In the recent Lemmy developer update, there’s a reference to one Lemmy developer, SleeplessOne1917.
I found some horrifying comments from this user.
https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/2649200 - “There is no such thing as an Israeli civilian. All settlers are valid targets.”
https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/2649472 - “15 year olds are military age. That makes them valid targets for killing.”
https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/2649732 - “… There is no such thing as a zionoid civilian. Everything that moves and isn’t Palestinian is a valid target. …”
Webarchive: https://web.archive.org/web/20231009171047/https://lemmy.ml/u/CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml
Edit: New comment from the user “Cry more. Israelis need to be eliminated. Death to Israel, and death to Amerikkka!”
https://web.archive.org/web/20231009171510/https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/2592588
https://web.archive.org/web/20231009171739/https://lemmygrad.ml/post/750810
https://web.archive.org/web/20231009171907/https://lemmy.ml/comment/4569805
https://web.archive.org/web/20231009172817/https://lemmy.ml/comment/4413706
In this thread people often talk about “a contributor”. However, lemmy’s the core dev teams has a very specific “political view” which is coupled with the project. The project was started to serve people with that “political view”. And this makes really hard to decouple project and the people who drive it.
You can decouple it by looking to include people who have a broader range of political ideals rather than hiring people further and further to the extremes.
We’re here, we’ve made peace with that the original authors of the project created it because they wanted to have some place where they wouldn’t/couldn’t get kicked off for their political views. That’s fine.
However, as they’re seeing donations from the public and they’re looking to hire people, and the candidates are further to the extremes - that makes this more of a political project than not.
Yes, we can ask our server admins to defederate from those instances… but as long as a criteria for getting paid with the money that Lemmy gets as donations or grants is that you have anti-western views then it is a political project first.