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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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.
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.
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
Agree and just to add to this: the official list of mbin instances
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.
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.
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.
Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.
I hardly see what that would accomplish if we could.
I guess some mod actions could be considered accidents or mistakes instead of bad actors. A transparent system would have a flow to allow the user to contact and get such a mistake rectified, or report a wrongful mod action to an admin.
But if the admin is a problem, then that needs more figuring out how to get one removed.
the only one who can remove an admin is a more senior admin, and they can already see behind the “mod” alias.
your point seems moot
People keep bringing up that because of the devs history with that instance, “surely it is the Lemmy devs themselves who are doing this”. Which hurts Lemmy’s reputation overall.
Actions have consequences
If more people would just block that instance and it’s childish admins/mods, this wouldn’t be a problem. If people think it’s exaggerating to call out the clowns at .ml, I’d definitely urge you to look into the posts/comments the remove and their reasoning.
Most are violations of Rule 1 where there is clearly no violation.
Others are removed simply for being “liberal” or “blue MAGA” which neither are violations of any rule, and the latter is just a childish nonsensical insult. Which IS against the rules.
Having said this- it’s their instance and their community to do with as they please. If the freedom to disagree violates their emotional safe-space and hurts their feelings- then they don’t deserve your traffic and interaction. They have no intention to help grow lemmy, because it’s easy to see by their example that choir preaching only appeals to the choir.
Just block them and forget they exist.
Everyone should defederate from .ml, and most have already got rid of hexbear and lemmygrad.
It’s an absolute shit show of an instance, and the rest of us don’t want to be subject to their nonsense.
I just wish the instance block prevented me from seeing their users as well.
Thanks for calling this out. I will stop posting content to lemmy.ml. What is the next best alternative to lemmy.world? I have nothing against lemmy.world, but would like to spread out content to different sites.
Really depends on the topic.
[email protected] for instance is more active than [email protected]
[email protected] is a good alternative to [email protected]
There is [email protected] vs [email protected]
But LW communities are mostly fine. The top priority on Lemmy is to get communities active, we can always migrate them later if needed.
There’s no need to defederate from Lemmy.ml. I rarely see their content on the front page of Lemmy.world. The other day someone complained that Lemmy.ml users were brigading a different thread. I counted three users with a ml domain…
We have different admins and mods, everything is working as intended. The issue is people bringing up tankies, communists, and China every three posts. Yes, we get it, the benevolent people who wrote us this software are communists. They allow us to have different mods and admins, there is no problem here.
Honestly, I wouldn’t post to /c/[email protected] even though I’m happy with how pro-Palestine those people are. The only community I look at Lemmy.ml is /c/[email protected]. It’s not their fault no one posts to the Lemmy.world instance.
I think it’s time to start banning users who troll other instances and cross pollinate the fediverse with drama.
Eventually lemmy will grow to a point where these communities are moved off that instance.
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.
Did that months ago; defederated completely when they turned into Lemmygrad-lite. At first I missed some more active FOSS communities, but since then, others on different instances have become more active.
programming.devhas a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on.mlso maybe check out what they’ve got.If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else, nurture it, and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about
.ml, and you probably won’t be the last.Related: I genuinely feel that
mlbeing the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.Edit: Oh yeah. Didn’t recognize your username at first, but I was looking at the modlog the other day from my LW account, and saw a bunch of individual community bans from Dessalines and wondered what was up. Figured it was something exactly like this, and it was. Thanks for sharing.
Happy cakeday.
Shit, so it is (depending on tiemzone) lol Thanks!
It is actually tomorrow but there’s a bug that causes the cake symbol to appear a day early in the default UI, because 2024 is a leap year.
Haha thank you for the info, I have been quite confused about this. At first I thought it was because it was already tomorrow in Australia, but then I checked a world clock and it wasn’t even close 😅
If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably wont’ be the last.
Maybe we should open a thread on [email protected] about this
TIL that community existed. thanks!
What? I thought I pinged you there a while ago! Anyway, have a look, there should be some topics you might find interesting
May have been my LW account? I mostly use it for my mod role, but I’ll switch to it sometimes and browse all there to look for new communities I might like. Perhaps it was that account and I only interacted from there? (My memory is terrible these days 😆)
I don’t remember, you’ll see a post with a lot of pings, one of your accounts should be there 😄
Did you ping in the post body or comments? I learned a month or two ago from someone that mentions only generate a notification if they’re in the comments.
