Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
Just chiming in to say a lot of communities I participate in are hosted on ml, I’d be pretty bummed losing access to those. For that reason I’m against wholesale defederarion. I do think the communities need to explicitly diversify away from the instance though, ml admins seem demonstrably untrustworthy.
I do think the communities need to explicitly diversify away from the instance
Yeah, I don’t think defederation is warranted yet, but establishing non-ml alternatives for communities which happened to be hosted on ml should be a priority. Blaze posted a thread specifically on this topic: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20431762
Fairly early on, when discussing defederating with an instance called “exploding heads”, I laid out criteria I would consider worthy of defederation, which you can find here
I was primarily concerned with unwanted traffic going out over the rest of the Fediverse, hosting illegal content like child porn, or being a rampant hive of racism and calls to violence.
So far I’ve basically heard people accuse Lemmy.ml of being rather Chinese in their moderation in-house. Is that all we’ve got?
So far, that’s it in a nutshell - barring one account of potential cybersecurity risks coming out of that, which still makes some assumptions re: motivations I’m not 100% convinced on.
I think there’s people on the ‘perhaps defed’ side who would want to argue it on points 4 from your immediate defed list, or 1 on the call to vote list - but personally, I’m not convinced the evidence is strong enough to do so compellingly.
Regardless of the current discussion, it’d be wise for us to revisit your proposed policy as a group and see if we can make that official (with any relevant revisions from pre-vote scrutiny). I stand by what I said back then - it’s a solid list, and IMO worth being made official and saved somewhere broadly visible for later reference.
Because if the complaint is “They ban you over there for failing an ideological purity test” the solution is we have our own Lemmy instance, start or participate in an equivalent community here.
start or participate in an equivalent community here
Yeah, I think establishing non-ml alternatives for communities which happen to be hosted on ml should be the priority here.
something something blackjack and hookers.
Another large instance deleted some of my posts and hid it, I think it’s more common than most understand.
I also think this post has been good at calling attention to them and that it might not be good to post there if you care about your stuff being moderated. They don’t seem to be outwardly malicious, just closed and authoritarian on how they run their instance.
At minimum the .ml admins have shown a desire and willingness to keep their finger on the scale of the broader fediverse, which makes them a clear existential threat and possibly even a cyber security risk. In addition, they protect hexbear and lemmygrad, which openly state that their intention is to wage information warfare on the fediverse. We also see some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them some special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content. This alone is extremely concerning. The idea that we can individually block their instance does nothing to mitigate the ideological or security concerns I have.
My personal experience is that they protect propagandists and do not enforce their own rules evenly at all. My bans have been for me extremely petty things, and even for thing I have said on other instances. Meanwhile I have been called names, told that my family deserves to be tortured and that my country deserves to be nuked by .ml users (or hexbear proxies). I also find their defense of Russian and Chinese autocracy personally offensive, as I have family who have been directly impacted by both. It would be one thing if this was happening in a forum where these issues could be debated, or defenses mounted against misinformation and historical revisionism, but that is simply not the case. Even the most modest pushback against these ideas results in quick bans. This is not something we should associate with.
The one hand, it’s important to explore the conversational landscape in order to enrich one’s perspective. I am always interested in calm, composed, respectful discussion of even controversial topics.
On the other hand, echo chambers aren’t really valuable to that end, and lemmy.ml is edging up past that threshold. I feel as if engagement with lemmy.ml users is, more frequently than not, typified by emotional antagonism out of the gate, and only becomes more accusatory and divisive as time goes on.
I had hoped, after all the hexbear nastiness, that lemmy.ml might emerge as the more rational and respectful leftist space. I consider myself a leftist, and I enjoy engaging in polite and nuanced leftist political discussions. But the prevailing sentiment that I personally encounter is the sort of strawman nonsense you’d expect from bad faith actors trying to fracture leftists.
