For one, I don't believe this place fosters a hostile environment, although it's definitely a place where people love to tell you how you're technically wrong about something.
For another, I would guess that there are a very limited number of websites that would opt into this sort of anti-traffic behavior. Hacker news could certainly choose to honor it, but it also feels within their right to bypass the block.
I wonder if there's a sort of middle ground, where HN alerts the user of the redirect that would have occurred, but still shoots the user to the desired location.
But now you're getting into user flows and begging the question as to why the redirect is there in the first place.
I'd love to know more about the perceived hostility, even reading up on Mastodon left me with more questions than answers.
It's not really all that much of a moral conundrum. Marcan's belief - expressed a number of times on his Mastodon - appears to be that he can prevent other people from discussing something, for the sole reason he doesn't want it discussed. It's not a particularly defensible position in an open society.
In particular, he is upset that people on Hacker News tend to point out that a contributor on Asahi - Lina - appears to be a computer-generated anime alter ego of Marcan himself.
Me, I have absolutely no problem with Marcan having an anime alter ego, but I don't think it's entirely reasonable to expect people to refrain from noticing this and remarking on it. Marcan disagrees, and this is the source of the HN-Marcan rift.
(As I've remarked before, I do mind OSS projects listing fake contributors, for both ethical and legal reasons, but that's another discussion.)
Also assuming there is a "fake contributor", who cares under which names contributions are split up? The work still got one. Also, it is absolutely not your project, you don't get to demand people show their ID when they write code for a project.
If I contribute my code to an open source project, then I - as the copyright holder - agree to license my work under an open licence.
If I use an OSS project, I am using other people's copyrighted work under an open licence from them. Without that licence, I have no legal basis on which to use that work.
Only real people can (currently) hold copyright. If person X writes some code, but the licence (incorrectly) attributes the copyright to person Y, and person Y purports to give me an open licence to use that work, then - crucially - I have no license from the actual copyright holder (person X) to use their work.
Until an effective open source license is made, this code is not open source; it is completely proprietary. If person X chooses to sue you for copyright infringement, it is no defence to say that you're using it under a license from person Y, because person Y had no right to give you that licence.
This is a major ethical and legal problem. I would be very wary of the Asahi codebase.
As I said, very weird hangup to have, definitely not motivated by other reasons.