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 published posts that included some word 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 developers themselve. When I wanted to sign-in 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?

  • Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works
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    6 hours ago

    .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.

    • davel@lemmy.ml
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      5 hours ago

      (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.

      • Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works
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        3 hours ago

        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.

  • Naadan@lemmy.ml
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    6 hours ago

    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.

  • juliebean@lemm.ee
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    7 hours ago

    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.

  • edric@lemm.ee
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    7 hours ago

    Join us at lemm.ee. It’s as neutral as can be, the admin is cool, and they leave blocking to the users instead of just defederating outright.

  • _ed@sopuli.xyz
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    8 hours ago

    The fact that each instance can have its own rules and culture is f a b. I love that’s one of the criteria. Mander.xyz should have a ‘identify all the creatures from the Triassic’ image captcha.

    • r00ty@kbin.life
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      1 hour ago

      How about freaking No!

      Lemmy might be written by communists, but nothing stops you using it on an instance that is not.

      Also, there’s other threadiverse apps out there that work fine with the federated network if you really don’t want to use one created by “communists”

      I don’t think making this place a total echo chamber, by telling people to “go back to reddit” is in any way a good thing.

  • Sprokes@lemmy.ml
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    8 hours ago

    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.

      • Sprokes@lemmy.ml
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        4 hours ago

        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.

          • Sprokes@lemmy.ml
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            30 minutes ago

            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.

            • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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              26 minutes ago

              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.

  • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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    9 hours ago

    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.

    • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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      8 hours ago

      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

  • socsa@piefed.social
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    10 hours ago

    Because dessalines is legit in competition for the most cringe person on the internet.

  • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org
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    10 hours ago

    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.

  • Windex007@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    That’s an interesting description of lemmy.ml

    I’ll just say that hiding not only the instance, but also any comments from any user registered with that instance has made my Lemmy experience about 1000 times better.

    Edit: oh shit I’m thinking lemmyGRAD.ml lol

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    11 hours ago

    To their credit, I think the Principles of Communism thing is partially meant as a floodgate, since the devs really do believe in their project and want to avoid over-centralization from everyone defaulting to one instance. They know many people will go “What the hell? No!” and go somewhere else and that’s exactly the point. I’d be surprised if they really thought it would get almost anyone to engage with Marxism with the prompt, especially since you can copy the first sentence of the text and not read anything else (and even just reading it is not engaging with it). I think it’s more like a little joke.

    Also, copying a sentence of your choice to a pamphlet is not a pledge and I think it’s silly to view it that way. If it helps, iirc, one of the sentences that appears is “No.” and they will accept that as an answer.

    But assuming this was “promoting an ideology directly,” would you find it less sketchy for an instance to promote ideology indirectly? Because if you aren’t directly doing ideology, that just means you are indirectly doing it (sometimes very deliberately). Personally, I appreciate transparency.