Voat was born out of several questionable subs being banned from reddit so naturally the userbase was into very questionable things. That's why they failed so hard
the great thing is that it has absolutely no bearing outside of that one instance. they have no control over anything that happens in lemmy.world or any other instance, if they are even exerting it over their own
I have no love for tankies and detest them, but there is a key fundamental difference. Tankies by definition simp for communist or formerly communist regimes and ignore the authoritarian crackdowns and human rights abuses.
Nazis are in favor of the human rights abuses and want genocides. They have a racial superiority complex and desire an ethnostate.
One group ignores and makes excuses for detestable behavior. The other celebrates and advocates for the detestable behavior. It's a very important difference. I don't like either, but a tankie isn't going to try and kill me for being an undesirable. They just won't defend me if the government unfairly takes action against me or imprisons me.
Not saying I feel one way or the other, but complaining someone doesn't dislike one group enough because they dislike another group more is sort of a weird argument. "I bet you'd feel differently if we were talking about something else entirely, you hypocrit." doesn't really hold up.
Technology can be used by anyone for good or evil regardless of the morality of the creator.
Even if the devs were literal Nazis, someone could just hard fork the software, and everyone could switch and continue on with their day. That's why free software is beautiful.
Y'know...it matters, but it doesn't. Technically they wouldn't have to let a neo-Nazi instance play with others if they didn't want to, and come to that they could take the same route as Truth Social and just close it off from the rest of the Fediverse.
The difference is, VOAT was a single website, whos owners could do anything they wanted and enforce their horrible shit. Lemmy is not controlled by the people that created it, by its very nature it cant be. So it doesn't matter what they believe, it is completely irrelevant to how Lemmy functions.
Maybe you are thinking of Lemmygrad.ml. The ML there stands for Marxist-Leninist (just kidding, I think). Lemmy.ml is free software tankies. I'm one of those myself, so it must be ok ;).
It's there any direct discussion about this besides that one post talking about some posts being removed? I'm not saying that person's concerns aren't valid, but I see a lot of discussion that all leads back to one person. It kinda feels like an echo chamber at this point. Lemmy mod logs are public, someone just needs the time and motivation to look through them if they want to search for their own evidence.