First of thanks a lot for the effort that you put into creating lemmy. You have created a really friendly and welcoming place!

I have a question regarding licenses. When you started developing lemmy, what were the reasons for your choice of the AGPL? As you are marxist-leninists, did you also look into other licenses like the the Anti-Capitalist Software License?

If you are looking for UI inspiration, you could give !unixporn@lemmy.ml or its counterpart at reddit r/unixporn a look. As a linux novice you might be interested in the KDE,XFCE or GNOME customizations that are shared in these communities.

Not a single mention of lemmy or kbin or any other alternative for that matter. While Reddit might not have lost a lot of traffic, Lemmy has seen incredible growth during all of this. I can still remember how empty this place was before Reddit went through with the api changes. Just thinking about how many great mobile apps we have now makes me really confident in Lemmy’s future.

Not sure if it’s atypical, but you could try reading “Alan Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking” and “The Freedom Model of Addictions”. The basic premise of the books is, that if you really want to quit, you will quit easily, and that in order to really want to quit you need to reevaluate the reward value of your habit instead of focusing on the negatives. You smoke because you find it pleasurable. The books guide you to better understand what part of your habit you find pleasurable exactly. Is it the nicotine rush? Or maybe the you like the social aspect of it? After finding out what exactly you find pleasurable about your habit, the books will give you pointers on how to reevaluate if the pleasure you derive from it is really all that great compared to other activities or whether it really solves the problem that you set out to solve with your habit.

Thanks for the reply! As a baby Marxist I just wanted to add that I recently listened to your Audiobook of Zak Cope‘s Divided World Divided Class and I thought that it was really eye opening as it for the first time made it clear to me, that there actually is a material basis for people in the West to buy into the liberal ideology. Living in the west one personally benefits from the bribes that the western haute bourgeoisie is able to pay its workers in inflated wages made possible by the super exploitation of labor and resources in the third world. (At least that is my understanding of the book, I‘m open for different interpretations)

So thank you for making the book available as an audiobook!

Thank you a lot for building such an awesome platform! Here are my questions:

How did you get into communism? Were there any events that had an influence on you becoming communists and what personally motivates you to keep working on lemmy even though you could earn much more as developers working on proprietary software?

All the people you find here fled from a proprietary platform that was abusing its position of power in order to profit off its users. While Sync for Lemmy is not in the same ballpark it nonetheless shares the same proprietary nature of reddit as it is a proprietary client that connects to a platform that is completely FOSS. So I believe it is entirely valid to campaign against the use of Sync for Lemmy and educate everyone about its dangers (loss of freedom, trust can’t be verified, abusive relationship)