Lemmy devs are being paid to develop Lemmy, they literally admit to it.

I’m called out, although I’m not quite in my 30s yet.

Also… Reddit started out in the same way, mostly as a forum for programmers and nerds

I’m seeing a lot of worrying trends.

The whole idea of Reddit is changing. It used to be the front page of the internet and that encompassed basically everything. Now it seems like there’s a lot of focus on making it advertiser friendly

Then we see Spez basically spitting in the face of the community. Mocking them, calling the unpaid mods “entitled” and just showcasing that he actively seems to despise the users.

Now we’re seeing Reddit do shady stuff like undelete comments. Destroying any trust the community may have had in the website.

The 3rd party app issue was just the kindling that ignited all the other issues

I get that, there’s a bunch of unethical associations with everything we use. But right now the main developer of Lemmy has his profile setup with Chairman Mao as his background, his Github repo avatar is Che Guevera, and he has an entire repo filled with propaganda copy-pasta. In the past people have also pointed out that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml resolve to the same IP address although this is no longer the case. Lemmygrad supports the DPRK and transitively one of the most horrific dictatorships in the world, and yet it’s advertised on the “Join-Lemmy” website.

Even if the software itself is apolitical and we can see through the open-source nature of it that it is not going to be abused to further those agendas, there’s no doubt that as that knowledge becomes more commonly known that it could severely impact the whole idea of a Federated Reddit alternative.

I guess the most important thing to consider is that the software, being open-sourced, can easily be forked if this ever becomes a problem.

Honestly I’m casting my support with KBin after hearing about the political affiliations of the main Lemmy dev. It’s worrisome because at this time of volatility, the community is going to be very fragile and stuff like that can really cause a massive problem when the community starts hitting critical mass

It’s always going to start off slow, but it seems like there is a decent amount of momentum and Reddit seemed to do a great job at pushing it.