If you go into a Nazi bar and order a drink without knowing it is a Nazi bar - at what point in the night after you’ve noticed you’re surrounded by Nazis do you excuse yourself from whatever conversation you may be having and leave? I don’t think you can really fault someone if they don’t notice immediately - the clues may be too subtle or unfamiliar dogwhistles. But once you know everyone around you is a Nazi - if you aren’t deciding to leave then and there you’re probably a Nazi. Same goes for Maoists and any other kind of genocide apologists you may find yourself surrounded by.

15 minutes on Lemmy is enough to realize most of the power users are Tankies even without knowing anything about the community or devs prior. Just like 15 minutes on Raddle is enough to know Ziq is an anarchist - straight from the horse’s mouth.

Have you vetted every single mod, admin, developer of every online community you joined to see if they are up to your political standards?

It is one’s civic responsibility to know who you are choosing to associate yourself with and especially those who you are trusting with a position of power especially when that power is the power of censorship. Censorship which will control the media you take in and can skew how you perceive the world. It doesn’t need to be a complete dossier but even a surface level review is very little effort and will generally find something if that something is egregious enough to be of concern.

I’m not particularly concerned by most milquetoast political ideologies or whether someone leans left or leans right to some degree and even less concerned if the individual makes an effort to be politically neutral despite their own beliefs. It’s the extremists that I care about. I choose not to associate with people who willfully and ignorantly defend well-documented genocides. The bar is set pretty low.

The degree of influence they hold is what is most important. The ideology of the devs for my media viewing software matters very little to me because their ideology is going to have no influence over me whatsoever. On the other hand the ideology of any admins or moderators in control of a social media platform I am taking part of matters very much because it will control the type of media I see or, more importantly, don’t see. It will also influence the kind of people I interact with. So it is more important that an admin remains politically neutral or that I’m at least aware of any biases that may exist.

Do you not vet your news sources at all? Should someone not care if they get their news from Stormfront or from the New York Times?

We are now on Kbin and can communicate with lemmy instances. Does that make one supportive of the ideology of the developers of lemmy?

The primary difference is I can call Lemmy a bunch of genocide supporting Tankies without being banned. Or maybe ernest is a Tankie too and I’ll be banned for this post.

This question is similar to asking if paying taxes makes one supportive of extremist ideologies because extremists also live in your country and may benefit from your taxes. There’s enough degrees of separation to safely say paying taxes doesn’t mean you support extremist ideologies by extension. Choosing to support the fediverse and some federation projects doesn’t mean I support all federation projects by extension.

I do not think every single user on Lemmy is a Tankie or Tankie supporter. Many of the users are likely ignorant and are only looking for an alternative to Reddit. Keeping the bridge open with Lemmy may allow those users to realize they’ve joined a Tankie space and to get out. In that case - cutting off Lemmy entirely may do more harm than good. Darkness hides better in shadows.

You make a good point but at the end of the day, the best you can do is choose the lesser evil, not let perfect be the enemy of good. We don’t know if Ernest has skeletons in his closet but we do know that lemmy does and they aren’t ashamed of them.