But are you suggesting this somehow impacts Lemmy?

Mostly irrelevant in this context, because the topic at hand is the developer denying that they condone these practices and insisting that it is a manufactured narrative. You are replying to a rebuttal of this.

Your opinion is a completely fair one to have, but we don't need to shift the conversation back to it every time someone provides a rebuttal to "the dev never actually said that" with receipts.

Yeah I know, I don't think them being tankies is really a problem for Lemmy as a whole. I was just annoyed that all they had to say is "no we aren't tankies" and people just took them at their word lol

I guess it kinda matters in that people like me certainly won't be giving any code contributions, which for an open source project can be critical to its long-term health.

But devs also tolerate and use tons of code and the licenses that Richard Stallman wrote, even if he's a huge creepball that a bunch of other free software orgs had to back away from.

So we'll see. I also wouldn't rule out a fork of it just so that it's officially ran by a less controversial group.

It impacts as long as those problematic instances are federated