I think it’s already widely known that the developers of the Lemmy software hold questionable/extreme ideas, which they don’t hide. I think it is not good to give them money or extra publicity, since that could drive away new users when they find out. Also money better not go into extremist hands.
I think there should instead be a donation link to help the instance maintainers and moderators.
Ideally however, it would be best if instance owners joined hands and forked Lemmy under a totally new branding and used that on their servers instead, in order to completely disassociate from Lemmy the software and its developers.
EDIT: You all have good points. On second thought, maybe you’re right: it would not be decent to not donate them for their work. However I’m still not happy that genocide-deniers get this publicity :(
EDIT2: Just so that you don’t think I’m making this up, please see this well-researched list of sources from the user spirit.
I don’t agree.
The software is opensource, noone “owns” that kind of software, many people contribute to it, anyone can fork it, modify it, and setup their own servers with it, regardless of the belief of the one who started the project.
Lemmy devs made that software opensource, that equals to donating it to the entire world, they don’t control what you do with it, in any way, it’s not that you can’t use it if you don’t agree with their ideas.
Now, telling people to avoid the “main server”/“grad whatever” is fine, because those are the servers in which those “political views” are expressed, if that bothers you better to avoid it.
But any instance of it? It doesn’t make any sense, other server are not maintained by lemmy devs, and there can be those who don’t agree at all with their political views.
Same goes for donations, you don’t donate to people, you donate to the maintenance of the software that you’re here using.
Did you use reddit? Yes?
Well know that Reddit got investments from Tencent, a Chinese company, do you know what the Chinese government thinks of human rights, don’t you? Yet we’re were there using the product.
You can’t “categorize” everything and everyone based on the views of a few, but if you’re still set on it, then you should quit lemmy altogether, it wouldn’t be coherent otherwise, in my opinion.
Though if you want to fork lemmy, you’re totally free to do it, that’s what opensource is about.