I made sure to ping in the comment for this reason. Actually now I’m curious, let me have a look
programming.devhas a lot of communitiesIs there a way to search for/browse communities on a single instance?
I use https://lemmyverse.net/
You can search for all communities of all instances, or click in a specific instance.You can in Tesseract, but AFAIK, that’s the only UI that lets you browse remote instances. Otherwise, you gotta go to it directly, browse communities, and copy/paste the URL into your instance and search for it.
Is it possible to see who is behind a mod action? I’ve figured something like world news on ml has some compromised fascist actors as mods but if it’s the main creator doing this then that’s crazy
There’s an instance level setting to hide moderator names from unauthenticated and/or non-mod users. They probably have that enabled. Those actions federate, though, so the mod names won’t be hidden if viewed from an instance that doesn’t hide the mod names.
It should be noted that the (visibility of) community bans are a result of better enforcement of site bans in 0.19.4, which for now is implemented by sending out community bans for local communities when a user gets instance banned: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4464
Prior to this, when a user got instance banned from .ml, they were also implicitly banned from .ml communities, but this was only known to the instance they were banned on. As a result, users were still able to post, comment, and vote on those communities, but it would be visible only on that user’s instance, not federated anywhere else. Visibility of this ban was exclusively on the banning instance’s modlog.
Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.
I had actually considered Lemmy before The Great Reddit Exodus. Lemmy.ml turned me off from that.
Now we have Kbin (you can make it, my love!) and Lemmy.world, and I feel much better.
Kbin, please come back to me
I… don’t think Kbin.social is going to make it. Even if it comes back, too much trust has been lost. Ernst should have stuck to just working on his coding project, not also administering his own instance, b/c that carries with it a certain level of “always-on” responsibility - e.g. I have unfortunately had to block Kbin.social lately, b/c nearly all (>>99%) of the spam that I currently see on the Fediverse was coming from the communities on it. Since I blocked it, I think I’ve seen like 1 single spam post for the past month.
So Kbin.social is turning people away too, for different reasons.
Mbin seems healthy though?:-)
I want to use Mbin, but all Mbin instances are federated with tankie instances, including hexbear.
And Mbin doesn’t make it easy to see user/community instance.
I gave up on the Kbin/Mbin style entirely - it sounds nice to Federate with both Lemmy and Mastodon, but I don’t like the interface.
Can you not do personal user instance blocks like you can in Lemmy as of v0.19.3 half a year ago? That would be an absolute deal breaker for me too. On Kbin.social though it was not an issue bc they were defederated at the instance level.
I really want Kbin to succeed, but Ernest seems to see the project as something he checks on once every few months and then ignores, but he still seems to want to be the only one who gets to make decisions. I get that he has stuff going on in his life, but the solution to all these problem starts with communicating and working with the community, not disappearing for months at a time and refusing to work with the people who try to help him. You just can’t have a successful project with an approach like that.
That’s why things have largely continued with mbin. Ernest couldn’t do it, so someone else who could has taken over for him.
The solution is… to abandon the notion that there’s some special utopia where we might reside.
There’s an idea that we all need to find or build some special platform which is going to be a home for all our communities and be transparent and balanced and free from corporate influence and perpetually shiny and awesome. It’s not only unachievable but probably not desirable either.
Instead, embrace the reality that the communities we want to engage with will be in different places on different platforms and each will have different issues.
There’s some niche communities on reddit, and yes that platform is run by a corporation but that doesn’t bother me when I’m only there to find a new recipe for snack that matches my diet requirements. I despise facebook but I do use their marketplace to sell junk my wife buys online. I’m aware of the privacy issues with telegram but that’s where I have a family chat group with my sisters. I recently discovered an XMPP channel about DIY bike maintenance which has been amazingly helpful, but I don’t like the XMPP clients I’ve tried. The forum on a torrent tracker I use is a great place to find new books to read but I need to use a VPN to access it.
My point is, the best part of the modern web is the disparate platforms we have available. Every platform has it’s own character, and caveats to be mindful of.
The kind of censorship you’re talking about is obviously repugnant, but the reality is that it’s just something to keep in mind when participating in lemmy.ml communities. You can refuse to participate there if you wish, but a mass-exodus on that basis just isn’t how things should work in 2024.
mass-exodus on that basis just isn’t how things should work in 2024.
Why not? You’ve made an assertion without any reason backing it up.