I’m no mod, certainly no admin. I just like having interesting conversations with people on the Internet. I can’t speak directly to censorship or specific logistical problems with Lemmy as a whole, or sh.itjust.works specifically.
All I can say is that I find conversations with lemmy.ml users to be petty and exhausting more often than not, and the writing is on the wall in multiple other instances. This seems like a band-aid rip moment on lemmy at large.
Non-tankie radical leftists tend to be in slrpnk.net and lemmy.dbzer0.com
I really like slrpnk.net, their ecology & climate change communities are really top notch in terms of the well-sourced academic articles they post.
I am generally against defederation. The way I see it .ml has problems with how their instance and communities are run and moderated. Unless there is content that puts sh.itjust.works in legal jeopardy I don’t think defederation will solve a fundamental discourse problem.
Honestly I don’t want to see .ml users unable to interact with our communities where they are subject to local rules. It is a foundation of the fediverse and the discourse it enables to avoid defederation.
I don’t see instance issues with .ml: just user issues. Users and communities everywhere can exercise their own discretion with bans and blocks. This isn’t a defederation issue as I see it.
I don’t understand the point of posts like this. How about you make up your own opinion and tell us why we should agree with it? I don’t care what a bunch of random strangers think based on their random feelings. " How do we feel about…" posts are pure trash.
This is just the community in which we have discussions and votes about how to manage this instance.
Hey Pfeffy - welcome to the Agora.
Mostly because I’m curious about what strangers think - particularly on fediverse topics. If you haven’t been on this community before, I invite you to take a look at some of the older posts.
A lot of this current lemmy.ml chatter rings super closely to shit we’ve debated here before, and given that this instance just hit its one year anniversary I think it’s interesting to see history repeat itself.
If you’re not into it though, totally cool - no hate here!
When I found about the existence of Lemmy, I wanted to create an account, and found that Lemmy.ml is the official Lemmy instance ran by the Lemmy developers (who I knew nothing about). Seemed like the obvious, default, non-controversial choice.
Of course I later learned about… All this. I’m not interested in any political content so it took me a while.
So I guess I’d be a casualty, due to picking the biggest instance suggested to me by join-lemmy.org. How is someone new to Lemmy supposed to have the context here?
It’s not ideal. I will say that the focus on ml has been removed from the join-lemmy website, even when I joined it was encouraged to join something other than ml just under a year ago and that change happened in the middle of the Reddit exodus. You could consider making an account on another instance now that you do have more information, a lot of people have already done that but it’s a pain without account migration implemented yet.
Hexbear is a instance run by tankies that spread their shit ideology and quash any dissent where they have the power to do so. Lemmy.ml is the exact same, except it’s much bigger and run by the Lemmy devs. I don’t think they should get a pass, and I think that Lemmy will become tankie Voat if this is allowed to continue indefinitely.
I came here because Reddit was being run by corporate scum that only cared about profits, and they crossed too many lines. I thought I could get a new start away from all the mod/admin abuse. I’m starting to realize that basically every instance’s and community’s admins abuse their powers to push their agenda, whether it’s political or trying to maximize membership, to the detriment of their larger userbase.
I don’t think this is a winning fight, even if LML is effectively quarantined, but I’d like to buy time by mass-defederating them.
Well said. The Fediverse has a massive propaganda problem and we should take it head-on if we want to see the Fediverse survive.
The two outcomes I see are:
- We slowly bleed off users until all that remain are tankies, fascists, etc.
- We effectively have two Fediverses, where one is LML, LG, Hexbear, and everyone that wants to allow users and sympathizers from those instances, and the other is everyone else.
Midwest.social might be another one, though it gets more and more complex b/c they’ve mixed in “leftism” with “being in the midwestern USA”, so a lot of their users and communities there don’t realize what that means, i.e. they think leftism = liberalism as in Bernie Sanders, not = Marxist-Leninist communism except scratch that, outright fascism just using that as a thin veneer to cover their true authoritarianism. And now they hold those users and communities hostage to anyone that would threaten to defederate from them - though they are currently still small(-ish).
