I’ve been trying to make people aware of Lemmy on discord and Mastodon, but it’s always met with resistance citing “the devs are pro authoritarianism tankies.” Kbin seems to be picking up steam because of the developer baggage.
Do you feel like this negative perception will hamstring Lemmy’s growth?
Doesn’t really help with the reputation among non-users, but I found myself much more comfortable with the platform and seeing dramatically less of the “Mao did nothing wrong” kind of extreme views once the instance I joined decided to defederate lemmygrad, maybe recommend an instance that does that? Lemmy.ml is also kinda concerning but at least there the typical user isn’t really much of a problem, it’s just the moderation policy there, so I just try to avoid the politics and news communities from that instance.
In the long run, I imagine that some instances will just end up setting up their own forked versions, I know the owner of my instance has been talking about doing that although i don’t really know how that’s going or how likely such a thing is to work out.