain on the platform and its developers. Imagine, a small, community-funded team suddenly dealing with the demands of 50,000 new users. It was a clash of cultures and expectations.
Lemmy.world stepped up during this influx. Run by volunteers, they took a more corporate approach to manage the surge. Their rapid growth brought them under the spotlight, attracting both hackers who exposed major flaws and users who demanded rapid scaling and development.
This brings us to the crux of the matter. There's a growing rift between the Lemmy developers and the team at lemmy.world. The developers, whose political views differ significantly from many in the Western tech sphere, run lemmy.ml with a distinct set of principles. The arrival of a large number of new users, many with different viewpoints, led to tensions and even bans.
This situation has led to a split within the community. A group of developers, frustrated with the direction and pace of Lemmy, are creating Sublinks – a Lemmy-compatible platform. Their plan? To eventually replace Lemmy, particularly on large instances like lemmy.world, effectively outmoding the original platform.
So, where does this leave us? We've been observing these developments and have concluded that the best way forward for our community is to establish our own Lemmy instance. This move will allow us to build a space that aligns with our values and needs, free from the external pressures and conflicts affecting the larger Lemmy ecosystem.
This is a big step, but it's one that opens up exciting opportunities. We'll have more control over our platform's direction and be able to create an environment that truly reflects our community's spirit and needs. Please search and subscribe to !homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org on your instance to cache it on your instance so we can get visibility. We're moving to our own hosting. Thanks for everything @ruud@lemmy.world, you and your team have been a gracious host.
Yes, I agree the heart of what it means to be a tankie is to be authoritarian socialist of some stripe; I think that's precisely why I don't find the label fitting to Chomsky, given the whole of his work and the kind of political advocacy he has engaged in.
Thank you for the link to the response to his talking points.
As I have said, previous to this discussion I have not known anything about Chomsky's view on Ukraine.
I did find this, from April 2022, Noam Chomsky: A Left Response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
From this I get the broad sense that Chomsky does not side with Putin nor does he support the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This is hardly saying much, since seething reactionaries like Jordan Peterson have said similar things, decrying the invasion of Ukraine while defending and rationalizing Russian interests.
This has long been a problem with the Left since the main geopolitical opposition to the U.S. and Western Imperialist countries have been problematic Marxist-Leninist authoritarian countries like the USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.
Though ironically Chomsky was also decried is an Imperialist and liberal for supporting U.S. intervention in Syria to support the Kurdish movement in Rojava, so he has committed sins in both directions (against Russian interests, and for, apparently).
From the May 2022 Open Letter responding to Chomsky's position there are many claims of positions Chomsky takes in his interviews, but the only quote they provide is about Crimea. Sure, maybe he is wrong about the people of Crimea supporting Russian annexation considering the claims made by the Ukrainians that dispute the Crimean referendum that Chomsky may have been alluding to by his comment. Hard to say, but I at least understand why people might bristle when Chomsky says "Crimeans apparently do like [being off the table]."
It seems to me there is a lot of work to do to sort through all the claims and counter-claims and evaluate evidence and so on.
I can suspect Chomsky is not likely to come out of that entirely clean, and I can understand to a Ukrainian that anything less than full, uncritical support is betrayal enough. War creates a stark psychological reality for the victims; it is for Ukrainians an issue of survival and all this hemming and hawing about larger geopolitical issues and Leftist ideological commitments will just come across as hypocritical to supposed Leftist values, and compromising to the pragmatic goals of resisting the Russian invasion which is pressing, immediate, and traumatizing. It reminds me of Che Guevera who summarily executed a suspected traitor, and was surprised when people were shaken by this. His reality had adjusted to war-time, and he had become so pragmatic he had stopped caring about due process or rights. This is the reality the Ukrainains are in, and we should understand this and be sympathetic to the on-going genocide.
I don't have the time or space to educate myself on this issue, and I am sorry for that. It may be that Chomsky is like other famous leftists who have taken compromising positions in the past.