Also, you can tell fairly easily when individual users shift over from such an instance to one that is not defederated - the rules they play by on their own instances is one thing, but what they can get away with on other instances is also the very same thing (“my way = the only correct way, and if I have power then I will enforce that, while if you have power than I absolutely dare you to use it”). Hence while defederation solves some issues, it also merely shifts the issues around to have to deal with some other way at some future date… or else as you say we simply allow it to choke the life out of the whole endeavor entirely.
Which is already happening. We who choose to come here tend to forget: there are a whole huge class of people that refuse to use the likes of Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Threads, and even Reddit, b/c they cannot stand “social media”, as it contains such toxicity. Their solution to avoiding such rudeness into their lives is to simply not partake at all. They read books, play games, solve puzzles, touch grass, etc., and since coming to such a place is not fun, they simply… don’t. When I was on Kbin.social, I started recommending the Fediverse to such people irl, b/c it seemed poised to be different than Reddit et al., though now that I have come over to the Lemmy side and experienced firsthand the likes of Chapotraphouse on hexbear.net and anything at all on lemmygrad.ml and now more and more things on lemmy.ml (which I just blocked yesterday), I can no longer in good conscience recommend the Fediverse to people. Like administering your own Linux machine, good experiences can be had, if you put in sufficient effort to curate your experience, but that is not what the vast majority of average people are looking to do.
So we will grow, or we will die. Thus I would be in favor of defederation if that were the only option, though now I think that there are other alternatives to provide a more “opt-in” - rather than mandate an “opt-out” - experience, e.g. as InEnduringGrowStrong suggested elsewhere in this thread, have new user sign-ups automatically block “those” places on the list, and have a bot send them a message about how to remove those blocks if they wish. The site.content_warning rolling out with v0.19.4 is another option to consider heavily - like porn, perhaps we should not be in the business of banning everything, when merely labelling such experiences would be sufficient as to warn users that it is there? (or both:-)
Lemmy.ml is very obviously being used as a training ground for state sponsored propagandists before they are promoted to Facebook or reddit.
Makes me wonder if the Lemmy devs are getting a kickback
I’m going to echo what seems to be the majority opinion here and say that defederation should not be taken lightly. The last big defed discussion here I was in favor of, but that was a very different case. That was a hatespeech instance with the barest veneer of “just asking questions bro”, run by a free speech absolutist who was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Their daily posts consisted mostly of transphobic, islamophobic or anti-semitic rage-bait (or some combination of those). EDIT: Oh! There were also a lot of covid conspiracy posts there too, now I think about it.
There are some communities there I avoid, but that doesn’t merit defederation. In my mind at least, that should be reserved for instances that allow illegal content, pure unadulterated hatespeech, instances that have been overrun by bots so badly the admin can’t handle it (temporarily for that one ofc), or instances that regularly brigade and the admin encourages this behavior.
And besides, I’ve also had some pleasant and interesting conversations with .ml users. There are some problematic users and communities, but that’s why we have block buttons.
Hello! I’m a guy who decided to join lemmy a few months ago, specifically because I was absolutely enraged by how moderation on Reddit worked. I am also taking part rather vigorously in the conversation about how much I dislike .ml moderation practices! I think I might be a little bit of an agitator in all this, because In joined lemmy after about a medium bit of research, and then jumped into it full tilt with the idea of “why not, I spent so much time as a revolutionary, myself!” And then I hit whatever the internet/globalization has done to what I recognize as leftist political spaces.
AMA, I guess!
For some background about myself, I’m an older millennial, who grew up with disparate web forums which were generally hidden behind a random website. My favorite haunt was punkbands.com, and loved LAN parties and early MMORPGs. Anyways, I had to get off the internet for a while to make a living, but eventually got to a spot where I could again visit the world wide web during working hours. One of my coworkers introduced me, through my first “smart phone” (an android, like, whatever was around in 2011 and cheap as fuck but still let me get online) to reddit. I really loved that old(ish) school internet, where people could spam and insult eachother within limits, and the community policed itself through a somewhat democratic process. I was legit excited to join lemmy, given how far I think reddit had fallen and how much disinformation had infected it, and how similar it appeared to the older, more democratic internet of my youth.
