>This also prompted me to contribute to PieFed[1], but at this point Fediverse for me does not feel the same anymore. That event left a bad taste in my mouth.

Email is federated and can be used to spread knowledge and subterfuge alike. That's the cost of freedom.

Like any other community, you need to find what you fit with and stick with that.We can't hope to grow if we quick every last alternative over solvable problems. Every centralized website had solveable problems too at one point.

>The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3].

if we're being frank: this is an issue we will always deal with as people on the fringes. Quote I take to heart:

>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong

All the normal people will stick to Tiktok/Instagram/Facebook/Reddit/etc. no matter what. When you hear all this bad press they are not the ones will who use their energy to move to an alternative. So by that definition, we are already "radicals" for moving off. So yes, we will get a lot of "wtiches" on the way and it's up to our judgement to find the "civil libertarians" to form community with. It's simply inevitable and friction we need to overcome if we don't simply want to give up to the centralized sites.

> The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting.

Why do we keep making this mistake of looking at the character of a person to judge the merit of the creations?

Sure every creation is a form of self-expression, software is not an exception. However, it doesn't mean that using the software makes you aligned in every way with the expressed views.

Yes, the Lemmy devs are morons who still defend the most abhorrent regimes. Gargron (the Mastodon dev) is a self-righteous prick who thinks he can control civil discourse by putting up barriers that can be easily overcome by any malicious actor. The Pleroma devs are sociopaths who can't even stand each other. The developer from PixelFed has the attention span of a toddler on a sugar high, keeps talking about "the power of community" but then goes on tirades against anyone that attempts to build upon any of his projects.

But at the of the day, absolutely none of this matters to the users. The software is free. The power is given to the user, not the developer. No one is asked to use the software only in a certain way, or to subscribe to any ideology before getting access to the source code.