this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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I just had a look at Lemmy's GitHub. Of the web interface alone, the second biggest contributor only joined two weeks ago. And there are many others. Those are new developers. So in essence: lemmy.ml admins are some of the software developers and are actually now in the minority, unless I missed something very obvious.
This might be a stupid question, so forgive me. Who controls what happens to the actual software? Like, if a hundred great ideas get added to the GitHub, who controls which ones make it into the next version of Lemmy?
Lemmy.ml devs own the repo, it's just licensed as open source software under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE. You can read the license in the repo files. So you can fork off it and run your own instance. If you go to GitHub.com/LemmyNet you see the two people who are members of the project, with the accounts, both have Fidel Castro avatars.
Personally I think having a bunch of socialists run the software, is by definition the best way to have it avoid corporate interests.
Whoever has permission to merge into the main branch of the code repository would have final say. All pull requests for the lemmy repo are currently public though, so you'd be able to see an abuse of power if one were to happen. More users can also be granted the ability to merge code into the main branch as well, which more than likely will happen with the biggest contributors.
If the main project start doing something stupid, other devs can just fork the project as a new lemmy project with a new kind of government of how codes are merged into the project.