However, I found that a large part of lemmy is dominated by people who profess to be leftists, but ambush you with ideological purity tests and subsequent abuse if you don’t pass. I questioned a post on the .ml world news sub that came from a source that is literally a Syrian and Bolivian governmental news outlet, which alleged that the US military was stealing crude oil and raw wheat from Syrian oil derricks/Syrian farmers. I used mediabiasfactcheck.com to support my questioning of this source. I also appealed to logic, questioning why the US would steal things that it exports. A mod there (I believe the username is davos) engaged me in a conversation spanning hours, where we exchanged information about whether mediabiasfactcheck.com was a reasonable source to help assess the validity of media. While the conversation was uncomfortable, we each exchanged information and links supporting our arguments. Because I did not accept his outright rejection of medibiasfactcheck.com as a way to assist with the judement of media, I was banned and all of my comments were deleted.
Since then, I have met another .ml mod (username yogthos), and engaged in a long conversation about this same topic (.ml censorship). It was in a meta sub, hosted on the .ml instance. The conversation I am referring to has since been deleted, and I am not sure if it is possible to find it again, since my own history has disappeared; I will be happy to answer questions of anybody with the tech savvy to retrieve these exchanges. Anyway. In this meta thread, I engaged several users about the issue of unfair .ml moderation, alongside several other lemmy users. During the course of this exchange, a .ml user made an assertion that the OP (who was complaining about the “tankie problem”) was banned from the .ml instance because they had, somewhere undefined, insisted that the Tienanmen Massacre had actually happened. As a note, please understand that this was about a week before the start of June, and nobody so far in this thread had mentioned Tienanmen Square. Anywhere. Anyways, I questioned this particular statement, and yogthos suddenly butted in with a ton of weird sources that supported his claim that Tiennenma Square never happened. They insisted that the whole thing was a Color Revolution that was sponsored by the CIA, and that actually the students of the Tienanmen Square had attacked the Chinese Soldiers. I insisted that this was inconsistent with prevailing evidence, but was told that I simply needed to watch the various videos and read the blogs to understand that it was all untrue. I also engaged with some uders about my own ideology, where I was insulted as a “lib” for stating my intense distaste for authoritarianism. yogthos, the .ml moderator who I spoke with, told me that “libs don’t understand” that authoritarianism is ok if it is in defense of fascism… but did not expound as to how fascism was defined.
As for my evidence, I have shared it in some of the other posts. However, if you’ll look at the moderation history of .ml, under my user name, you will see that I am banned from several subs, and I think from the whole .ml instance. It will be for “Rule 4,” which from what I can tell is spam, or advertising. I have never taken part in anything that resembles spam or advertising. I have, though, had comments that insist that there was some kind of violence surrounding Tienanmen Square, or debate the validity of news from Syrian government media sources, removed from .ml instances. You may also notice that I was banned from subs like palestine and usa, which I have never actually participated in, aside from upvoting or downvoting.
You will also, looking back, hopefully find the initial conversations I reference in this post. If you have specific questions, I will try to figure out how to find them, using the mod log.
This is a long post… and I’m sorry. I guess I just really don’t want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.
I’m sure I have missed a ton here, and paradoxically written far too much. I am happy to answer any questions or critique, as long as it is relatively polite and relevant.
Edit: I’m also just kind of a nerd about propaganda and discourse in international relations, especially in online spaces. I’ve studied it. Ive written papers on it. I find these things incredibly meaningful and important, so I’ve gotten involved here.
