I’ve been trying to make people aware of Lemmy on discord and Mastodon, but it’s always met with resistance citing “the devs are pro authoritarianism tankies.” Kbin seems to be picking up steam because of the developer baggage.
Do you feel like this negative perception will hamstring Lemmy’s growth?
It doesn’t help, but i don’t see it as a massive problem. the project is decentralised, free and open source, so as long as that codebase is open and you can choose to join a server instance that doesn’t federate with the more extreme groups it’s fine.
The influx has led to a big increase in contributors to the codebase, more moderators, and there are no central admins to worry about due to the way the network works, so it would be effectively impossible for them to censor unrelated communities.
I’m pretty auth-left on a lot of topics but those guys are crazy, they’re the far-left equivalent of far-right conspiracists and cant be reasoned with.