Yea, so, the “Chinese whispers” of negative rumours are super toxic. The rumour you’ve heard is probably the most untrue I’ve heard in a long time.

The devs are communists and a pretty staunchly anti-Nazis and racism. The reason you have to apply to join lemmy is that a while back a bunch of nazis came in here, and so to prevent that from happening ever again, the devs made the sign up process harder.

They’ve also hardcoded some anti-racism filtering into the codebase, which has attracted a good deal of criticism from “free-software” types while the devs just don’t want their software to be used by any racists.

If there’s controversy, it’s over the magnitude of their communism and the extent to which they happily defend china etc. From what I’ve seen, their position is mostly that western media/propaganda hypocritically exaggerates issues. Even if their defences go too far, I think this is a valuable perspective (because beyond “fake news” rubbish, the media is absolutely biased). Additionally, capitalism, even if you think it’s the best system, could do with a critical beating at the moment.

Beyond all that, this is FOSS and the devs have been nothing but supportive of people making new instances, communities and forks for a diverse ecosystem.

Back to the rumour shit. I’ve seen a bit of it on the fediverse and basically concluded that it’s a social media habit from big social platforms that really needs to die. On bigger platforms, it’s more harmless as the umbrella organisation running the platform is untouchable and the most likely victims are big powerful people that have actually done something wrong.

On the fediverse, basically no one is powerful. Instead, you’ve got volunteers and people trying to do their best, however much they might need to learn something. And it’s not one big shadow company keeping the place together, it’s just people. So any rumour is likely to be friendly fire against the fediverse as a whole. So unless you know something and are willing to look into it, it’s probably not worth thinking about. If someone says something is the case, ask for receipts or evidence. Often there won’t be a reply. Asking as you have here isn’t bad, but the weirdly wrong rumour you’ve acquired probably deserved more scepticism based on its source.

The big exception to this is racism. If someone who is the subject of such things says it’s happening it should be presumed true.

The developers are communists. One of them maintains a collection of essays explaining their beliefs. There is a lot of drama and controversy swirling around. A lot of people putting words in each other’s mouths. If you want a straight answer, I would go straight to the source. The fact that you’re hearing third-hand that they’re white supremacists and nazis clearly illustrates how distorting the rumor mill is.

If you use lemmy.ml (the developer’s instance), I would recommend reading the front page sidebar. Under RULE #1 - “No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia”.

Here is a screenshot for reference, feel free to share with folks.

If the enemies of Nazis are religious, ethnic and sexual minorities - then lemmy.ml 's front page immediately puts to rest any notion they are associated with far-right ideologies.

That said, my best understanding is that one or more of the developers identify as communists/anticapitalist and are involved in lemmygrad.ml and /c/socialism.

And with that in mind, a platform like Lemmy is communist by nature: nobody owns it.
So it doesn’t matter who the developers are, really. What matter is who runs the server and instance you’re using. You, as a user, have a choice in how you wish to connect to the Federation.

Most of Reddits alternatives from when they did crap in the past were typically flooded with extremists, racists, etc because the offshoot platforms had the goal of being an absolute free speech platform and only banning for illegal stuff. If there was a big enough influx of normal people then it would typically start to balance out. IIRC a lot of those alternatives had creators that were err…more politically motivated individuals but they typically stuck to their guns about having a completely open and free speech platform for better and for worse. I like the Federated approach to this because that basically means you can set your instance up however you want, and if the direction that instance goes is not the way others want well you can defederate from them and have your own little federation/blob of like minded instances and this goes the other way too as if you dont like what another instance is doing you can defederate from it yourself. At least thats what I understand

I’ve heard the same allegations but heres the thing: Who cares?

Even if its true, just go to instance run by someone whos political ideology doesn’t make you uncomfortable. We’re not beholden to any one instance here, that’s the point.