It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit.
I am also glad that I’m getting away from reddit’s general political shitposting, which was more left leaning. You couldn’t have any proper discourse on there, and even I with my generally more left leaning views recognized that.
It’s an open source, open contribution project. It has one maintainer who’s confused being angry at the capitalist class with a call to reflexively defend people who use the word “communism” to justify whatever they want, but he’s not “the devs”.
No none seems to care when for-profit projects are backed by the slime of the Earth. Actual fascist Peter Thiel financially backed Reddit a decade ago, and people didn’t care. And Tencent, with actual and direct ties to the CCP has been a major investor in Reddit for years now.
Reddit ran off of the direct support of white supremacists, anti-democracy advocates, and CCP supporters, and none of that was an issue for anyone until spez got stupid with some small developers.
The tankie guy’s political influence will be miniscule in the long run. You can’t say that about Thiel’s or Tencent’s.
It sucks that the official instance from the devs of the software denies human rights violations and supports authoritarian governments.
That should not be where people land when looking for a reddit alternative.
It’s not the “official instance”, though. There isn’t an “official instance.”
They’re the devs that got the software started, but anyone can be a dev or fork the repository. Or write a new compatible server from scratch, like kbin.
They don’t have that power, they don’t control most of the instances, if they do that on their own instances that’s up to them. They couldn’t even secretly embed anything in the code to push an agenda since it’s open source.
They have that power on their own instance which is the “official” instance and very popular.
And it just sucks that the software is associated with tankies.
They could silently change their own instance if they wanted to, there has already been some nonsense with them blocking kbin useragents.
There’s no “official instance”, it’s free software - lemmy.ml isn’t even a recommended instance at https://join-lemmy.org .
It’s you that’s perpetuating that association.
You can’t base your software choices on whether or not you agree with their creators political beliefs or else you won’t use anything. The creator of Javascript has expressed controversial opinions about same-sex marriage and most of the web uses it.
