Hi everyone. Another refugee from reddit here. What’s the drama with the Lemmy teams politics? I’ve seen a few people warn that they’re not great, but the only example that I actually saw was an argumentative back-and-forth in a github issue about filter lists for slurs.
It didn’t seem particularly damning to me.
They’re full on tankies - this post with admin responses from Lemmy.ml summarizes it well:
Basically it illustrates their intent to remove “orientalism,” aka critique of the Chinese government from any western sources, from any community on lemmy.ml. It’s not a great look, but at the end of the day with how the fediverse is set up, they can only control things hosted on lemmy.ml, not any other instances. It’s one of the few reasons I signed up here instead of there. If their politics are a deal breaker for you, all you have to do is not interact on that one instance.
If you look at the main dev’s profile pictures, they are pictures of Fidel Castro as a young man. They are one of the only new big instances that hasn’t blocked lemmygrad.ml, which is basically a tankie pro-CCP pro-Russian-invasion instance, and it is rumored that they mod them with their alts, and that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml are hosted on the same IP address. Lemmy.ml being the biggest or one of the biggest instances, and also the main developers being the leaders of that side, it makes sense to worry a bit.
But as others have said, just don’t give them money, sign up elsewhere and you’re good.
