I feel like I understand socialism quite well. On one hand you have heavy top-down states like the USSR, and on the opposite end of the spectrum you have libertarian socialism as championed by people like Noam Chomsky (i.e. co-ops and unions in a pseudo-market economy). When I say "socialism" I generally mean the umbrella that covers both the former and democratic socialist states since both benefit from concentrating power into the hands of a few (e.g. look at how Western countries control information dissemination). Libertarian socialism just doesn't exist outside of universities, so I tend to discount it.

There's not a lot of profit motive to be found.

If you build it, they will come. Look at all the shilling that exists on SM, such as on Reddit, Twitter, etc.

In its current state, it's essentially a hobby project. I work on Lemmy-related projects because I find it fun, not because I'm trying to overthrow capitalism or anything like that. Likewise, I use Linux because it solves my problems better than other systems, not because I'm trying to rob Microsoft or Apple of a sale.

I consider myself a pretty laissez faire libertarian, yet my interests align with socialists. If you look around on lemmy, you'll find people from all stripes here, from anarchocapitalists to tankies, and everyone in between. The only people I don't see much of here are Trump loyalists and fascists, and I think that has more to do with moderation than the nature of the software.

the intentions to it are certainly wrapped in expression

And it just so happens that people from a variety of political leanings value expression, they just want to filter out expression they don't like. That's where moderation comes in. You can have polar opposite instances with the same high level goals, just very different moderation. Look at the difference between Lemmygrad and Exploding Heads, two very different ideologies using the same platform with very different moderation.

And that's what I mean when I say software isn't politics.