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I don't know if you can reduce politics to "good" and "bad", but the main dev, dessalines, is enthusiastic about Stalin and was unhappy that the Soviet Union went away and such.
You can read some of his stuff here.
https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md
You have stuff like:
It is a take that many, including myself, strongly disagree with, particularly given the context of the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia. I'd add that the "ml" in "lemmy.ml" was chosen to refer to "Marxist-Lenninism".
Well, they have a lot of influence, as they make the calls on how the software is developed. The software is open-source, though, and could be forked. I have seen some statements that concern me, like "we want to make it hard for right-wingers to use lemmy", which I don't think is a great take for forum software that would -- at least as I would like to see it -- become widely-used in a content-agnostic way for many forums. But thus far, I don't think that I've seen political policy decisions baked into the software package. Policy on lemmy.ml, sure.
If you don't like lemmy and want to avoid the developers, there's another software package, kbin, which can also communicate with the Threadiverse. It's done by some -- as far as I can tell -- pretty ordinary Polish guy. Note that I don't know what the state of the mobile clients is -- they were behind lemmy a few months back when I last looked, as they were still working on the API to expose to clients -- though the Web UI is fine. It also has some additional functionality, can interoperate with Mastodon as well.
The instance that Ernest, the lead kbin dev, runs is here:
https://kbin.social/
If you just want to use a lemmy instance that is content-agnostic and want to avoid lemmy.ml, lemmy.world is a large, popular one. It does defederate with some instances, though, which may or may not be okay with you. I use lemmy.today, which is on the US West Coast, and has specifically stated that they aim not to defederate with other instances.
EDIT: I'll add that I have both a kbin and lemmy account, since generally, if something breaks on one, it's working fine on the other, and it can be nice to have that as a backup. One of the perks of having a federated infrastructure with different software packages that can talk to each other.
EDIT2: If you're looking for a different lemmy or kbin instance to call home, I'd recommend the Fediverse Observer, which can help find a lemmy or kbin instance near you.
For kbin:
https://kbin.fediverse.observer/
For lemmy:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/
I moved from kbin over to Lemmy when kbin was having some uptime issues a few months back. But I can confirm wholeheartedly that Ernest is a super genuine and nice guy, at least as far as any content he's ever posted to the internet.
Oh, totally, no disagreement. When I said "ordinary", I wasn't trying to ding him -- he seems to be a great guy and all. I just mean that he isn't going around doing controversial political advocacy in conjunction with his project.
I initially used kbin, hopped over to lemmy when it had a couple days where kbin.social was having some issues, then hopped back when the problematic 0.19.x lemmy releases caused a lot of problems on lemmy.today, and am currently back on lemmy.today.
Oh yeah chief, I was agreeing with you. Didn't mean to put you on the defensive. Ernest is overwhelmingly "just some dude" who happens to be very pleasant to interact with and is building one of my favorite projects on the internet. It's a stark contrast to some others I could name. I wasn't implying calling him ordinary was some insult, I was just adding my voice to the chorus.