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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lmao get back to me when the mods on lemmy.world stop deleting every comment that is critical of Biden. STFU. There is no recourse for mods on Lemmy and they can use their powers to delete any comments they want. The only recourse you have is to find a fediverse that caters to your weakass centrist views.
If anyone cares to check my comment history they’ll find a crapton of rebuttals to anti-biden comments that were NOT deleted by anyone.
So the pro-Biden comments are staying up? Exactly like I said ? lmao
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.
Are you saying that all popular instances are run by “tankies”?
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.
I’ve been making fun of Lemmy.Ml for months, I’m glad to see I’m not the only one
Tankies warming up to call you and Lemmy.World fascists in 3, 2, 1…
Tankies: The word ‘tankie’ is meaningless because it gets overused by disingenuous people on the right.
Also tankies: Everyone who criticizes my position is right-wing.
Every word used by disingenuous people on the right becomes “useless” - freedom, patriot, Christian, help, law, order, justice, democracy, Constitution, agreement, good, bad - you name it, they twist it into a 100% polar opposite of what it used to mean before they got their hands on it.
So at some point, I think perhaps they should not be in charge… of what words “mean”? :-P
That said, ‘tankie’ is pejorative so perhaps we can find a better one for that different reason. I don’t know what, or for sure that a pejorative is bad, but maybe “authoritarian”, totalitarian, or fascist seems accurate - as in not beholden to “principles” so much as whoever holds the power gets to do whatever they want.
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.
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.
That describes them well imo
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
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.
Sopuli is cool
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.
What the fuck is the threadiverse. This is the Fediverse. Threads has added nothing and has no place here.
Threadiverse is just a general term to refer to the parts of the Fediverse that behaves like forums (cause forums have threads). It has nothing to do with threads.net.
They speak like a bot. Zuckerberg sending miles to infiltrate?
Are you new here? “Threadiverse” has been used to refer to thread-based fediverse technologies that use threaded comments since before Zuck’s “threads” was even announced!
I’ve only really heard Fediverse. I don’t really get into the meta discussions on here though. I’m also getting hyper sensitive to chatters that sound like bots. They mentioned “we”, but it doesn’t look like they’re a mod or admin, so I thought it was a bot using some PR speak from the dataset.
As you say OP, the solution here is to use the fediverse model as intended and use different instances/communities. It sucks because it fragments the community, but that’s the way it is. I’ve long held the opinion that I’m grateful to the lemmy developers for building this whole thing that we all get to enjoy, but their approach to administering an instance is reprehensible and actively damaging to the relatively free and open exchange of ideas that should happen on the fediverse.
That hides the problem instead of fixing it… and if it’s a dev as well, the whole system isn’t really safe
Code is opensource, if they were to put a backdoor or anything that would be seen, and once detected, the code can be forked
You… should probably pay more attention to the news.
It is very possible for bad actors to inject malicious code into an open source project. And it is very probable for people to not notice because the vast majority of developers never read a single line of the open source code they claim to value so much.
“Any bad code will be detected by the armies of people who do rigorous code analysis of every single pull request” was always nonsense.
Are you referring to any news stories in particular? Because the only big one I recall recently was the
xzbackdoor which took three years of social engineering to get in and was detected and patched within a couple of weeks!There have been a number of articles (pop and scholarly) about malicious code being social engineered into codebases over the past few years. And, in this case, the malice is “expected” from one of the long time developers to begin with.
Also: We got INCREDIBLY lucky that Andres Freund detected it when he did. Because that was hitting right around the time a lot of the major distros were preparing their major releases (Fedora basically escaped by the skin of their teeth).
Malicious manipulation of open source projects has always been a concern. And the vast majority of us do the equivalent of signing whatever form we are given because “oh it just looks like a standard contract”.
as a communism sympathizing leftist, i hated these mods on reddit and i hate them here. the behavior is idiotic
That’s the most frustrating part. These “leftists” are the stupid kind who seem to care more about relitigating idiotic cold war drama than evolving or pushing forward leftist philosophy. It’s straight up brain rot, mixed with obvious right wing agitprop disguised as leftist ideology. That fact that anyone other than trolls, spies and teenagers would engage with it is astounding.
“leftists”
They’re not, that’s just a cover for spreading CCP propaganda.
Some people just have daddy issues and need an image of a power figure to guide their life. It’s obvious on the right, but I’ve seen various shades of it in the left as well.
