I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, …
As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.
I posted a comment in this thread linking to “https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs” (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.
This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:
Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say?
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”
The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting for example in /c/[email protected] where there’s nobody to discuss anything with.
I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
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Yeah, I’ve been banned because I said something about Uighur genocide, on the other hand I’m wondering about dessalines’ nationality and his knowledge about communism, it’s easy to be communist of you only touched it online, I for example live in post communist country and remember some of it, old people are talking about it, it wasn’t that good
I’d “understand” if everything would be transparent and they admitted it’s tankie instance and you’re banned because you don’t like China but no, everything is saying their own COC
Do we want someone like that not only administrating the oldest Lemmy instance but developing the whole platform?
Everyone who wants communism has never lived it, and those who have don’t want it.
It sounds great on paper, but humans will always have those who wish to hold power.
it’s easy to be communist of you only touched it online
This is almost certainly the case, these kids read about the ideals of communism and think it sounds great, and they know about how things are in the USA and think that’s bad. Two fair assessments, but they then deduce that the because capitalist America is bad, then Soviet Russia “communist” China must be good, ignoring the fact that every person who survived/escaped those reigemes described them as hell.
every person who survived/escaped those reigemes described them as hell
This is patently false, you’re either mistaken or lying. During my PhD in a western European country, I had the pleasure of working with several Chinese students and supervising the thesis of even more of them. Of all the Chinese students, all except one returned to china after finishing their studies because they prefer life in China. I made it a point to ask about their opinions on the government, and the approval rate of their government is so much higher than the approval rates of governments that we have in the west. If you look up any poll on this topic you’ll find the same conclusion: Chinese people are on average happier with their government than westerners are with theirs.
About the USSR, a majority of the citizens were against the dissolution of the country and a transition to liberalism, so again, you’ve been misled or you’re lying.
First of all, anecdotal evidence. Also survivorship bias. One - the type of person that goes to study abroad is usually wealthy, well off. Two, your family is collateral so you are guaranteed to return. Saying negative shut about the regime can get you in trouble so they’ll sing praises of it - just like in Russia.
Second, the USSR thing is complete dogshit and you can see why now in Ukraine. People hated the russians. Speaking russian in western Ukraine after it disolved could get you threatened or punched in the face. Same thing with the Baltics. Same thing with Poland.
Dude, you’re absolutely delusional if you think that the conversations I’ve had with Chinese co-workers and FRIENDS (which you clearly never had) are swayed because “their family is collateral”, as if the Chinese government was punishing families for their children emigrating. That’s absolutely insane bullshit on the level of “Chinese hivemind” conspiracy. Regarding your “anecdotal evidence” claim, I beg you to please look at any poll on the topic.
The way they arrived to western Europe isn’t because of “rich families”, it’s because of an agreement between a university in Western Europe and another university in China where China would pay for their tuition abroad. So much for the fucking oppressive state huh?
Funny that you bring up Russia, I also happen to know people there who have no problem telling me in private (as Chinese friends could do) that Putin is borderline fascist, oligarchic, kleptocratic scum, and I fully agree with it. Almost as if, in private, people could voice their actual opinions.
Wow, people hated Russians in post-soviet countries after decades of anti-russian propaganda, what a surprise. I wonder why the Polish were capable of forgiving Germans for the literal Holocaust, but not Russians for a bloodless invasion of their country in the context of a war against Nazis… Almost as if the hatred was manufactured and it was an unjustified form of racism…
Yeah, okay, you are just a tankie. Fucking bloodless invasion my ass you ignorant moron. You are insulting the history of my country and my people. I won’t be wasting any more time on you - you don’t deserve the wear on my phone screen from replying to you.
Bye bye, revisionist racist prick. 3000-7000 deaths is absolutely bloodles for an invasion of half a country, keeping in mind that there were plenty of actual Nazis in Poland. Maybe you’re just one of them, since you condemn so much more a bloodless occupation than fucking Nazism.
Ah yes the tankie forgetting about Katyn in their assessment and countless other massacres. You heard it here folks, the war in Gaza is bloodless. So many nazis we need a denazification special military operation, huh?
What is this link supposed to tell us?
Maybe open it and read it ?
I now understand why you get downvoted.
I for example live in post communist country
I don’t believe you. I think your country was state capitalist, and would have described itself as economically socialist rather than communist.
I live in an actual post communist country, Australia, and everyone here understands that when capitalism arrived here, it was genocidal and environmentally destructive.
In what universe was australia ever a communist country?