Coming to mind for me is Howard Zinn who was so bent on criticizing the U.S. that he amplified Nazi propaganda about the Dresden fire-bombings. I don't think that made Zinn a Nazi or a Nazi collaborator, nor do I think it undermines his humanistic principles or overall project as a historian. I do think it is unfortunate, that it weakened him as a figure, and so on. I see Chomsky similarly. In his attempt to attack the U.S. he can come too close to defending authoritarian regimes. (I don't know whether that's true with Ukraine, it's just sounding like it from what you are telling me; I've had the thought previously about his support of China.) Still, I think in the context of his ideological commitments those compromises make sense even if they are flawed, problematic, or simply built on lies that are convenient to authoritarians. The politics are messy and none of the sides are morally righteous even though that's not how it feels.
I do not expect figures like Chomsky to be right about everything. We could be having a similar discussion right now about how Kropotkin is a whatever-disparaging-term-you-wish because he supported Western entry into World War I.
Some figures might be more compromised by others, but I don't think Chomsky or Kropotkin are compromised to the point of figures like Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin who each proclaimed ideals of communism and did much more to destroy those ideals.
Still, I am sympathetic to criticizing Chomsky where he is wrong, I just don't have the time to figure out exactly what sins he has committed with regards to Ukraine, as plentiful as those sins may be.
What I get from it is the same thing as enlightened centrism. The Trump-style position of "very fine people on both sides". The kind of spineless response that only enables the fascists, as they're the ones to force their views on everybody unless clearly and consistently opposed. Another example? "I'm not racist but", because that's exactly the structure of his response at your link. He spent just a bit on criticizing the invasion only to spend 95% of the time on echoing Putin's narrative of it being related to the expansion of NATO, the US, and some made-up promises (most recently reiterated in Putin's interview to Tucker Carlson). Also worth noting that for Putin, the kind of wishy-washy "all sides bad" response is precisely the goal of the many years of influence operations, as exemplified by the trolls from Olgino posing and organizing US demonstrations as both Blue Lives Matter and BLM, pro- and anti-Muslim activists, among other things (documented at the same link with reliable sources like The Washington Post).
Hey, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but maybe I can come back another time when I can respond properly? I already compared Chomsky's response to right-wing responses, and I feel like parts of my response are getting ignored and the claims being made are getting a bit out of hand given the context. At this point it feels like communication isn't happening between us, and usually that's a sign that this isn't going anywhere helpful, for either of us.
I want our time together to be mutually useful. I'm not here to defend Chomsky, I don't even agree with Chomsky on many points, as I've already tried to communicate. I just can't spend the time unpacking claims that he's a tankie, an enlightened centrist, committing "both-sides" errors, etc. I feel like I mentioned casually that I'm a leftist and a libertarian socialist and now we've gone down this rabbit-hole about how Chomsky is actually maybe kinda like a tankie or like Trump or Tucker Carlson because he criticizes the U.S. and NATO handling of the situation with Russia (and maybe worse things than that, to be charitable to your view).
I hear what you're saying, and I'm not really saying you're wrong, I just don't want either of us to keep wasting our time on communication that is not working.
At this point I can't tell how you are trying to relate to me or what you think my position is in all of this.
EDIT: I'm saying this because I assume you and I have no major disagreement, just want to make sure you're not feeling hostility towards me and that we're good.
I fully read your comments before responding. I also had a look at the Chomsky interview, which contained some of the other points already addressed in the open letter I linked. I'd say you were on the money when you brought up China and how some or more people on the left end up siding with it in their quest to call out the US. I think we'd also agree on that there's nobody we agree with 100%. My problem is that I find it shallow for someone to not be able to harshly criticize the US government without siding with (or praising) Russia or China, let alone acting as their agent by repeating their main talking points. That's where I'd want to draw the line at least as far as openly recommending those people, and possibly where we differ the most.