Shit like this makes people go back to reddit. At least there’s more content and getting banned from one million user subreddit doesn’t stop you from going to another big sub. Here, if you get banned in one or two of the big instances you have to become a lurker. I take pride in being able to disagree with the dominant opinion in a reasonable way, but these .ml mods are unreasonable.

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?

Tankies are modding many communities here as well. The solution is to fight them tooth and nail.

Thanks for shedding light on this! I will do my part and no longer post in communities tied to lemmy.ml!

I’ve had this happen to me, I was chatting in a thread with some guy about IP theft and plagiarism at universities- a legitimate discussion about a current topic- and all my comments were suddenly deleted for “xenophobia”. I let it go but its still really jarring and annoying.

This is the fediverse and that is their instance. You just move to another instance and mute them if you are desatisfied with them.

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 spreading the word. We get these complaints every few weeks. More people need to be educated and move away from these instances to make the Threadiverse a better place.

Sad to see. Feels like Lemmy has no bright future with people in charge of it thinking russia’s and China’s government is good and ban difference of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs.

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.

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

When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies

You complain about the tankies’ whataboutist replies “critical of the USA and the west” - yet your very first comment up there proves that you, too, were very quick to bring the west into a discussion about Tiananmen.

but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

You think the liberal hive mind here on lemmy.world is (somehow) more “reasonable” than the views held by tankies?

By what metrics are you measuring this (alleged) “reasonable-ness”?

Is there a way to message instance owners/admins? I would propose that lemmy.world defederates from lemmy.ml asap. Post

I fucking hate tankies, but.

The problem i have, every time this conversation happens, is that cutting them out doesn’t solve anything, and that I don’t want to be coddled.

The 2 main issues we have, as lemmy at large, is that there are some wildly uneven standards enforced across instances and that we have no say about that. There was that hugbox instance that would ban people for being rude and yeeted itself into the void, there was hexbear that got de-federated for its mods actively encouraging being subversive (despite its users receiving intolerable psychic damage after 5 minutes in any lib space where people are free to call them names, or was that lemmygrad?) and now we’re talking about removing lemmy.ml for the fact that its mods are somehow sentient pieces of actual shit.

And while I agree to all of those reasons, I don’t think defederating is the answer.

Every time we fragment the fediverse we make it overall worse.

Average users don’t even understand what they’re looking at when it comes to decentralized networks, let alone can they understand that there’s politicking between instances and such. If I were told “you can make an account on instance x or y, but they don’t talk to eachother so if you want to see stuff on instance y you can’t make an account on instance x” as a rando, I would go back to reddit, the only reason I didn’t is that i really hate the app and I am tech/net savvy enough to handle this.

I am a tad more radical when it comes to speech than most, and I accept that, but I do believe that these people have no power so long as they can’t abuse moderation, so the answer to the question “how do we handle open propagandists”, to me, is to create perhaps a “moderation neutrality charter” and making it very clear which instances subscribe to it, having each instance’s moderation team maybe be required to weigh in on appeals to bans from other instances to ensure a certain amount of balance.

That would take care of that real quick. They can subscribe to the charter and start abiding by neutral moderation standards agreed to across the board by some democratic standard, or they can defederate themselves.

That’s actually something twitter does right with the idea of community notes, that for the note to be published it needs to be agreed on by multiple parties that don’t usually agree in those votes, to ensure there is a bipartisan agreement.

I know this is perhaps too lofty for a ragtag group of essentially microblogging self-hosters, but a man can dream.