Nobody’s suggesting a mass exodus to a single lemmy server, but rather just a dispersal from .ml to the rest of the fediverse. There’s no reason it can’t or shouldn’t happen.
It’s as though you only read the last sentence of my comment
I’ve read it multiple times. None of it quite addresses why we can’t just move communities away from .ml en masse. From the votes I’m not the only one having trouble discerning your point.
Good lord. If you think lemmy votes are an indicator of solid reasoning I don’t know what to tell you.
Communities aren’t going to move away from lemmy.ml because no one cares enough about this issue.
You can dream that that’s how communities ought to work but they just don’t.
So your wall of text boiled down to ‘we can, but we won’t because nobody cares’. That’s pretty different from ‘that’s not how things should work in 2024’.
You can dream that that’s how communities ought to work but they just don’t.
Ironically, that’s how most of us ended up here on lemmy, we as a community decided to move off reddit.
We didn’t migrate “as a community”. All the same communities still exist on reddit.
Not only do they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology, they often do it in such a way that it is untraceable by other mods. I’m not sure how they accomplish that, nor is the admin who messaged me letting me know that it was happening and he couldn’t figure out how. Anyways, my solution has been to completely block that instance, and delete my account there. If they want to exist in a little untruthful echo chamber, then so be it, but I don’t need to be a part of it. I recommend you do the same thing.
I was imagining something like this in hexbear or lemmygrad, as people there seemed quite dogmatic at times, but even on Lemmy.ml? Sad to see this, as I had mostly positive interactions there till now
Tbh this is one of the reasons why I’m looking forward toward Sublinks
Rule 1: Crushing people with tanks is fine so long as it’s our side doing it.
Literal fucking tankies. I wonder if they will ever come to their senses. Oh well, it’s not as if there aren’t Nazi instances somewhere on fedi as well.
Crushing people with tanks
Just a heads up, while it is established that the CCCP killed tons of people on that day, the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia and mostly considered inaccurate news reporting.
The famous “tank man” photo shows a guy standing in front of a tank in order to prevent them from moving tanks to another part where the protesters had gone. We have no evidence that he was driven over by that tank.
Those “academics” are wrong.
We know this because there are photos of bodies and bicycles smeared into a paste [Source. Warning Blood/Gore].
And because people who were there literally said that’s what happened:
"The shooting was going on and people were still running to try and block the tanks, which were travelling at high speed, some positioning buses in the road. But the tanks crushed the buses and people, they didn’t care. People’s bodies were merged, moulded to their bicycles. They were flat.” [Source: Shao Jiang to The Mirror]
The CCP has desperately tried to cleanse the most brutal images and interviews of the massacre from the Internet, but even 30 years on they can’t completely scrub it clean. There’s a reason The Pillar of Shame monument is designed as it is.
the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia
There are photos of people clearly crushed by tanks?
No but the red paste is most likely explained by the tanks that were verifiably there. They could have crushed people with other machinery but they had tanks.
A hexbear in that thread is literally claiming that “the soldiers did everything they could to avoid hurting him” when there’s a photo of him lying dead on the street after the tanks have gone through. They don’t think it’s fine, they’re saying it didn’t happen (curious)
This loony bullshit is why tankies go full useful idiot and parrot shit most of them know isn’t true. The right-wing disinfo about Tianamen square - or any other communist atrocity - is so widespread. Tankies think that the most ultra counter-narrative will somehow combat that even if its just as loony.
Of tank man? The guy in the famous photo?
Where’s the picture of this? I’ve never heard that before. It doesn’t appear in his Wikipedia page, it just says there nobody knows what happened to him after.
Was it actually him? I was under the impression that history did not relate what happened to him afterwards, nor who he was. That’s not to say the CCP did not murder a couple of thousand people during the crackdown regardless, because they did, but I have never seen a verifiable claim that a picture of any particular corpse actually was the Tank Man. There are numerous theories I’ve seen floated over the years alleging what may have happened to him afterwards ranging from him being caught and imprisoned, executed, living anonymously in China, or fleeing to Taiwan. All of them are unverified and, of course, mutually exclusive.
The tank operators absolutely did attempt to (and succeeded at) avoid running him over. That much is plainly visible in the video. Whatever happened after the video ended is undocumented and pure conjecture. Plenty of well documented atrocities actually were committed that day, before and after that moment, so there’s not much sense in inventing new ones and bickering over details we haven’t actually got.