Take your medication dude
I’m all for defederating from tankie instances. They suck.
Yes, we should all recognize that Lemmy.ml is a tankie instance.
Reread OP
Thanks for bringing this up, it’s really needed.
Your example is just one of many I’ve seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.
I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.
I don’t think we can help them. They’re praising the authoritarian state capitalist nation of China as an ideal form of government just because the country lies about being socialist. (The “Chinese characteristics” are billionaires and capitalism.) They need cult deprogramming to re-enter reality. Just like the Trumpanzees who think Donald did a good job.
For the rest of us, a team should fork the code and the rest of us cut them loose. I came to Lemmy to get away from delusional far-right redditors. I don’t want to read similar idiotic doublethink from “communists” who love capitalism and think North Korea has done nothing wrong.
The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign
That’s too subtle a statement. It is a willful, bad-faith, full-on attack on objective reality via the rewriting of historical facts, redaction of massive volumes of information and constant aggressive, knee-jerk silencing of voices.
As such, it can also be described as a malicious assault on the mental health of individuals and society as a whole. Their actions a clear example of the type of repressive, miserable society they would have us live in, if given the chance by hook or by crook.
Makes you wonder if they are supported, or directly controlled by either china or russia
Yet so few people see this reality. And engage in pointless fights where there is absolutely nothing to gain but only lost time and effort. Meanwhile this strategy seems to work very successfully and not only here…
As a marxist, I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism. And I don’t even understand how people can stay with “Stalin was not so bad”, knowing that he never planned to apply the last state of the Communist theory, and even if it did, massacre are not acceptable (sounds obvious), same applying with China and their open market.
In my country (France), Stalinism isn’t a thing, all communists are against what happend in USSR, and most are anti-china.I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism.
It’s because tankies are just contrarians that use communist ideology as a vehicle to be anti-west / anti-United States (anti-liberal democracy). Tankies will defend any cause or ideology that is against ‘the west’ even if that means happily ignoring the blatant homophobic, genocidal and repressive authoritarianism.
That describes them well imo
wow this is literally them
It’s called second campism, and it’s been happening for a long time, it just used to make more sense when it could actually seem like there was two hegemonic camps during the cold war (still an oversimplistic view).
Now they just support any regime that’s anti-US/the original capitalist camp because they have no hegemonic camp of their own to support, just a broad smattering of authoritarian regimes with completely different ideologies.
And capitalist regimes. The Russian Federation was literally founded by a betrayal of a reformist movement in the USSR, and China consulted with Milton Goddamn Friedman on their economy, ending up with billionaires. I even saw .ml users crying about Russian *oligarchs" having their assets seized (“stolen,” as they said), and unironically citing Matt Taibbi. Not even “back in the day” Taibbi, but literally The Twitter Files. Using bought & paid for corporate propaganda to make their point.
They’re just campists. I don’t want to run afoul of a “No True Scotsman” situation, but fuck, for people who seem to think they’re the Only True Socialists, they’re willing to drop socialism in an instant if it means they can be edgy dickheads on the internet.
Thanks for shedding light on this! I will do my part and no longer post in communities tied to lemmy.ml!
Semi-O/T
There’s censorship just for having a different opinion. When you challenge someone’s belief in any subject… or just simply have a disagreement, you’re getting banned. Lemmy is following in the foot steps of Reddit in the sense that it appears that the left/progressives want to be segregated and keep the division. No dialogue, no meeting in the middle… just ban anyone who threatens their bubble.
I would suggest trying to get out of the english-language (American-centric) internet bubble with respect to dialogue, “challenging beliefs” and the broader nature of what you consider to be censorship.
Focus on real-world (internet can be a red hearing) examples of cases (particularly in Asia, Africa but Europe and LATAM too) that contradict your statements around “just ban anyone who threatens their bubble”.
Then consider the what are the real world consequences of tankie propaganda, again better to avoid US narratives/examples. Just try a good faith approach to this question.
I have no idea what you’re suggesting… but just about the entire non-western world laughs at Reddit-type leftists because they can’t come to terms with reality. So much so they (Reddit-type leftists) refuse vehemently to acknowledge that it is their feelings that they’re putting before facts of life. Refuse facts, refuse reality.
I mentioned elsewhere but here’s a copy and paste:
It is far more than just that. Removing comments is one thing, mass-banning from many communities at once despite never even having commented in them at all is another, but the real issue is using database manipulation to delete the log entries as to why the comments were removed after the fact.
