CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@mkljczk @madeindex Was not aware of that.

Tried going down that rabbit hole.

- There seem to have been a thread on Reddit which does not exist anymore (/r/Lemmy is banned in general).

- Found a discussion on lemmy.world (from 3 years ago) which does not really have any real receipts other than people calling the devs Tankies.

- The devs seem to also run (or were running) Lemmygrad.ml which seems to be at the heart of the controversy (also read that Hexbear is also associated / mentioned)

I have no idea if the devs are still connected with Lemmygrad (or if they ever were) and don't know what they have said to be called tankies.

I'm not doubting it. It can be true or not or somewhere in between.

Personally I've mostly seen their project repo and comments on github. Very direct communication but as far as I've seen there were no politics involved.

My favorite instance is hosted by dbzer0.com - pretty sure they have some controversial stances too (not their main focus, but they tolerate AI, crypto).

@madeindex You can also take a look at the Pleroma fork Akkoma https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma/

Be aware that the more you get away from the main projects Mastodon > Pleroma > Akkoma the smaller the dev community gets. Not saying the smaller projects are less safe, but usually bigger projects get more eyes on their source code.

@madeindex Most notable controversy I'm aware of was a hard-coded slur filter: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622

This was years ago and AFAIK is now completely optional. The initial stance of the devs rubbed many people wrong and some people might still hold a grudge.

Also there seem people not liking that the lemmy devs themselves hosting lemmy.ml

Not sure about possible political stances of lemmy devs?

Similar in the Mastodon world where Pleroma seems to get (or was getting?) a lot of heat. Not up-to-date in that regard. I liked that Pleroma was so lightweight compared to Mastodon. Tried self-hosting and had the impression that other instance sometimes automatically blocked based on the instance beeing Pleroma. IIRC it was mostly about the dev(s) behind Pleroma. Honestly don't know and decided to not self-host Mastodon at all.

Lemmy development is (was?) at least partially (or mainly?) funded by NLnet foundation. They seem to be legit and do a lot of good. I would assume they vetted the project to fund them.

At the end of the day the Lemmy ecosystem is like the Mastodon ecosystem IMO. It depends on what instance you are on. Plenty of bad instances in both worlds. I like Lemmy as a Reddit alternative. Can't wait for 1.0 to drop. RC already out and publicly available. Looks promising.