To be clear, I’m not saying that they’re bad programmers, or that their code contributions are harmful. They’d probably be fine as contributors, but having them in charge is significantly detrimental.

In general, ideological authoritarians should be kept away from even the most minor positions of power, whether they be tankies, nazis, theocrats, or what have you. Even disregarding the potential harms that they seek to inflict on the world, they’re just constitutionally incapable of handling these roles well.

I’m confident that the threadiverse will eventually route around this particular damage, it’s just a question of how long it will take, and how much our momentum is impeded in the meantime.

As the admin of ani.social, I genuinely feel heartbroken after what had happened. Not only do I feel like I’m doing a poor job of building ani.social but I also feel like I’ve disrespected the work of the Lemmy developers.

You shouldn’t take this personally. The lead lemmy devs, nutomic and dessalines, are completely unhinged redfash. In addition to lemmy.ml, they also own lemmygrad.ml, the completely mask-off tankie instance. Tankies often have a weird hatred of anime fans, which is likely what inspired the defederation. In any case, they were never going to hear you out.

Nutomic and dessalines have a habit of engaging in this kind of self-marginalizing petty tyrant behavior, and many people avoid them and lemmy.ml because of their authoritarian, genocidal politics. While this is unfortunate overall, it does provide a fair amount of incentive to fork the project, and should provide a significant boost to any competent fork. Nutomic and dessalines aren’t exactly brilliant programmers or project managers, and their presence is more of a hindrance than a help at this point.