I'm hearing Lemmy itself, the .ml instance and some others are ran by Tankies that censor criticism of russia and china. What are your thoughts on this?
Just like with Stallman and his contributions to software, I can justify using Lemmy to myself due to it being open source and the devs not directly financially profiting from the spread of Lemmy (although it certainly raises their public profile).
devs not directly financially profiting from the spread of Lemmy
Aren't they though? Even if we ignore the obvious aspect of getting donations and exposure, they will also get more contributors for their project which will push them even further ahead of other competitors in this space.
I agree people might be blowing it a bit too much out of proportion at times, but then again we shouldn't pretend that it doesn't matter either.