Yeah, the software is developed by tankies. That’s an unfortunate fact that I’ve personally only become aware of after setting up everything and starting to interact with the community through the already running instance, and I can’t speak on behalf of the rest of the mod team. I’m not exactly happy about it.

However, Lemmy is also free and open-source software. The tankies in question have no influence over us, they just work on the code. They’re not our u/spez – in fact, Lemmy, much like the rest of the fediverse, is specifically designed to ensure that every instance owner or admin team is their own u/spez, so that if anyone goes off the rails, others will just slide into their place. The instance ran by the original devs, lemmy.ml, isn’t even the top instance at this point, that would be lemmy.world which is mostly unaffiliated (obviously there’s going to be some conversation when they’re the top instance) and the admins over there seem to be nice.

At the end of the day, we are in control here, not them, and I think I speak on behalf of the rest of the admin team as well when I say we absolutely do not tolerate tankies here. The first instance we defederated from was lemmygrad, and we do distance ourselves from any tankie or alt-right instance. Thankfully, such users do seem to concentrate around these instances, so this appears to be a very effective method for now – if that changes in the future, we’ll make the appropriate steps to keep this a safe space for everyone.

On that point, the concerns raised here about lemmy.ml are absolutely valid too. I’m going to bring the topic of defederating from them to the mod team. But I’d like to make the point that lemmy.ml is not the entirety of Lemmy, it’s just one corner of it, and it’s not expressed anywhere that this is the “main instance” you should be joining. That would be lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works for anyone joining around the time of the Reddit migration, both of which feature open registration, while lemmy.ml switched into approve-only mode after experiencing significant overload. They’re not the best approve-only instance either, that one is pretty clearly recognized to be beehaw.org, which is about as anti-tankie as it gets.

There is still something to be said about engaging with the work of immoral individuals, but the Lemmy devs aren’t Rowling. And I’m not talking about magnitude here, I’m talking about logistics: unlike something like the Harry Potter fandom, supporting which is inextricable from supporting its transphobic author due to copyright, you absolutely can use and engage with Lemmy without supporting tankies. Fortunately, there is no such system tying us to them in this case – in fact, the devs themselves seem to be very strongly against any such influence. I guess that’s a silver lining in their ideology. (There are also a lot more people who work on Lemmy who aren’t tankies, open source projects run on community contributions, it’s just the two head devs who this is focused on.)

There are also some practical concerns with migrating to an alternative, which would likely be Kbin. A lot of people lost their private keys used for federation in such migrations, we’d likely lose our domain and would have to start over. I talked to a lot of other instance admins who had that happen to them due to an improper first setup.