The devs hold extreme political views. They are on board with the Tiananmen Square massacre being necessary and shit like that. Like this post says though, there are plenty of instances that are totally run by normal people. Additionally, the Lemmy server code is open source, so that helps to ensure that it isn’t doing anything nefarious behind-the-scenes.

https://lemmy.ml/post/1167199

More details in the link above, here is the introduction:

"My concern is that users are being banned and content is being removed on lemmy.ml citing a rule that is not publicly stated anywhere that I have seen.

Moderators of lemmy.ml are removing posts and comments which are critical of the Chinese government and are banning their authors."

Source: https://kbin.social/m/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/t/47012/-/comment/196579

Text:

Here is one of the Lemmy devs denying that the Uyghur genocide in China is happening:

https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xq49ct/deleted_by_user/iq954mu/

"The Uyghur genocide is as real as white genocide."

Here they are again denying it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xq49ct/deleted_by_user/iq951cv/

"The holocaust was a genocide that actually happened, with all the evidence that goes along with it. There is no Uyghur genocide."

"Do you believe in anything as soon as the word "genocide" gets attached to it? What about "white genocide"? Are you a white genocide denier?"

And just so nobody can deny that parentis_shotgun is a Lemmy dev: -

“I’m one of the devs of Lemmy” https://i.imgur.com/5kp9BP0.png

Direct links to the posts will not work but still exist on the user’s profile page: https://old.reddit.com/user/parentis_shotgun/ - hold PgDn until comments stop loading then Control+F. In fact feel free to peruse their history in general - it’s quite interesting.

One of my favorite posts is their defense of the government of North Korea in /r/AskTankies: https://old.reddit.com/r/asktankies/comments/tb1836/okay_but_dprk_seriously/i04d1wu/

Now ask yourself why would someone who is not a Red Fascist Tankie piece of shit be answering questions on behalf of Tankies in /r/AskTankies while defending a totalitarian regime? Is it… perhaps because they’re in support of such a regime because they are in fact a Tankie piece of shit?