He is bundled off to the left by other protestors, nobody knows what happened to him, there is no photo of him dead.
That photo (I’ve seen it circulate on the internet myself) is a photoshop. Every reputable source says that no one knows what happened to that man, and we have no evidence whatsoever of him getting run over.
A hexbear in that thread is literally claiming that “the soldiers did everything they could to avoid hurting him”
ah the trolly problem defence
Inaccurate - the tankie pulling the switch would be smiling
And there would be more people on the track.
Imo, when tankies get that bad, they might as well be nazis.
I’ve defended lemmy.ml in the past when people have blamed the entire instance for the actions of a solitary, overzealous moderator, but this genuinely concerns me:
This must have been action taken at the instance admin level, considering all those communities have different moderators.
Is there any way to probe the modlog to see which account it was?
This is actually more evidence that the Lemmy devs run a modified version of the code which gives them the ability to, eg do things like dole out mass community bans. There is also some evidence that they selectively federate the mod log as well. It all points to the obvious conclusion that these people can and will abuse their power in any way they can.
I’m pretty sure any admin could do that with their Lemmy server, couldn’t they?
Yes, an admin probably has access to community level moderation rights and the lemmy API is not difficult to figure out.
It would be trivial to come up with a script to go through the community page, get all the current communities and iterate through them banning a user in each of them.
I have had comments removed and could never see why. Now I just block their instances.
They roleplay as communist censors since that’s all they can afford to do from their positions.
They specifically obfuscate which mods take what actions so you can’t appeal or even defend.
Tbh, also harass a mod. People get quite worked out when being moderated, and being a mod is enough work without people chasing you to argue with you or straight up harass you, I suppose. At least, I can see plenty of good reasons to hide the moderator name.
Then have a mod box or something. What they currently do is, “Post removed. Reason. Rule 1.”
No details, no appeal, nada.
What does this have to do with showing mod log? Genuinely confused
If they act on a post or comment, there’s no way to ask why or see what their actual reasoning was. So it allows blanket censorship without a paper trail.
It does, but it’s an online forum, not an essential service, and easy to replace. On the other hand, being there with your name or nickname exposes you to harassment from those pissed at you for your decision.
I would say it’s an acceptable evil given the circumstances.
As a side note: asking why after a mod action is almost universally pointless. Moderating is free work and a level of subjectivity is implied. I think not having the ability to argue is infuriating but understandable.
My experience with them is you can’t even find the modlog if you look when they remove comments. I guess they don’t federate it and/or it only shows if you’re logged in?
Good incentives to block their instances.
To quote the reason why calling out mods by name is forbidden from a previous encounter I had with them: “removed for doxxing”
So yeah I think you’re giving them too much credit here
I am not sure I understood. You called some mod by name and they removed the comment? If that’s the case, I perfectly understand and agree with the decision tbh.
That said, this is a general argument, not referred to any particular mod. I think that many people get angry when their content is moderated and they might want to harass/argue/avenge against the mod who took that action.
You agree that tagging the username of a mod (wasn’t even one it was an admin) is doxxing? If so, you’re delusional.
Mod names are visible by default on my instance so if taking a look there and then mentioning the username you see there is doxxing good luck with the rest of your life. You can’t have a system where everyone can easily find out who performed a mod action and then claim you were “doxxed”
No sorry, you said name as in the person’s name, I did not understand “username”.
well in this particular case it wouldn’t have mattered, I used the username but the admin in question has their clear name set as the display name (which made the whole “doxxing” claim even funnier to me)
Only admins can do site bans. What you’re seeing is a hacky/temporary feature of the upcoming Lemmy v19.4, of which lemmy.ml is running the pre-release: when an admin bans someone from the site (temp or otherwise), it also automatically bans them from any community they have ever participated in. Lemmy.ml has always been the “beta” instance for new releases.
Why, so you can censor some more posts critical of China?
The modlog of this sub is absolutely ridiculous:
Guessing that was the comment they made to trigger it. Seems perfectly reasonable after starting off just attacking them
Dude literally started it by doing comment in their mod request post
The criticism is warranted. They don’t even equally apply their own rules depending on context
They’re doing it specifically to piss off the mods. That’s the context. It was the pinned mod request for it
Perfectly reasonable to ban someone from completely unrelated communities like mechanical keyboard and arch Linux? Come on. It’s not like they’re throwing out toxic terms or criticizing on a personal level. They’re questioning the way things are being modded. Those aren’t even attacks.