I am not from this instance. But I’m very happy to have you on the federation we need more people willing to be open and honest about their experiences. Thank you 🙏
Edit: Added an additional choice - block whole instance at user level - to ‘option’ list. If you, nahuse, or anyone else have ideas for options f through zz, feel free to say so!
Thanks for joining the discussion, nahuse! I appreciate the specifics you’ve provided.
As an aside, you and a few others raise an interesting point re: archiving of deleted comments, particularly when there’s evidence of those comments getting removed from the modlog intentionally (I’m not claiming that this is objectively true - I don’t know, but it is one of the common claims in the broader discussion here and on similar posts). Seems like a worthwhile project for someone with the interest, skills, and time to develop. But anyway.
Your experience does echo that of other politically engaged sh.it.heads* in this thread. I would ask - given the choice between
a) blocking lemmy.ml communities with evidence of ideologically motivated moderation (either on a case by case basis, or as part of a community-sourced blocklist - something I mentioned here before but do not know can be implemented), and using alternatives for ‘controversial’ topics;
b) blocking lemmy.ml at the instance level, as a user;
c) joining an instance which is not federated with lemmy.ml;
d) having sh.itjust.works defederate from lemmy.ml as a whole; or
e) keeping things as they currently are, in terms of your engagement and ‘positioning’ [eg. Instance of choice, community engagement, etc.] - retaining the ability to try and engage on lemmy.ml communities with the same risk of ban/blanket ban, and talk about it there while enfranchised and elsewhere in the Threadiverse during ban periods.which makes the most sense to you/would be preferable?
The dynamics of Lemmy instances are kind of interesting, as each can have very different approaches to moderation. An instance admin may simply have a policy of “Please just don’t post anything that’s going to make CSIS or the RCMP knock on my door” (Canada bias here), and individual community moderators either a) apply an even hand with that edict in mind, or b) apply and enforce more restrictive policies. Others may have a more consistent throughline based in interests, political beliefs, and so on - which seems to be the case for lemmy.ml and is why we see these blanket community bans over innocuous comments.
I’d like to touch on that ‘innocuous’ point - what I’ve personally seen results in bans/deletion looks like fairly bog standard internet political discourse (alongside legitimately not cool stuff, but that’s not in scope at the moment to tease out). You present a point, you get a counterpoint, things get a little heated - with the difference that the person with the heated ‘not our flavour of far-left discourse’ comment has a much higher risk of getting ban hammered.
I don’t think this is ok - but at the same time, this is a moderation choice of a specific group using a specifically allocated set of resources. Alternative communities exist, and can be used, that may not have this problem (though someone will always find something to complain about re: moderation practices, tale as old as the internet)
There is, of course, the stickier point of lemmy.ml being not necessarily the main instance (see imaqtpie’s post, makes some good points), but the Lemmy dev’s instance. I don’t think the problems people have with lemmy.ml (usually in global events and political discussion communities - unfortunately resulting in blanket bans from unrelated communities on the instance in some cases) extend to the tool/protocol itself [see: exploding-heads, all of the more distasteful instances that exist], but this may be a concern for some [see Socsa’s comments here]. It may raise concerns/doubts about Lemmy as a whole. It sucks - I love this thing - but it shouldn’t be unacknowledged.
*If you haven’t seen this term before, it’s what I like to call users of this instance (much to the chagrin of some :) ). Think Deadheads - enthusiasts of sh.itjust.works. A little cheeky, but ultimately good natured and fun - which kind of sums up my feelings about this place. We love sh.it.heads - not to be confused with shitheads.
I too have been somewhat of an agitator in this. In my defense, data getting removed from the modlogs sounds indefensable to me - as in, incompatible with the principles of the Fediverse where we are supposed to “trust” the instances that are federated together?
In Dessalines’ defense, that may very well have been real yet merely a bug in testing the newer features of v0.19.4? Only an instance admin would be able to dig deeper into that, and even that requires some bit of coding or data wrangling skill to either constantly monitor the differences in the modlog before vs. after the alleged edits, or as was suggested to have happened, be caught purely by chance (as one person claimed).
