Hey everyone, I’m new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says “Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.”).
The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the “lemmy.ml” server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”.
So I thought I try that one when it’s from Lemmy’s own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?
Yeah lemmy.ml is full of commie bastards…😂😂😂
based
Why don’t you move if you are aware of it?
It’s phrased in a positive manner, sarcastically.
Indeed. Anytime someone asks for my ideology I always say “I’m a filthy commie.” 😂
You misunderstand: that is why we’re here.
This is only a few paragraphs in; on a larger screen you don’t even have to scroll.
This industrial revolution was precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinning machines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices.
What is so objectionable about that, or so hard about copying it?
Being required to read something for less than 60 seconds isn’t a violation of your rights- in fact, this is less than 1% of the time a EULA or ToS takes. It also takes less time and bandwidth than many of the AI-training Captchas nowadays.
If you have a problem with reading 30 seconds of something you have a feeling you might disagree with, the real problem is you not being willing to peek outside your bubble.
it’s not sketchy, it’s basically a captcha to keep down automated bot sign ups, and they link to that document in particular, i assume, because the devs are marxists and figure folks who are vehemently anti-communist would refuse and thus keep down their moderation load.
The most correct answer here honestly.
Censorship still exists in lemmy. I got banned from an instance just because I said some things that weren’t aligning with far left ideas. I was one of the active members of that instance (we were very few) on non political communities.
I made a political post and one of the administrators wasn’t OK with it and started insulting me and then banned me from the whole instance.
sounds like someone’s a nazi~
If I am a nazi then the whole planet is. I am from left and hate rich people. I was just expressing my view of how my country is letting people who can’t integrate to the society live in. Some people get citizenship when they have extreme views about womens and do not let their works when trying to get them welfare for not working.
I am not against welfare or immigration but the people will let in should benefit the society and not the opposite. If you check Switzerland, Japan, Nordic countries which have good immigration policies, the quality of life is way better. They do still have issues but not related to immigration.
“Can’t integrate into society” and then goes and supports Imperialist ethnostates, lmaoooo
You see, you are just insulting and making assumptions. I don’t care about ethnicity as long you adhere to the country values. Do not impose your religion in a laic country, it is not OK to disturb people with your music in public just because it is OK in country, do not take transport without paying because it is OK in your country, letting children cry or make noise late in the night isn’t OK ,… They are not exaggeration, I am experiencing them. I have had discussion with them and I am immigrant too and those behaviors are OK. I got responses like “it is normal that children make noise at night”. We are talking about running and crying for hours after 10PM.
Because you’re a fascist who deserves ridicule.
Let it be clear, you took an effectively anti-immigration stance on the basis of cultural differences, then praised Imperialist Ethno-States. Yes, it was correct to ban you.
Where did you see that? Even if it is the case isn’t that just censorship which the subject of this post to which I am responding? There were no discussion or anything and ban you from the whole instance (not just the community).
the people will let in should benefit the society and not the opposite. If you check Switzerland, Japan, Nordic countries which have good immigration policies, the quality of life is way better.
Right there. Anti-immigration on the basis of cultural differences and praise for Imperialist ethno-states.
Secondly, no, racism should be banned and censored to protect marginalized groups. Censorship of racism is a good thing.
I am not against welfare or immigration but the people will let in should benefit the society and not the opposite.
This is not a “leftist” tenet. For someone who ‘hates’ rich people you sure as fuck think exactly the way they do, piglet.
Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.").
Yes, exactly, you can host your own or sign up at one someone’s already hosts. The resistance is in the ability to choose which admins you trust and align with your views while still interacting with the rest of us.
The devs run their own and have their own rules and censorship but you don’t have to sign up there. Does that help?
Helps a lot, thanks for your answer!
.ml is treated as a bit of a bogeyman around here - most of my interactions with their instance and users has been good. I realise this could be different for others. But, yes, they are Marxist-Leninist so, obviously, their opinions and content will be closely aligned with their political philosophy. In my personal opinion and experience .world seems to have vacuumed-up a tremendous amount of people from the other site you mentioned (Robbit?). Their netiquette seems to have not changed. Also, myself and some others have noticed that on .world it’s not unusual to see comments that express views from outside what the majority believe get deleted. Fortunately the “mod logs” are public record so you can see why comments were deleted, whom by and what the original post/comment was. (I guess with the exception of illegal content that has to be scrubbed) I hope you enjoy your time here. Welcome.
(I guess with the exception of illegal content that has to be scrubbed)
Correct. There is a “purge” feature, but I’ve not yet had to resort such measures after several months of admining.
