Yeah! Definitely, I understand that! But in my neck of the woods “tankies” are more just boogeymen that people throw around when they want to cast an entire group as immoral. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they aren’t gaining power either. It just seems like an appeal to fear (a reasonable one at that), but using illogical framing that doesn’t at all represent reality. That’s the fundemental crux of it for me. It may come to bite me in the future too! Growing up in conservative parts in the U.S. I’ve grown numb to people claiming others are communists - it comes across as more a technique for division than any real concern of community harm.

I’m not trying be an apologist for the devs opinions or detract from them as much as I’m trying to state that open source, and this project - given its git history - doesn’t appear to spread authoritarianism. I didn’t sign an agreement to violently seize the means of production upon cloning the repository. Had this information not been swirling around on reddit (and now lemmy) I would’ve never known that I had to “cancel” yet another thing.

I mean, personally, I’d rather fork it and make it into a vision that the people of Tucson want in their social media experience. Lemmy is a bit better architected, and I think the codebase is a bit more mature for such thing.