If Dessalines is receiving money from the Chinese or other fascist government to develop the Lemmy sourcecode, even if only partially funding the project alongside other funding from e.g. the EU, then I can well understand why he would want to see them kept happy - on top of what he may feel personally.

You people are so lost up your own asses, you will never find yourselves. Conspiratorial nonsense driven by your McCarthyism 2.0 with a complete lack of self awareness.

But I guess I shouldn’t expect anything more from a NATO funded user and instance, right? The Heritage Foundation and CIA signing the checks over here?

If Dessalines is receiving money from the Chinese or other fascist government to develop the Lemmy sourcecode

What kind of moldy McCarthyite garbage is this? If my Grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike.

You need to take a step back. You can’t see the forest for the trees. Our strength is in our diversity.

Hexbear defederated from us as we were discussing whether to vote on defederating them, which was a foregone conclusion. Our users can’t walk into their communities, because they are scared that we might poke a hole in their bubble. Perhaps these boogeymen that you envision are less interested in taking over the world, and more interested in simply having their own space on the internet.

In short, if a user on that instance were to accidentally walk into chapotraphouse (hexbear.net is also not defederated on that instance) and say something that would anger the trolls and get you brigaded (from their discord server), then that’s not the problem of the instance admin of sh.itjust.works to protect their users from such a mistake.

It’s not nice to put words in someone else’s mouth. I will always protect my users against being brigaded. Hence why we were about to defederate hexbear before they beat us to the punch. But we aren’t being brigaded by lemmy.ml.

You actually believe Dessalines is taking money from the Chinese government? Come on dude, that’s absurd. Occam’s razor: he just doesn’t like when people say shit he doesn’t agree with, and petulantly bans them. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just an internet moderation saga that has played out a million times before.

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.