Personally the sooner we rip off that bandaid, the better. .ml is far from the only activity pub project out there, but they are absolutely one of the most toxic forces on the fediverse and seriously harm the on boarding experience for new users. Nutomic is a bigot and a liar and Dessalines is a cringe keyboard warrior and nobody would put up with them if they weren't writing code. But if Lemmy is no longer the only mature option for federated social media, why should we continue to tolerate their shit?

I halfway agree with you, the first part at least: I don't mind if people have opinions I think are wrong or stupid. It is fine. Unpopular opinion, I also think letting nutomic have some kind of transphobia and talk about it is fine. The alternative is that every opinion that someone thinks is "incorrect" gets driven underground where no one talks about it, and so anyone who does hold that view can't really have a conversation about it or learn where and how exactly they are wrong. It just festers, and eventually they find more people who also think that way, and none of them talk about it in public because they've learned not to. It's just a stupid cultural feature.

This stance does make it kind of silly that Ada defederated from some other server because of one random user on there, saying that if the admins won't ban that user then how can she protect her users against ever seeing someone with a wrong opinion, and so bang, defederation. For some reason, the exact same logic does not apply to lemmy.ml even though the one random user in this case is also an admin. Who knows. But anyway, for my opinion she is making the right call in this case, and made the wrong call in the previous one-random-user case.

To me, the great sin of .ml isn't their bad opinions, although they are very bad. It is that they are unapologetically heavy-handed about manipulating the conversation to require their users to hold those opinions also. That to me is terrible. It's dishonest. It's like sending fake votes out into the network, it's like editing people's comments after they write them. It's just wrong. I think someone who takes that attitude towards other people's communications has no place on a shared network where we cooperate to get communication done, and the fact that those other people have accounts on their server and so "belong to them" or whatever doesn't in any way excuse it.

I don't know what's in their heads that they think "these users are ours, so we can do what we like with their content" is reasonable. Also, to be honest, I don't know why people put up with it. I think the propaganda that recasts it as "defending the space" from bigotry or Western propaganda has a lot to do with it, sort of putting up a distorted reality where what they are doing is actually some other, unrelated, thing, and so people look at it in that light instead. I don't know.

Anyway, I sorta agree with you on the main thing. nutomic holding opinions I think are wrong isn't a crisis. People can think what they want as long as they're honest about it and let other people be honest about it too. That's my feeling.

I think this is an inconsistent move from the Blahaj team. They defederated feddit over one transphobic user who the admins wouldn't deal with. And I agree with that decision. They should make the same decision here. If lemmy.ml won't ban Nutomic, then it's clear they aren't interested in creating a safe environment for trans people.

Regardless of any funding question, I think every instance should be questioning federation with .ml over their acceptance of Nutomic. And that goes double for any instance committed to inclusivity, because they have a responsibility to their users to uphold the values those users expect.