Thank you (and your fellow admins) for all you do and the time you sacrifice. It is appreciated, by me at least. I don’t even want to consider what vile obscenity you run the risk of exposing yourselves to and I’m happy you’ve not yet had to purge anything; but there’s some sick individuals out there and I’m glad you’re a bulwark against that.
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communism is good though? that’s the only reason i signed up with lemmy. also because .ml is too strict
Communism will win!
If you have an email address, you’re already used to the federated service pattern. When you sign up for a gmail, you’re making an account with Google to be able to send emails to anyone else with an email address. And there’s nothing stopping Google from making you fill out a “sketchy” application to get an account.
On Lemmy, each instance has its own set of rules, and if you don’t like them, you just make an account on a different instance.
As far as censorship, each “community” (analog to subreddit) lives on a certain instance and the rules of that instance apply.
Edit: also on the topic of communism, however you feel about communism in the physical world is irrelevant when it comes to the digital world. Free and Open Source Software makes the world go 'round, and is often communist in nature, even if done unintentionally. The pattern of people developing software for their own purposes, and then sharing it freely with others is the purest form of “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” That said, running an instance isn’t free, so make sure to kick your instance a few bucks if you appreciate their work.
Okay but implying that a given instance is the main community for Lemmy by promoting that it’s run by Lemmy’s developers and then making people repeat phrases from the Communist Manifesto just to make an account ain’t exactly the best first impression to give, no?
If they’ve been trained to immediately recoil at the word “communism”, and don’t understand how federated moderation works, then yes, it’ll probably scare away a good number of users. But on the flip side it’s not a for-profit business trying to hook DAU using predatory and emotionally exploitative patterns, so who cares about first impressions? The people who use Lemmy know why they’re using it.
It’s not the context of the article, it’s the presumption of solemn affirmation as a requirement to entry that is agregious, no?
You’re just restating what OP said. I refer you to my original post.
Yeah, you’re discussing communism specifically. I have no beef with communism or any other political ideology. Except perhaps capitalism, I might have beef with that. Digressions aside, the ask could be for quoting an article about Spongebob Squarepants and I would have the same grievance. Can we discuss the action itself, without going into a discussion about communism?
If you don’t like SpongeBob, pick a different instance, that’s federation.
To me this is like having a problem with the flags someone else has in their yard. Not your yard, not your flags. You’re free to not like their flags, but if your grievance is with the action of them peacefully demonstrating free speech, that’s a you problem.
Sure, maybe that guy also happens to work at the flag factory down the street. Probably explains why he has so many flags. Doesn’t mean he’s going to make you put the same flags he likes in your yard.
Edit: for the record, I’m not downvoting you, I think you’ve been very reasonable in this discussion
I appreciate you addressing the downvoting; I had noticed the trend and it’s very easy to jump to the “I’m under a personal attack” conclusion.
While I believe 107% that each instance owner can do what they want; if this given instance is the first instance to which most people will be introduced, being the closest thing to an “official” instance, should they have a duty, or at the very least, an interest, in maximizing the inclusitivity of their community?
Communism will win
☭
Thank you for posting, OP.
I was thinking about making an account here. Saw this and made one here, to see how the instance would feel like.
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Yeah when I joined IIRC I just had to write a sentence about why I wanted to join. The communism thing made me laugh though!
I wonder if it will be somewhat better here.
If you host your own instance, you have complete control over what gets posted. If not, you have to follow your instance’s rules.
one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do.
That’s just basic bot detection, like a captcha. Karl Marx’s works are out of copyright, and Lemmy’s lead developer is a communist, hence the choice.
it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
In general, instances don’t expect you to agree with their mods on politics or religion, but the content hosted on that instance would be somewhat biased towards the mods’ tastes. So you go from lemmygrad (far-left) to lemmy.ml (centre-left) to lemm.ee (centrist) to shitjustworks (centre-right) to lemmy.world (right-wing). Personally I’d avoid the first and last, but it’s up to each person to decide what’s right for them.
Is lemmy.world particularly right-win? It seemed mostly shitty liberal from what I’d noticed, thought admittedly I don’t actually pay much attention to people’s instances
They referred to ML as “centre-left”, so their perception is obviously very skewed.
…fair enough, missed that
Liberals are pro-capitalist, which inherently makes them right wing. American politics would have you believe otherwise, but American politics are severely skewed to make the populace accept the dominance and power of capital as an unassailable truth.
.world also makes a habit of denying ongoing genocides and shutting down any criticism of the parties involved in said genocides. Many of their users go out of their way to shit on left-wing instances and deride anyone left of them as a tankie.
