As posted about recently in !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works and !fediverselore@lemmy.ca it seems that @nutomic@lemmy.ml's stance on transphobia has not changed and his apology only seems to be that he was sorry he got caught and that someone leaked the DM. This is concerning for an admin of Lemmy.ml and the leader of the project. I don't think this means we should stop using Lemmy, it's open-source and even if they embed donation links, they can be stripped out in our fork. But it does make me wonder if we should consider defederating lemmy.ml on that merit. Since if they hold such views on trans issues, it's very likely they won't have any desire to act on that type of transphobia being expressed on their instance.
I know that Lemmy.ml has and does handle overt transphobia well, but I can't speak to their ability to handle less overt or thinly veiled transphobia, and this incident doesn't inspire much confidence either.
Edit: Since some people haven't seen the original. I decided to include it here. Warning, it contains transphobia, if you don't want to see that, don't open the spoiler.
CW: Transphobic talking points
I'd really like to hear Feedback from Blahaj's local community on this, I'm not as interested in outside opinions here so please try to refrain from top-level commenting if you aren't from lemmy.blahaj.zone (I will ignore them if you comment anyway from a remote instance).
They do indeed have a history of problematic moderation in general, though I'm not sure about how much they let thinly veiled transphobia slip there. There's not much of it to begin with and can be difficult to spot at first.
I pointed out in the other comment two alternatives to the Linux comm. !linux@programming.dev and !linux@sh.itjust.works, both have decent activity and could be more active if more users started posting.
They both have tens of thousands of less users. As for the moderation, I know they can be bad at that, and difficult to appeal to, but I've yet to see anything transphobic.
Subscriber wise they are vastly different in size, MAUs aren't as drastic. Which is largely what matters.