I’ve just come back from a long shower in which I thought about your comments, and I think you’re right, hence I will be moving to Mastodon (#MastodonDE) soon (just called a friend, we’ll setup a server in Frankfurt or sth)
Just to legitimize my beliefs to some degree, here’s why I thought what I thought:
Sure, I use Soapbox and Rebased, but I’ve never given a penny to Gleason. As a matter of fact, I am very open about my opinion on him and tell everyone who asks about the software my instance uses or shows interest in Gleason’s software why I think they should rethink their actions. I do that on here as well as a moderator on r/Fediverse.
My instance is promoted on his website, so whenever someone who is a TERF or something along those lines (libertarian, alt-right, etc.) wants to join a Soapbox instance, they might just join mine and get introduced to an alternative viewpoint (an ultra-woke radical leftist perspective in which trans rights are, obviously, human rights).
My idea behind it was something like “just because there was one Nazi punk, punks didn’t stop identifying themselves as punks”, so instead of leaving something that is now problematic because it was annexed by the far right, you ensure that it won’t become another symbol for them. If they want to use climate change as a means to push for ecofascism, you don’t let them, if they annex Christianity to push christofascism, you don’t let them. If they develop software to promote “free speech”, you don’t let them. If more leftists and trans rights activists used Soapbox than any other group, the problem would shift to the side of Gleason: continue developing a software that now mostly pushes for something that is against his ideals, or stop entirely. I liked that idea more than moving away from a sinking ship and letting Soapbox develop into a larger and more radical bubble to the extend where instances using it become Auto-defederated.
However, I am not sure how realistic that was. Considering I needed a lot of help with bugs and stuff from Gleason, I also wasted lots of his time for which he didn’t get paid - another example of why possibly using software from problematic devs is a good thing rather than a bad thing. Yet getting more leftists to open Soapbox instances is probably harder than I thought.
Yet I cannot measure the amount of people that saw my instance and software, decided to give Soapbox a try, and possibly donated money to Gleason due to me, it’s probably zero people, but I can’t tell, and as long as the software my instance uses links to a GitLab under his name, your point stands and continues to stand indefinitely.
The argument that Lemmy’s frontpage displays lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml is valid, but it also displays ~70 instances that have no genocide denying opinions whatsoever, so the Lemmy mods are left having to develop software for people who do not support their ideology or opinions whatsoever.
But, you’re right: if there are alternatives, promote those, if there aren’t, make a fork. You shouldn’t support something with the name, logo, and link to where to donate by people who have problematic views to this degree.
Software, media, and especially social media software are tools, it’s our task as admins to ensure we maintain control over our platforms and do not inadvertently support increasingly problematic people or viewpoints by using their software. Even if the software itself seems to have none of the admin’s viewpoints hard-coded now, a future update can change that, and then you’re left to decide whether you want to go through the effort and migrate to another software, or accept the problematic updates and give people whom you do not support more control.
To remain independent of problematic admins means not to support or use their software.