Not to mention the sheer volume of woman bashing I’ve witnessed in gender-related threads.
So, all that considered, I think it’s perfectly fair to consider them right wing.
HILARIOUS!
So, the instance that demands you copy a sentence from the a communist’s manifesto ir not be allowed in- is considered “center right.”
Welcome to the Fediverse! Somebody has probably told you this, but I just realized that I forgot to hit “Post” before I went to dinner. Here it is anyways.
When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
The applications and copying of a particular line is a simple form of spam prevention. The fact that the line is from “The Principles of Communism" is probably because the owners of that particular instance (who are also the main developers) are communist. I believe they also run Lemmygrad, which is full on Marxist, and one of the more commonly blocked instances. Lemmy.ml is intended to be a more mainstream instance but like much of the Fedi leans hard left.
I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here
Lemmy is censorship resistant, but not censorship free. There is a difference. Censorship (or moderation, depending on your view point) happens at 3 levels, user, community, and instance. You can’t do much if other users find you obnoxious and decide to block you, but if you find the moderation of a community to be over bearing and if your current instance allows, you can create your own community from your current instance and mod it how you see fit within the guidelines of your instance. If you find your instance’s moderation to be overbearing, you can create your own instance and moderate it however you see fit. However, you will still be subject to the moderation policies of the communities (and their home instances) that you subscribe to.
In the Fedi you have absolute freedom of speech, but nobody is required to give you a soapbox or megaphone and nobody is required to listen to you.
why does the sign-up process on lemmy.ml involve having to copy a sentence from “The Principles of Communism”?
The OP is trolling.
Looks
Fuck me. It’s real. I’m at a lost of words…WTF.
You are free to self select a commune… Oops I mean a instance of lemmy that best reflects your values.
Lemmy’s main developers are communists, and lemmy.ml is one of the original Lemmy instances. “.ml” actually stands for Marxist-Leninist, and that instance has a very large number of political leftists.
Most likely it’s a combination of wanting to attract like minded people and deterring right-wingers & trolls. Of course, if you don’t like it, you can sign up to another instance. That’s the beauty of Lemmy, no single entity “owns” it.
.ml is actually Mali’s TLD. That it happens to also be an initialism for Marxism-Leninism is a coincidence.
That they picked it specifically is not a coincidence, though.
Right, but .ml doesn’t stand for Marxist-Leninist is the thrust of what I’m saying.
Except it does stand for that in this context. It’s like saying “the TV in twitch.tv doesn’t stand for television, it’s Tuvalu”, like, yes the ccTLD tv is Tuvalu’s, but twitch wouldn’t have chosen that TLD if it weren’t for the “coincidence”.
It does stand for Tuvalu. It is a happy coincidence for Twitch and any other media company that wants to use that TLD that such a seemingly in theme TLD exists (so long as you only use the abbreviation and never spell out what the TLD actually stands for), but .tv 100% refers to Tuvalu. There isn’t a Television-land that it’s reserved for.
I used to think it stood for machine learning.
Mali also happens to be under attack by US funded terrorists. The same pattern repeats itself over and over and over
The ccTLD was free when lemmy started. And developers like to test out things on free resources. The ccTLD just became paid last year.
Repeating the same thing for the 1000th time doesn’t make it the truth.
Yes they’re tankies, have awful censorship and are thin skin snowflakes. but making out the whole .ml ccTLD a marxists-leninist agenda just makes them see you as conspiracy nuts.
For what? a couple domains you’ve noticed to fit your narrative? Holy fucking batman. LMAO!
… when did I say everything on .ml domain is marxist-leninist? It’s not any kind of conspiracy lol.
I said they picked this one because it was an obvious reference. Apparently some other people have spoken directly to them and said it was purely because it was free. I’d be shocked if it was the only free option, so it still tracks that they chose it at least partially because of that connection.
They used that TLD because it had the same letters as Marxist-Leninist, not because they’re from Mali. They’re not from Mali.
So you are a mind reader now?
Sometimes people write their reasons for doing things down and other people read them and they don’t need to read anyone’s mind to know why they said they did something.
Why do people keep repeating this? Every time they do someone corrects them but they seem to just assume that’s what .ml is without so much as a google search about it.
Is it a coincidence or did they pick the Mali domain space for that reason? That’s the story I heard
To be fair, it is a large coincidence. I get that it’s wrong, but it’s widespread because the dots are close enough the brain closes the gap by itself.
It’s not exactly wrong, though. It’s clearly intentionally chosen because people are gonna connect these dots.