Even if unintentional, which strains credulity, this is some spez-level stuff going on, where we have the option to either take what a single person (who does not seem inclined to follow their own stated rules) offers, or else we can leave. Many are choosing the latter, and like the Rexodus, making the situation known to others as well in the process.
“Criticizing China” was merely the spark that lit the match, with the situation offering proof of what apparently people have been suspecting for some time now.
As others have said, the only option available currently is to leave the instance and re-create your beloved communities elsewhere. The Lemmy.ml Admins also happen to be the ones actively developing the Lemmy code base, and they’re not gonna change because they feel entitled to do whatever they want, and technically, they can because they run the instance.
My best advice is to move on from the instance.
Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.
Lemmy.ml also has the funny quirk that it doesnt have a proper legal imprint or team list afaik. So we don’t have actual transparent information on who is on that instances admin team and who is not. Iirc only one of dessalines and nutomic is on that admin team anymore.
This Dessalines?
Creeping the admin logs to find out who dared down vote him.
If you want to get away from the Lemmy codebase entirely I can vouch that mBin works quite nicely. I’ve been on fedia.io for months now and only once or twice hit some kind of technical problem, which was resolved quickly.
Agree and just to add to this: the official list of mbin instances
Don’t forget about piefed it’s amazing and lets you subscribe to posts and/or comments. Theres someone who contributed Lemmy API compatibility to use some Lemmy apps with Piefed instances. Its still very early but so far its extremely promising and the codebase is in python and the main developer is focused on ensuring it wasy to contribute. Check it out: https://piefed.social
Code is on codeberg which is great too https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi
Are there mobile apps yet? Because if no that’s one huge advantage Lemmy still has over Kbin/Mbin, and it’s why I switched to Lemmy when Artemis started having issues (it went down completely since) instead of going back to Kbin.
MBIN FTW. KBIN has been “We are working on resolving the issues” for some days now. I hope Ernest is ok.
I have a login for lemmy.ml, as I have several from when I was switching over from Reddit. I’m thinking from what I’m reading here, that it’s not an instance I want to associate with.
Yeah, nothing against Ernest but developing and running kbin is just too big to be a one-man show.
Dude’s a superhero, and needn’t be a ‘lone ranger’. Agreed. As the Fediverse expands, it will be the work of many; it just has to be that way.
I do hope he eventually finds a balance that works both for him and for us. I greatly prefer Kbin, when it’s, y’know, up.
Thanks for illustrating that I was banned from not just one community I don’t participate in aside from upvoting, but several that I have never even visited. All for “Rule 4,” which as far as I can tell is spamming ads, which I have never done. I’ve tried to message the mods of those communities, but haven’t gotten any kind of response.
It’s really disappointing that this is how Lemmy seems to work. As a new user, I had to actively persevere through the .ml bullshit to understand that lemmy as a whole is not like that. But it’s almost impossible to be a progressive (but not full blown anti-western communist) on an awful lot of this platform.
It really does the other large instances a disservice that those mod/admin practices are so commonplace.
I know the answer is to defederate/block them, but I genuinely find the news and posts interesting, and .ml was one of the instances that I was first looking into, because I literally didn’t understand how the fediverse worked but kept hearing “just pick an instance, there no wrong choice since you have access to all the other instances.”
But even those posts about topics I am educated in and care about, it all just literally seems to be a vessel for a specific type of (dis/mis)information in the comments, which actively preys on the gullible and shuts out even moderately different views.
Edit: mobile formatting fix
It really does the other large instances a disservice that those mod/admin practices are so commonplace.
Agree.
On the other hand nowadays now most of the communities are on LW (https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active) so at least it’s a bit better compared to a year ago.
It’s a good trend, but I still think it would behoove the admin of more reasonable instances to make it more obvious that there is a sizable and aggressive group of people with nearly unlimited (internet) power, and making it clear that they do not associate at all with those instances/individual practices.
There is a huge dearth of naming and shaming bad actors, and it’s going to reach a size where people won’t do their research as I did, but will assume that all of the fediverse is run by authoritarian Communists and (not) engage based on that.
And that wouldn’t be an unfair understanding, given who the creators of Lemmy are, who their disciples/mods are, and their influence across the platform.
Lemmy really runs the risk of being “left wing Truth Social” otherwise.
Lemmy really runs the risk of being “left wing Truth Social” otherwise.
