Hm… yeah. I mostly agree. Or sort of almost agree. This one issue of Nutomic having an offically incorrect stance on trans issues is one thing, and then their wider pro-authoritarian politics is another, and then the way they manage their instance is another. They are related but separate.

In terms of a response to the third thing, I do agree about a “boycott” meaning not posting new stuff to lemmy.ml communities in general and just preferring communities in more human-rights-respecting instances. I don’t think that blocking the instance, or not commenting on their stuff at all and having isolation, is a good way, though. The thing is that that isolation just helps their censorship to be effective. That’s part of the point of the fanatical way they attack outsiders and try to curate a narrative for their users, and it’s really very effective. If you ever look from inside lemmy.ml, it looks like they all make sense and there is consensus, and we’re the weird ones. One way to tear down that veil is to have open communication, and people from the outside coming in and saying normal things, and then they have to continuously have that fanatical response or else have the mods intervene (and then we can talk about how the mods are overreaching and it’s pretty clear who is talking sense about it, over time). Talking to each other is good. I feel like if all the not-pro-Russian people just self censor themselves from lemmy.ml, because they know the mods are going to go HAM on their comments, then it sort of does their job for them and makes it actually airtight, more so that it would be otherwise. That’s what they would want to see happen.

One related thing which bugs me more than it seems to bug a lot of people: I think it’s a problem that they are so overtly aligned with these malicious actors, and then also they are producing and packaging software that all of us use that is designated for this important purpose. Like if if was an Israeli software development team putting together a new federated web site that all of us were going to trust our communication to, and their home instance was all pro-Israel stuff and you could get banned for criticizing Israel, that would be insane for us to trust the software and the core instance. I mean yeah it’s open source but also, the people controlling all of it are super-green with these people that like to do corruptions to software and sneaky things in the Western media sphere. That would bug me. That’s kind of how I look at the Lemmy devs, and why for example I reacted so strongly when the docs had that “mistake” that would send new Lemmy installs’ admin passwords to lemmy.ml by default. I feel like that aspect of it is also something that should get thought about more often, it is why I am in favor of Piefed even if reimplementing the whole thing from the ground up is this massive amount of duplicative work.