Sorry, but in my book, actions speak louder than words. And the actions here are very clear: they made a useful service that benefited people. They paid for it out of their pocket and suffered major inconveniences in their personal lives to keep the service operational and to uphold their ideals of transparency. It’s a net positive contribution to the world, even if you account for the offensive/hurtful jokes they made along the way.

You can spend hours talking about what people should or should not have done. Critiquing others from your high horse is easy, but it gets you nowhere. As another example, take Lemmy’s developers. You could go on for hours denouncing their tankie/authoritarian views, but it won’t change the fact that they created an anti-authoritarian and censorship-resistant platform that benefits many people.

What I value personally is a consistent moral framework. What someone thinks on isolated issues or what kind of offensive humor they like is a lot less relevant to me. Do I disapprove of it? Yes. But do I condemn them for it? No. Because actions speak louder than words.

It’s probably good that a free and private email service might shut down because… they registered a few edgy domains that they no longer use? Wow