Indeed. I’m still on /r/RedditAlternatives to talk about Lemmy, and I usually have to explain that most of the instances do not share the political stances of the main devs.
it would behoove the admin of more reasonable instances to make it more obvious that there is a sizable and aggressive group of people with nearly unlimited (internet) power, and making it clear that they do not associate at all with those instances/individual practices.
The situation here is a bit tricky: instance admins still have to debug the software (as they are the ones using it), and they have to interact with the Lemmy devs. Getting too much friction with them could break that collaboration, and leave everyone with worse software.
https://sublinks.org/ is still under development, hopefully once it will be ready instance admins will have another option to potentially replace Lemmy
I hear you.
I’d just offer a slight counter, which is that if the devs want their software to succeed, they should probably work a little harder to police how their politics overflow, or work harder to contain them. And bringing these issues into the full light of day may help with that, or at least convince them to crack down on bad actors they a currently allow to function with impunity.
convince them to crack down on bad actors
The Lemmy devs have expressed several times that they don’t want to interfere on how people use their software (e.g. admin the instances and mod the communities).
Which is good (and allow us to say that they can’t indeed interfere with Lemmy as a whole), but that also means that they won’t be the one “cracking down on bad actors”
https://gui.fediseer.com/ might be something along those lines, with a chain of trust between instances
This seems like a by design thing.
I agree completely. Blocked the instance only now despite them becoming more and more annoying each month.
Tankies are modding many communities here as well. The solution is to fight them tooth and nail.
Oh they are all over the politics communities. Both as mods and as trolls.
People are naive if they think the .ml admins and devs don’t intend to keep their thumb on the Lemmy scale. More instances need to take this threat seriously and defederate from .ml, and possibly even fork the Lemmy repos for when the devs inevitably decide they want to start building quiet exploits into the code. There are serious cyber security implications here that people are sleeping on
Yep. Something needs to change if we want Lemmy to be something besides a place for Soviet simps to hide from criticism. Authoritarianism cannot be tolerated.
Authoritarianism cannot be tolerated.
Except when it suits your agenda, in that case it’s not only tolerated, but actually encouraged! :)
I’m so bored of that line. At least come up with something different.
You’re bored of people pointing out your hypocrisy?
But it’s not surprising, you’re not supposed to be entertained by it, you’re supposed to think about it…What is there to think about? I complain about people who support Soviet-style dictatorships having full control over online platforms moderating exactly as one would expect, and I get told by Random Guy On The Internet #368,452 that I’m apparently a hypocrite because wanting action to be taken to stop authoritarians from controlling social networks makes me the real authoritarian or something. All this to “suit my agenda”, which in this case is wanting to be able to say that authoritarians are bad.
God forbid I find arguments like that incoherent and unworthy of taking seriously.
I’m apparently a hypocrite because wanting action to be taken to stop authoritarians from controlling social networks makes me the real authoritarian or something
No, you’re a hypocrite because you see “them” censoring “you” and you scream “censure, you can’t do that!!”, but when it’s “your” side is censuring “them”, then you have no complaints, because obviously “your” censure is good, and their is “bad”.
Or maybe I’m wrong and you’re against censure in general? :)
I complain about people who support Soviet-style dictatorships having full control over online platforms moderating exactly as one would expect
I will ask in good faith: given that those people started the whole project to have that space, but built it using federated technologies which allow others to run their places, what is exactly the basis for your complaint? As absurd as they might be, instances can decide their own moderation policies, whether you or I agree with them or not. Given the fundamentally distributed nature of this platform, there is no such thing as “having full control”, and instead we can choose instances based on our preferences, so we are free to not subject ourselves to those policies, they are free to do, and both a free to use the platform in the way we use. The code is open, there are plenty of other instances. What exactly is the complaint here?
if we want Lemmy to be something besides a place for Soviet simps to hide from criticism
There is definitely a place for Soviet simps in the Fediverse, it’s just in a corner all by itself. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.
Decentralization is good for everyone.
Hello,
A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml.
Are they? Most of the communities are rather on LW: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
[email protected] is moving to [email protected]
Is there any community you need that doesn’t have a LW or another equivalent on another instance?
So long as any active communities on .ml end up on the front page, they will inevitably draw attention away from less censored spaces. An interesting one is [email protected] which tends to rise and fall in popularity in inverse proportion to [email protected].
I agree that other communities have popped up to fill the same niches, so that’s step 1 and 2 done. Completely moving away from them, as OP intends, doesn’t seem like a plausible solution.
I’m sure it’s still doable.