I am not volunteering to spin up an instance to test though, so I will drop this matter and give lemmyl.ml the benefit of the doubt on it. i.e., Lemmy.ml having been in the process of upgrading to 0.19.4-rc.6 wasn’t widely known at the time, but now that we know that, bugs may be more expected than not during such a process?
Even so it does not change how hearing about (or observing first-hand?) such heavy-handed moderation practices as nahuse described will drive people away from the Fediverse, thereby lowering overall content for us all. Saying that it is their instance to do with as they please is like saying that it is fine for porn to appear on porn websites - which it very much is! (or should be, imho) - but my goodness, please label it so that people do not walk into it unawares!!! Similarly I am not… entirely happy that hexbear.net has a community dedicated to dunking on people (Chapotraphouse; maybe it is therapy for them?), but now that I know that, let them feel free to be however they want, but oh my, please WARN someone before letting them just walk into that hailstorm of comments!!! (which continued for WEEKS after I made some comment about President Biden doing better than I expected in some small matter, long after I stopped responding but my consent to continuing the conversation no longer seemed to matter to them; and then the next week I similarly walked into a lemmygrad.ml post and had the same thing happen)
The very concept of Federation makes that significantly more complicated b/c “we” choose to show that content in “our” spaces, so it is both theirs, and after it comes over, ours too. Fortunately, the site.content_warning in v0.19.4 will allow such warnings to be delivered, though I am not certain how it is implemented (it says prior to showing images or viewing a community, but what about a post from a community? e.g. [email protected] has a great deal of content that can be… off-putting to people). Note that it says that the warning will only be delivered the first time a user triggers it - though again the details remain to be seen, e.g. will a cookie remember that past a session for the same login?
So I personally would like to see an option “f” added that would use the new site.content_warning ability as/if it rolls out with v0.19.4. Though I have no say in this as a non-member of sh.itjust.works, so I say this only to explain my thoughts in case they were of interest. The tricky part about that might be how to implement it: the temptation would be to do so only in the more “controversial” communities, and yet the admins of lemmy.ml are doing blanket bans among many communities, e.g. [email protected], despite people never having commented in them before. So they seem to think that the entire instance is one big community in that respect - or else how can that be justified? - hence the warning should be to anywhere across all of the instance, not just each community, should it not? (and again, whether that is even possible, or if it would have to be applied to each individual community plus all future ones created, remains to be seen)
I guess I just really don’t want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.
I don’t mean to instigate an argument, but I think this comment illustrates pretty well why .ml might actually be justified in judicious use of the ban hammer. If people are coming in specifically motivated by an ideological disagreement, then maybe they’re well within their right (ethically I mean, they’re within their right just on the basis of owning the instance as it is)
But the person you replied to wasn’t talking about ideological disagreements - they were talking about factual disagreements.
As in, the .ml mods seem to deny facts.
Yes I’m sure OP was having a very rational conversation about widely accepted and not at all contested facts that are not at all important to any ideological perspective.
The Tiananmen square massacre is not a contested fact. It’s just a fact.
Yes, a famously uncontested fact
And I am sure that fact was brought up completely organically and not specifically because op knew it was a source of ideological tension
Truth isn’t an ideology though. You keep trying to draw a false equivalence between the two. Truth is just truth. Ignoring the truth is simply acting in bad faith, and that’s something any ideology can do for any truths. If a group is denying that truth then they are trying to spread misinformation.
I’m not making a statement about the truthfulness of the specific claims being raised, i’m just pointing out that the topic is very famously contentious, and going to that space specifically to raise it knowing full well it is not a welcome one is itself bad-faith trolling and deserving of removal and possibly a ban, depending on how hostile you’re being.
It isn’t your space where you can decide what topics are fair game, and frankly whining about it here isn’t going to change anything about their moderation policies.
Lemmy.ml is like the PR version of lemmygrad.
