Just going to address your first paragraph: I sincerely doubt that the devs are receiving money from a fascist government. I simply don’t think Lemmy is big enough yet to be on the radar of e.g., the Chinese government. Yes, maybe there are some Wumaos on here. My understanding is they get better training and autonomy these days, so it’s certainly possible. But most of the comments look more homegrown. I just doubt the Chinese government (or any similar government) would care to the point of trying to pay off devs, and it’s not their MO anyways.

The sad part is that this situation was entirely predictable a year ago.

The Lemmy devs (who also run lemmy.ml) made no secret of who they are and what they believe. Especially dessalines.

I do think they have made a very good piece of software. And I think we’re better off here than on Reddit. At least it is more difficult for one asshole to ruin everything. We have tools to block people and instances, so it doesn’t matter as much even if they’re in charge.

I worry that if lemmy.ml continues to be run the way that it is, then it will bleed over into the software side, and we would be forced to fork Lemmy. So far though, despite running lemmy.ml like assholes, the actual development seems fine – not too different from any other open source project (I only remember that one issue where dessalines completely failed to understand why a user would want to block an instance).

The irony is that, despite creating a tool with what seems like very socialist principles (it gives users & communities a lot of power, and doesn’t centralize that power with one person), those principles are often lost on the devs in favor of authoritarianism. Hence the term: “tankie”.

AUR tends to work really well for me. There are binary packages for almost every software that I use. Things do go wrong occasionally, but when they do it’s almost always solvable. AUR packages are just scripts, so you can go and fix the problem yourself and then tell the maintainer how you did it.

Yeah I got permabanned too.

I still post there occasionally. I made 4 new Reddit accounts from behind 7 proxies, but they all got banned due to browser fingerprinting. But I wised up and now the 5th one’s still not banned even though I access it from my home IP. I really try my best not to give such a hostile company more content, but there’s still a few local subs and specific content that isn’t big enough yet on Lemmy.

They were too busy getting removed to just work.

I’ve been using zsh with oh-my-zsh for almost a decade, but sounds like I might want to try Fish + Starship.

I registered on lemmy.zip. Sign up requires you to apply and freeform write something in a text box to prove you’re human. I put in a really bad dad joke, and my application was approved almost immediately.