@beforewisdom Reason to stay off the instance that developer controls. The RBlind instance has nothing to do with them. They have also been vocal about needing to use something that currently just works rather than wait for another platform to sufficiently mature, and Lemmy was pretty much the only choice; there's some of the discussion at https://www.rblind.com/post/1791750 .

Everyone has to make their own choices when benefiting from the work of awful people. Do we still accept a needed ride in a modern Volkswagen-made vehicle even though the company was started by the nazis? Should most of the Linux installs out in the world include support for the ReiserFS filesystem even though the developer turned out to be a murderer? Can I still live in my country despite it being founded on oppression and genocide? These sorts of questions are everywhere, and so many things in our day-to-day lives can be connected to the actions of truly bad people if we dig deeply enough.

I can fully understand not supporting things which directly reward awful people in tangible ways. I wouldn't use the Lemmy instance the developer runs, or contribute money to that project. However as open-source software like Lemmy effectively doesn't belong to anyone (or, to put it another way, belongs to *everyone*) I personally find it good to see such things used by people who can benefit without directly rewarding the person in question, and in fact used for the tangible benefit of communities directly opposed to his brand of bullshit.

@beforewisdom “Political extremist” is a worthless condemnation that can be and is applied to anyone who opposes the violently oppressive status quo of capitalism. parentis_shotgun has never pretended to be anything but a Marxist-Leninist, and lemmy.ml is explicitly ML.

I would be more concerned about the bigotry claim. However, when I looked into it, the only source is a contact of the sixth author of a paper parentis_shotgun linked once. I see no reason to condemn them for it.