I’ve been told directly by the admins that it was picked because it was free. I don’t doubt that the reference wasn’t thought of, but the driving factor was that the domain is free.
Fair enough, then.
So .ml isn’t an intentional reference to communism?
The domain was initially managed by Sotelma, a Malian telecommunications company. After Sotelma was privatised in 2009, the .ml zone was redelegated by IANA to the Agence des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (AGETIC), a Malian government agency, and the process completed in 2013.[1] The agency then announced that it would give away .ml domains for free in partnership with Freenom with a view to improve the usage and the knowledge of the IT industry in Mali. It was the first African nation to start giving away domains for free.[2][3][4] The ten-year contract with Freenom expired on 17 July 2023. Since then the registry is operated by AGETIC itself and the free domain offer was discontinued. All paid Freenom .ml domains were migrated to the new system.
I understand that, but I’m asking whether a .ml domain was chosen as a quirky little reference to communism? Like, I can start selling contacts on contacts.contact. I’m curious about the intent
I’ve got no skin in this game, but i thought you could register a site on a TLD for a country other than the one you live in? That you can hunt around for one that matches whatever backronym your looking for now. From what other posters have said it sounds like the craters of lemmy .ml may have chosen the Mali domain because it was also a communist call.
It was free making .ml domains good for web development.
I’m sure @dessalines and @nutomic has a chuckle about it. Definitely a fitting TLD to use, especially for lemmygrad.
So, there are a few different categories of TLDs.
com
,net
, andorg
are among the original generic TLDs, which had the ideas of being for specific types of site, but in practice have always been available for pretty much any purpose.Then there are country-code TLDs, your
au
,ca
, andtv
domains. In these, the registrar of that particular country sets the rules. au domains require some specific connection to Australia, while Tuvalu has seen it as a good source of income for the country to sell.tv
domains to sites that want to have a domain that recognises their primary purpose as relating to video.In 2012, ICANN opened up the ability to buy new TLDs with almost no restrictions beyond the minimum 3 character length. Though technically
com
,net
,org
, etc. are considered generic TLDs, when you see people say gTLD they almost always mean those created under this new scheme. Examples includezone
(which my instance runs on),new
(owned by Google and restricted to people who use it to perform “new” actions, like Google’s own docs.new which creates a new Google Doc), andtokyo
(intended for use by things related to Tokyo, but not restricted to such. Other city gTLDs also exist, likemelbourne
which restricts to businesses and citizens of Victoria). gTLDs are very expensive to create, but whoever owns the gTLD can choose what rules it applies to domains registered under it.So if you want a domain name that calls to a particular thing, you can find a gTLD that matches that thing and is open for registration for your purpose, or you can spend big to register a gTLD for yourself, or find a ccTLD that’s open to those outside the actual country and which fits your purpose.
Mali’s a weird one because the reports were that .ml domains not related to Mali were being restricted last year, and fmhy.ml lost their domain over that. So it’s weird that lemmy.ml did not.
Inherently, no. That they picked it specifically is almost definitely an intentional reference.
Where do you get these insights?
Wait? What’s the reason? Like, the tld is for Mali, but lemmy and lemmygrad use it as “marxist-leninist” as a joke. Or at least that’s what I thought the story was
They were free up until 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ml
This part is funny
Employees for the United States Armed Forces regularly misspell emails—suffixed with the .mil TLD—with .ml. In 2013, Dutch internet entrepreneur Johannes Zuurbier took on the .ml TLD. He attempted to contact the United States government about classified information being sent to army.ml and navy.ml in 2014 through Dutch diplomats.[citation needed] The contents of these emails include crew and staff lists, maps and photos of installations, naval inspection reports, and passwords. Emails that were sent to the .ml TLD include the travel itinerary of chief of staff James McConville on a trip to Indonesia in 2023, information about Kurdistan Workers’ Party efforts in the United States, and Australian Department of Defence documents detailing issues with Australian F-35s. On 17 July 2023, Zuurbier’s contract expired and control was reverted back to the Malian government.
This part is funny
I am sorry but you are wrong: This bit is beyond funny.
Amazing. Wish the chinese had caught that first, like they caught the secret CIA websites that allowed them to kill hundreds of spies
It’s been speculated they paid for theirs because other sites and at least one instance had their free .ml domains revoked
??
Emphasis on speculation, but I found the instance that had its ml domain taken away
Maybe Lemmy.ml had a free domain but they got to keep it because they had it for a longer time. Who knows?
You spelt militant anti-capitalists wrong, its spelt “tankie”
All Marxists and Anarchists are “tankies?” Lol.
You’re catching on well done