Ironically, I’ve been trying to move a few communities away from LW (to avoid hyper-centralization), and it worked, for instance with [email protected] (compared to the previous [email protected] ), same with [email protected] which replaced [email protected]
Maybe we should bring attention to people about the lemmy.ml kind of moderation (and I guess this post does this quite well) so that they will avoid to post there in the future
It’s difficult to bring attention to censorship by way of active censorship of the censorship. I occasionally wonder whether folks on .ml understand that they’re being fed a very particularly catered experience. At least .ml isn’t the largest instance anymore, otherwise getting the word out would be nigh impossible.
And it was a nice bit of foresight to spread the load!
I was among reddit refugees a year ago and it took me a moment to notice what was going on ml and their communities were more significant in comparison to what we have today.
One of the reasons I’m on sopuli.xyz now is that it was one of the first reasonably big instances to defederate hexbear outright. Hesitance and outright hostility to defederate it from some instance admins was also worrying.
World grew MASSIVELY around the time of the reddit mod strike.
In the time since? A lot of those communities are basically full of people who can’t stop talking about their ex while constantly re-posting everything they see there. And… the lemmy world admins made a few controversial decisions and their method of removing problem/“problem” users made a lot of us uncomfortable. Piss off an admin and your entire comment history is wiped in an instant and your ban reason is unverifiable.
Whereas ml already had communities that existed to talk about the topic of the community rather than what reddit was talking about.
who can’t stop talking about their ex
Is it still the case? I found most the Reddit discussions happening on [email protected] nowadays
Sopuli is cool
I’m not new to Lemmy but only just recently started being really active. Can you explain to this OOTL user (and perhaps others like me) that don’t know what went down with hexbear?
Welcome back!
Hexbear are known to be quite argumentative about politics, leading to most people blocking the instance overall at the user level.
That’s basically it, if you want more details you can have a look at the instance itself, you should get what I mean quite fast.
I regret looking haha but it was enlightening. Almost literally every single comment was someone angry about someone they’ve never met. It was like they were manifesting their ideal enemy in their comments to be angry at them.
Whew. Definitely avoiding that.
Over the past year on Lemmy I have witnessed a constant fight between people on hexbear, lemmygrad, and ml and people on communuties like tankiejerk, meanwhileongrad, and the like.
Both appear to constantly brigade and overmoderate their respective areas of control. Since my instance: sh.itjustworks, is some combination of defederated to hexbear and lemmygrad, I mostly just see threads like these complaining about tankies. I only assume the effort is being matched by those instances I don’t see to warrant this problem being so persistent.
So to me there’s so much active bad faith behavior between the camps I assume they all just have a paranoid view of the fediverse and are mostly just perpetuating a cycle of bad faith. Maybe that relationship is terminal if just people can’t handle each other.
One side argues “maybe we should be authoritarian buttholes and quietly silence dissent on our website of 10,000” and the other side replies “don’t be an authoritarian butthole or we’ll make fun of you in our community of 200.” I’m not impartial in this, but historical revisionism and whataboutism serving the cause of spreading propaganda is generally not the right direction. Looking at the result of both actions is a decent method for determining what you’d like to support or stifle.
Will the actions of the .ml admins, course unaltered, produce an environment that you’re willing to post and interact with? For me, the answer is a big no.
The fundamental source of conflict is that developers of Lemmy, who are also admins of .ml, describe themselves as marxist-leninist. Their very allowed existence is a conundrum for some, regardless of what they do.
So there is absolutely interest in the elimination of instances like .ml from the Fediverse, especially as things like Meta’s Threads moves in to centralize communities and standardize discussioms so everything can start aligning with thr valuation of their investment.
You’ve misread the situation entirely. The most active community admin on our instance has described themselves as being staunchly pro-communism and it hasn’t evolved into a slap fight because they’ve been gently pursuing the goal of proliferating their views. Kind person, no clue how they tolerate the internet.
On the other hand, I’ve been hearing the same complaints about the Lemmy devs for like 4 years, long before META came around and before I had even tried lemmy. In this case, I firmly believe people simply dislike clandestine political chicanery and its intended goal.
So you say uou’ve heard complaints about Lemmy devs, who run the instance in question here, for four years.
That is a direct illustration of what I mean: from the start of Lemmy there’s been complaints of the devs.
As the Fediverse becomes bigger, this type of stuff isn’t going to be wanted by any entity especially not ones owned by Meta.
If you have any evidence of meta going after lemmy, I’d be keen on seeing it. Conspiracies really don’t appeal to me but I chug sauce like an Italian sex worker.
