In the boiling chaos of reddit over the last few days, I scrolled past some allegations that I didn’t have a chance to thoroughly look into before today’s start to the blackout.

IIRC, if was something to do with a connection between Lemmy’s creator (or maybe the fediverse at large?) and neo nazi/white nationalist ideology, but that’s all I remember off the top of my head. I couldn’t tell at the time if it was just a loyal redditor’s sour grapes, ragebait, or if it had something to it.

Obviously, I’m not going back over to reddit right now to find the thread, and a web search is mostly pulling articles about Motorhead’s Lemmy, lol. Does anyone have any info on this or an idea if why this might have been passed around? I’m new to lemmy, so I don’t know much of the backstory on the page.

  • derived_allegory@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    AFAIK, one of Lemmy’s core developer seems to be a China/Russia apologist, see content on https://lemmy.ml/c/socialism , which is moderated by one of the creator: https://lemmy.ml/u/dessalines

    He identify as a communist from his profile on GitHub and Lemmy. I am sure there are people (including me), who disagree with his definition of “communism” or “socialism”.

    As a left-leaning Chinese, who does not enjoy many decisions made by the CCP, it is obviously disheartening for me to see CCP being protraited as “socialists”, “communists”, or “democratic”. But despite his potentially controversial political stance, it is very likely he is neither a neo-nazi (Nazi and Russia/China didn’t have a good relationship) nor a white supremacists (even his cover art on Lemmy is a picture of Mao, and he allows China apologist comment on this subreddit).

    I don’t necessarily agree with his political stance, but lemmy is a FOSS project maintained by many; so if the lead developer does something out-of-line, I am sure there exists people can maintain a fork.

    EDIT: obviously, when I say “China” or “Russia”, I refer to their current governments, not their people.

    • Apolinario Mabussy@lemmy.calvss.comEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      This is the advantage of having an open source project like this. Anyone can just fork the project if they disagree with the original devs. Migrating preexisting content on instances should probably be relatively painless, though I haven’t delved into the code too deeply yet to note if it does.