They banned from the instance. Apparently the fact that you get banned from hosted communities is just a new feature.
Gonna put this out there. Ended up in a thread on ML the other day. The poster/admin got a little unhinged, over 4 down votes. 4. Took to the admin panel to see who dared down vote him. Convinced he had been the victim of the tiniest not swarm ever.
It’s troubling behavior for anyone with power.
Lol, is that why they removed scores from the API? 😆
You gotta admit, it’s very suspicious to be massively downvoted (25, not 4) over an inconspicuous comment that merely highlights a few paragraphs of the linked article.
I know I would also be wondering if there was a pattern in the origin of those downvotes.
Downvotes are public on Lemmy fyi. There are interfaces that show who voted on a post or comment.
I can see them through the lemmy reader app I use.
For admins, yes. I was pointing that out in the picture of the responses I posted. But not for General users.
Even regular users can see them through other federated services like kbin AFAIK. They show up under likes and dislikes.
I see downvotes
I can’t see those, specifically, but a similar pattern of mass community bans after even remotely criticizing an authoritarian regime is completely on brand for Dessalines.
I don’t have record of the comment that triggered these, but when it’s something like civility, it’s usually just a comment removal and maybe a single community ban.
Imagine that - a white dude who appropriates the moniker of an actual slave revolutionary as a symbol for his “cause” might be cringe and unhinged.
Really stupid. Dont forget the Che hated homosexuals as well and he wrote a letter to one of his family members saying he found a meaning for his life “Killing people”
See https://lemmy.world/comment/10467647
It seems this is just a new feature in the upcoming relase (the communities ban).
Interesting.
Still, site bans for criticizing China is just as bad, if not worse as mass community banning.
Yes, but that fact is well known and at least this shows there was no particular intention to chastise the user - it was just a button press.
The punishment was easy, so the intent wasn’t as great. You know, the difference between a bullet to the head and repeated bashing with a rock. I’m sure in all these instances, the lack of effort was a relief to the target of the action.
Every point can be supported with an analogy bad enough
For people who want to avoid all content from lemmy.ml, including posts and comments:
I use lemmy.cafe now because it has defederated with lemmy.ml.
As a lemmy.cafe user, I don’t see any post/comment from lemmy.ml users at all.
Communities on lemmy.cafe are invisible to lemmy.ml users, so I would recommend creating more communities there.
I’m half retarded, any videos explaining the structure of Lemmy? No idea the difference between .ml and .cafe, is it supposed to be different subreddits? Or different websites?
The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to email.
You know how you might have a gmail address, your friend might have a protonmail address and your parents might still have their old aol email address? But you can all still freely talk to each other anyways?
Lemmy is like doing that, but for something like Reddit. If you notice, usernames have an @servername on the end and just like an email address that’s the server that person is connecting through. For example, I’m [email protected].
Which means I log in to lemmy.sdf.org and use their servers to read Lemmy, but I can read, post and comment on communities on any other Lemmy server that is federated with lemmy.sdf.org just like they’re on lemmy.sdf.org just like you can send an email to someone using a different email service and it makes no difference on your end.
Communities work the same way - so for example [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] are all different communities hosted on different servers with their own separate posts, subscribers, mods etc. And users on any Lemmy server federated with the server that community is on can read, comment, post, etc (mod action notwithstanding).
This federation thing I keep mentioning is just which servers are willing to talk to which other servers - again you can compare to email. Sometimes email servers pop up to send massive amounts of spam, and when they do mail providers blacklist them and simply ignore all messages from that source. Defederating is the same idea. You use lemmy.world according to your username, so if lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml then you will no longer be able to see any communities @lemmy.ml or read any posts or comments posted by someone @lemmy.ml - to you it will be like lemmy.ml just doesn’t exist.
If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link labeled “Instances”, which will give you a list of which servers lemmy.world talks to and which ones they’ve specifically blocked. Lemmy.world has a pretty long list of blocked instances.
One of the reasons I picked SDF’s lemmy instance was because they don’t block **any **instances - as far as SDF is concerned it’s up to the end user what they want to see. Also SDF is kinda a cool entity - they’re a non-profit best known for maintaining public access unix servers and a bunch of retrocomputing stuff (like dial up internet and a gopher server) that has been around since 1987 (the name is literally an old anime reference because they started out as an anime BBS).
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