Chinese honey pot
Ironically, .ml seems to be blocked in China.
Pretty much any popular site they can’t censor is like that.
Oh, for sure. I just think it’s funny.
Definitely lol
I agree with the sentiment of your post and I won’t comment on the other posts that were banned but your image turns into hardcore gore half way through. Like hanged burned bodies and people leaking their brains.
Maybe it was removed for the wrong reason but it’s not as innocent as you make it seem.
Like “how dare you actually show the atrocities my Chinese overlords committed in a way that can’t be denied” ?
I’ve been banned from .ml for being a ‘racist’ for being anti-Xi, despite the fact that I am Chinese, and pointed out my ethnicity as such in the discussion. I guess antisemitic Jews aren’t the only weird accusation getting thrown about nowadays.
If anyone would like more context about the kind of think they were posting:
Yep, the horror. I absolutely deserved an instance-wide ban for the terrible things I said.
I do love the amount of facts and proof that is been dug up and displayed in this post, many thanks to all those going to the effort!
I don’t think any of this is even real to them. The same way that a majority of the white-nationalist 4-channers are just roleplaying and losing themselves in the storylines, as a species we tend to do that, we just get lost in a narrative because it explains how we feel.
The tankies are doing the same exact thing. They’re not impacting policy, they’re not marching for anything, they’re not taken seriously and it’s just another in-club that has its own language and imagery and secret handshakes and a unifying message to rally behind (America bad!) and instead of turning that criticism into actionable plans for changing representation and making anything better, they put on WW2 Russian Tanker helmets and have erotic fantasies about a communist uprising that will never happen.
Children.
I got a ban for pointing out the nuclear strikes on Japan killed less than the conventional firebombing runs leading up to it, and if nukes wouldn’t have been used a shit ton more people would have died.
Like, no opinion on if what was morally right or not, just what the numbers worked out.
It’s all trolls over there, when a rational person makes a community, the admins start drama there and troll the mods till they leave or get kicked out for stupid shit.
I just blocked the whole instance. I never see any of their posts now, and as an unintended bonus I don’t even get notifications when their users reply to my comments.
Like, it would be best if we defederated from them and that hilariouschaos troll instance.
But I can just block them, works the same.
I honestly disagree that blocking works the same. Social media relies on a network effect, and if they keep being allowed to operate popular communities then they will have that network effect in their favour, and new users that don’t know any better will keep joining.
Defederation is an important tool to turn certain instances into pariahs for bad behaviour, and individual blocks don’t achieve that.
More people were killed in the firebombing.
The theory that more people would have died of the nukes weren’t dropped is FAR from settled fact. The Japanese were already looking to surrender and it’s not likely the bomb played a big part in that decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki?wprov=sfla1
Regardless it’s nothing to get banned over, that’s for sure.
Whether that alone is something to be banned over is probably context dependent, and I don’t have any faith that that instance had a good reason for it. Nevertheless that person holding up their great take about the nuclear bombs being good actually does not paint a great picture of them as a person. It makes them look like a reactionary US nationalist who wants to believe anything that makes their side the “good guys”. They can pretend it was morally neutral all they want, but morality is the only reason anybody argues something like that because it’s so nebulous the only way you get there is with motivated reasoning.
At any rate I wouldn’t put that on the pile of reasons to hate on the .ml instances, not when there are so many good reasons.
Probably [email protected]
Go to lemmy.world and have a look at the Sidebar. That’s where instances publish info like that. And they list several methods to contact them, there.
Thank you! I just did and already posted there :D
Probably start with buying them dinner first
hehe well, you can always edit your comment!
It’s funnier this way :P
I am one of the removed comments and just found out about it here. Does the Lemmy standard really not send direct messages to users when one of their messages was removed? If it was an actual Rule 1 violation (which of course, it wasn’t) I’d like to know.
Saying anything negative about China is a violation of rule 1 on lemmy.ml from the admins perspective. They classify anything critical that gains any attention as Sinophobia and file it under bigotry.
There is no “lemmy standard”. There is ActivityPub though. Lemmy could maybe implement something to send an ActivityPub message when something is removed but this has not been done yet. I think there is an issue for it on GitHub though?
Yes there is an open issue on Github for moderation notifications (Get notified when you’ve been banned, your post has been removed, etc): https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4572