I’m more bothered by anti-tankie posts then tankie posts.
I was super into the idea of lemmy.ml and actually had some extensive conversations with them and with lemmygrad when I first joined Lemmy. I didn’t agree with them on practically anything, but whatever, it is fine. Then, lemmy.ml mods started deleting my comments when they decided that I was expressing the incorrect viewpoint and that viewpoint needed to be deleted to clear the way for the correct viewpoint. That’s kind of a red line for me in terms of whether or not I feel like fuckin with a particular instance, and I pretty much turned my back on it.
I wonder if I’m banned from some places and don’t even know lol. I had some casual conversations in these areas too but wasn’t supportive of the alt right bs
This was my exact experience. I was pretty excited for a community well to the left of reddit, only to discover that they had no knowledge or interest in leftist theory beyond Lenin and Mao. Then I got run out of town for basically challenging this orthodoxy.
Whatever user: I can’t wait for the revolution, let me challenge the status quo with my iconoclasty, no politics is gonna be enough until we can battle in the FUCKING streets
Me: Dude I don’t think opinion X is correct
Whatever user: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA shaking and crying ban ban ban
Me: I WANT THE EXTINCTION OF EVERYTHING AND HATE YOU ALL, SHUT THE FUCK UP AND FIX. EVERYTHING!
OR I WILL KILL YOU ALL.
(later)
“Ma why they bein so hostile to me tho”
Check out the new account replying to me lmao
Obviously that person was trolling you, but gotta admit I laughed at the “lol, so paranoid … we’ll keep that in mind” thing.
I was laughing the entire time lol. The deleted replies were fucking deranged and hilarious:
What if I told you that I’m genuinely not the person you were talking to before? And what if I told you that I just don’t like you and think you’re unintelligent and irritating? Would that make you cry? Piss and cum, maybe? Little pissbaby wants his nappy changed I guess - too bad there’s no more milkies in the fridge for him. All gone, and never coming back Enjoy your phone addiction - try living in the real world instead of a shell. It’ll put hair on your nuts
First of all, the complaints are not without substance. Some of their admin decisions are highly questionable and obviously politically motivated. However I think the idea of defederation is a huge overreaction.
What do people think about lemmy.ml?
They have always been left-aligned, despite officially being privacy/FOSS focused. This is largely due to the history of Lemmy, which was created by leftist developers and existed in relative obscurity for a couple of years prior to the reddit API exodus a year ago. They have received a good number of relatively apolitical users since the API exodus due to their branding, but many of those users eventually chose to leave to other servers.
These screenshots from 7/16/23 and 9/5/23 show that lemmy.ml experienced a massive bump in users that quickly ebbed away in the following months. This happened with all Lemmy servers, but beehaw and lemmy.ml had the biggest drop offs.
Right now they are sitting right around 2.5k MAUs, same as us.
Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically?
I don’t believe it creates problems for Lemmy users, but I can see the argument for why it does. I think there’s a misconception that lemmy.ml is still the flagship instance or new users are being drawn to them, but I just don’t think that’s the case. People dont really recommend lemmy.ml to new users, because it’s already common knowledge about their political leanings. And they’ve never prioritized promotion of that instance on join-lemmy.org or anywhere else that I’m aware of. This is borne out by the data I just shared, which shows their share of the Lemmy userbase has steadily declined over time.
For sh.itjust.works specifically, I don’t agree that it’s creating problems for our users. Our server has literally grown in the garden planted by lemmy.ml users. We are less dependent on lemmy.ml today than ever before, and now is when people decide they want to defederate? That seems really lame and somehow duplicitous.
I think to the extent that there are problems with the lemmy.ml userbase, they have come more recently after hexbear got defederated from most of the fediverse. I think some long time users on hexbear and lemmygrad who got a taste of the wider fediverse decided to move over to lemmy.ml so they could keep pushing their ideology. That’s not ideal but I don’t think defederation of the whole server is a proper response to a handful of hexbear trolls up to their old tricks.
