The developers, I’m told, have taken some controversial positions such as questioning whether North Korea is much worse than South Korea or whether China is really conducting a genocidal campaign against Uyghurs. Some people seem to be concerned about that in the following ways:

1. They worry that by using Lemmy they’re endorsing the developers’ political views.

2. They worry that the developers will develop the software in ways that bake their politics into it somehow, or that are influenced by their politics.

I’m not convinced by either. To the first point, Lemmy is a piece of software for running communities on federated instances (sites). Each community has its own character and each instance does too. By design it’s not monolithic but distributed and diverse. The developers have never given any indication that they want the software used only to discuss things from their point of view; in fact they’ve indicated that they want it to be able to host a diversity of views.

To the second point, the code is open source and anything politically loaded would be out there for anyone to notice. It would get spotted, and other developers would be able to fork the code and remove it. Instances could then run the forked version. Since ActivityPub, the software that handles the federation, is not part of Lemmy, they couldn’t politically tilt that anyway.

Mostly I think what we’re seeing is people with an interest in the status quo (communities hosted and controlled by profit-making companies) using vague and unspecific allegations (“the developers are tankies!”) to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about an uncontrollable democratic alternative that threatens these corporations or those who are given power by them.