As posted about recently in [email protected] and [email protected] it seems that @[email protected]'s stance on transphobia has not changed and his apology only seems to be that he was sorry he got caught and that someone leaked the DM. This is concerning for an admin of Lemmy.ml and the leader of the project. I don't think this means we should stop using Lemmy, it's open-source and even if they embed donation links, they can be stripped out in our fork. But it does make me wonder if we should consider defederating lemmy.ml on that merit. Since if they hold such views on trans issues, it's very likely they won't have any desire to act on that type of transphobia being expressed on their instance.
I know that Lemmy.ml has and does handle overt transphobia well, but I can't speak to their ability to handle less overt or thinly veiled transphobia, and this incident doesn't inspire much confidence either.
Edit: Since some people haven't seen the original. I decided to include it here. Warning, it contains transphobia, if you don't want to see that, don't open the spoiler.
CW: Transphobic talking points
I'd really like to hear Feedback from Blahaj's local community on this, I'm not as interested in outside opinions here so please try to refrain from top-level commenting if you aren't from lemmy.blahaj.zone (I will ignore them if you comment anyway from a remote instance).
I stated that using Lemmy (the software/app) doesn't / does not automatically mean you are supporting the original Lemmy devs. What I was mainly getting at was, when I said, "Since the software is open source the main simple, straight to the point difference is who is running what servers you are federated with." but that also certainly extends to the the server you are on as well.
No one is saying stop using Lemmy over this, in my opinion, it's because not one person or company owns all of Lemmy servers and communities. So the difference really lies with the specific people running your servers and communities. Can you trust them, can your instance provider trust them. Do you trust them or your instance provider.
That is the difference.