A drop in replacement fork? No, I've thought about forking it and rewriting in C# (my preferred lang, which might also have the effect of attracting more contributors (C# has WAY more active open source devs than rust)) but historically political forks tend to flame out and I know I probably won't have the time to support it myself if it came down to it which is the only way to keep a political form from flaming out

That being said, the infusion of their ideology has generally been kept to a minimum in the actual code. There's certainly concerns, like how they made the modlog less useful and potential to steer people to .ml unfairly with the main Lemmy landing site. But nothing overt

Lots do, but I personally use Boost

They hate anything the west supports and support anything Russia/china hate

I have no doubt in my mind that if Israel was supported by Russia instead of the US and keeping all else the same, they would be simping for them instead

Nope, they'll just disregard any credible source as "liberal", they'll refer to Wikipedia as "liberal pedia" or some shit if you try to use it against them

Hey! That's not an em dash! Are you a fucking human‽

Projection, MAGAts and Drumpy.

Name a more iconic trio

It's a feature of Lemmy where your instance will proxy image links for you, it can be useful in some cases to do things like bypass regional censorships (If you can access your home instance from your country, but not instance lemmy.example.com your home instance can proxy the image from lemmy.example.com so you can still see it (text is handled by federation already, so no proxy required for just text)) or to cache images in case an instance goes down

But it seems to be poorly implemented where it's end user experience is a pain at best, and the more aggressive it's set the more annoying it is.

Take for example this instance I'm currently on, infosec.pub, they seem to have it set to aggressively replace all image links including in comments no matter what.

So now my attempt to reply to this comment https://infosec.pub/comment/20590443 is utterly broken because the image service just doesn't like it despite me just wanting to link to the off-site gif link manually typing the markdown instead.

This is what that gif looks like proxied:

https://infosec.pub/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ibb.co%2F8gHKNsT1%2Fmichael-scott-why.gif

Eating ass and pussy in one step!

EFFICIENCY

"Chic Fil A must be using the vagina portion of the chicken in the food that they serve because it tastes similarly good compared to when I eat the vagina portion of a woman"

listen here, you little shit