For me personally as an admin, I can confidently say that I don’t feel like lemmy.ml users have been disproportionately involved in bad behavior or trolling. I’ve removed my fair share of hostile comments in political arguments, but no more offensive or combative than stuff I see from our own users, lemmy.world, lemm.ee, or any big server. I haven’t seen them brigading communities or threads, aside from the ones located on their own server, which is obviously fine.
In terms of their admins, I have to acknowledge that they sometimes make mistakes with moderation. But moderation on Lemmy is also a really difficult task. One important factor is that they host a disproportionate number of communities and especially political communities. Here on SJW, our most active communities tend to be fairly non-controversial. I cannot imagine the moderation burden for active political communities such as those hosted on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, and I’m thankful they’re doing it instead of us.
TLDR Lemmy.ml is basically alright with me, aside from some minor annoyances. I think it’s kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them. But that’s just my personal opinion, I will of course abide by the wishes of my fellow sh.it.heads.
It’s good to know that ml users aren’t disproportionately causing problems. That was the impression that I got - they have their overzealous trolls with their own ideological spin but they don’t have disproportionately more trolls than other instances - but I’m not a mod anywhere so I don’t pay attention as closely.
I think ml does have moderation issues, that post on the technology community is not the first time I’ve seen overly aggressive mod actions from them. I’ve left several news and politics communities on ml due to certain users and moderators creating an environment I prefer not to be in. Being a moderator is a hard job, but I genuinely appreciate the transparency and even-handedness from the mods in other large non-ml communities and they show that we can and should expect better from our community moderators.
I think the post over on Technology has the right idea - move the non-political communities off of ml to other instances, the politics communities already have active alternatives due to the mod issues. The Star Trek communities show this is totally possible, but the non-political communities are the least likely to have issues with overzealous moderators (unless you’re foolish enough to engage in politics elsewhere over there and get a blanket ban from all of ml for bullshit reasons…). But a community call to action is harder than a blanket defederation.
I think the moderation issues are more than a minor annoyance, but I agree that defederation, at this point, would be excessive. And I think we’re all happier not addressing the elephant in the room because, well, we wouldn’t be here without them.
My concern is that the devs have shown a willingness to keep their finger on the scale and use .ml as a tool for this ideological end in any way possible. If, eg, there is a way for a malicious instance to modify federated content from other instances and republish it, I would confidently say that the .ml devs certainly have the ability, and have shown a willingness to engage in that kind of agitprop. At the very least I think we have to take this threat seriously.
Furthermore, If .ml were to be treated as a state espionage actor, federating with them is exposing your users to very significant risks, as it would be trivial for them to collect identifying information via federation, and to promote malicious or compromised websites by modifying their feeds, or even the feeds of individual users. They could very easily collect identifying information from a target, and then modify a web application to serve malware to that specific user, which they push to the top of that users feed in various ways.
This is an aspect of the fediverse which generally makes me uncomfortable. Even if the core code is safe and audited, there is nothing stopping a malicious admin from running modified versions of the front end or forum code. Again, it would even be possible to only serve such malicious content to individual targets, and federating content with them provides an incredibly convenient threat surface for performing this kind of targeted analysis.
The biggest thing stopping this kind of behavior would be “who the fuck would bother?” And the scale needed to provide cover for the operation. Who? Well, an admin who openly admits they are waging information warfare in the fediverse, that’s who. Or perhaps a dev who appropriates the name of an infamous murdering zealot as a symbol for his “cause.” How? Maybe via one of the largest and most visible instances on the fediverse?
Of course, I have no evidence that this actually happens. It would be incredibly difficult to detect such targeted threats. But the whole combination of the way the admin and devs handle themselves, and the adversarial way they interact with the rest of the fediverse, just triggers all sorts of red flags in the secOps part of my lizard brain, and it bothers me that people don’t seem to be taking these threats seriously.
