As I said above, I'm also on lemmy.ca. That has a donation link with funds going solely to the admins at that instance.
But even if every penny went to Chairman Mao Ze Lemmy or whatever, it wouldn't matter to me because I wouldn't donate a penny. So again, no one's profiting off my use.
Why should I care who made the software if they don't profit off my use of it? I'm not giving anyone at .ml a dime. Nor can they cash in and sell .ml the way (say) Reddit could do with its users -- at least not without risking blanket defederation and the flight of pretty much everyone using that site..
Neither Lemmy nor Kbin is a "system built for propaganda." They are systems built for community and communication. Which means they can certainly be used for propaganda, but also for many other things. I'm not going to write off an entire protocol just because a fraction of the people who use it are being jerks.
That's a bit much, isn't it? I mean, screw the weirdos at .ml obviously. But the folks at plenty of other instances, such as my home at lemmy.ca, are pretty chill, and startrek.website has some good goofy stuff.
You're not "supporting" bad actors on one corner of a platform if you use another corner of it. Like, I think we knew back over at Reddit that people who subscribed to /r/aww weren't "supporting" the crap going on at /r/jailbait when that was a thing. And critics had better cause to argue otherwise then, since Reddit profited off of visitors to both. By contrast, people on separate Lemmy instances are on completely separate networks, connected only by federation (or not, if an instance defederates) and each user's individual choices as to which other instances' communities to visit.
Lemmy, Kbin, others.... Let a million flowers bloom. And if one flower goes rotten, just trim it off.
I moved here two years ago. My tactic for initial pronunciation lessons has been to ride the SkyTrain and adopt the pronunciations used for station announcements.
Based on that, it's "LOW-heed"