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!)
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!
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.
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
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Obviously that person was trolling you, but gotta admit I laughed at the “lol, so paranoid … we’ll keep that in mind” thing.
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I was working on a Lemmy instance here at Eskimo.com, but ran into some technical issues because rather than having Lemmy installed on the same server as the web server and rather than on the same server as the database, I have them all different machines and had to find where it looked for localhost and change to the appropriate hosts, but after seeing the general behavior of the Lemmy userbase, I’ve decided to shelve this project for now. When I initially approached Mastodon a year ago I was met with a similar situation but it turned out to be transient, hopefully this will be the case with lemmy as well, only time will tell.
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.
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”
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
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.
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.
You raise some interesting points, and I don’t think they should be dismissed out of hand. I have some questions though (some of them are re: your other comments here):
[…] some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content.
Could you speak to this in a little more detail? Does what you are seeing inherently require functionality beyond what Lemmy’s public release offers natively, or is beyond the scope of something like an automod tool? Asked honestly, I am not an IT professional.
[…] if .ml were to be treated as a state espionage actor […] 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.
This is obviously a very serious accusation, but let’s put that aside for a moment.
My (limited) understanding is that as a function of using the ActivityPub protocol, it is already trivial to collect identifying information on users of federated services. What makes lemmy.ml unique in this regard - couldn’t a bad actor do this just as easily by other means? Simply it’s comparative size to other instances/services that can be leveraged for this purpose? Aren’t there lower profile means of accomplishing this same thing?
I don’t know enough about how federation works from a technical perspective to speak to feed manipulation when viewing a ‘rogue actor’ instance from a place like sh.itjust.works, but welcome comments/clarifying questions on this point from smarter people than myself. Want to know more, just don’t know what to ask.
Federation exposes potentially quite a bit of user telemetry data through a few different vectors. For example, simply loading a thumbnail from another instance exposes a user’s IP to that host instance. The exact ability for a third instance to tie a specific web request or usage pattern to a specific user is unclear, but is not a large leap. I am working through some specific exploit ideas on a test server I run, but I don’t have a ton of time these days, and it’s difficult to model some of these vectors without real traffic. I can say that so far, if a user interacts with a post soon after making the content request, it’s pretty easy to grab their IP, especially on low traffic content. So if I can see that a user interacts with a niche community (because votes are federated for some strange reason), I can target them that way. I should also be able to set a cookie via the content request, as well as do all the typical browser fingerprinting tricks. Once that association happens, it becomes trivial to serve malicious content to an individual user. This is a very serious threat vector specifically because it’s easy to hide what you are doing from the rest of the world, so it requires vigilance by the target to uncover. If it is done rarely it would be all but impossible to spot.
The broader point is that there is clear motive and plausible opportunity here. From a cyber security perspective, that’s enough to take preventative and protective measures.
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.
I’m more bothered by anti-tankie posts then tankie posts.
I had an account on there.
Russia invaded Ukraina.
Russia used their non-nuclear city-massacring weapon their “heavy flame thrower” on a city…
Russia murdered Mariopol…
etc…
Recently there was an election in Russia, & I commented that if what Putin wants is for the war to calm-down for his political-comfort in the election,
then Ukraina had to MAKE it a political-problem for Putin
( obviously, the more politically-problematic it is for Putin, the more likely this stupid waste-of-life will be ended for internal-political reasons ).
Lemmy.ml banned me for life.
Kremlin-aligned people are doing what they can to butcher civil-rights throughout the West.
Lemmy.ml apparently is aligned with the Kremlin.
I’m not for accommodating true-enemy of our countries.
Remapping it from sociopolitical-frame to internal-to-one’s-body…
IF rabies were trying to highjack your biology, would “being nice to the rabies-viruses” help your life?
Would it increase your lifespan?
Sometimes one needs to accept that some people really, actually intend that one’s kind be butchered, for their ideology, or some other aspect of their personality/religion.
Young people are generally much less capable of actually-accepting/actually-believing that others aren’t motivated by wanting to be liked…
Young people are generally much less capable of accepting that there are many who’d rather see one butchered/destroyed for sake of their factional-supremacism, for sake of their ideology, for sake of their money, for sake of their class-position, whatever…
Old people sometimes become capable of accepting the evidence.
It seems to be both life-experience battering it into one AND one’s innate-nature ( if either one is defective for accepting the specific understanding, then it just won’t get in. And I’m saying that as a guy who took about 1/2 century to learn the meaning. )
Understand that people who push to displace objectivity for sake of their ideology are, on both right & left, working to make-certain that this century gets “settled” through lashing-out with weapons, until factional-supremacism, of whomever “wins”, has vanquished considered-reasoning, objectivity, correctness, sanity, responsibility, accountability, all that are required for civil-rights to be.
The amount of dogwhistle-programming going on, now even in mainstream left media ( CNN, MSNBC, “progressive” memes are getting infected with it significantly, nowadays )…
as ClimatePunctuation continues accelerating through the next few decades, it’ll just keep intensifying…
We NEED to reduce the amount of ideology-instead-of-considered-reasoning.
They’re not only going the opposite way, they’re pushing that that be The Answer, just as the right are doing.
shruggeth
What people do is people’s own business.
Humankind’s enforcing the 6th Great Extinction, & pretending it isn’t, it’s successfully activated ClimatePunctuation, which is accelerating, & will continue accelerating for decades, before peaking, then slowing-down to the new ClimateEquilibrium ( hot planet ), & … pretending it isn’t…
non-accountability/non-responsibility/denial/ignoring is going to enforce the extermination of most of humankind, this century…
The “infection”/highjacking of the US is what happens when corruption is accommodated, right?
a “post constitutional” US of A, is what they’re working-on enforcing, now, when they take possession of the US…
Notice, finally, that Leninism, with its “proletariat dictatorship” & Murdochism/Fox with its “populist dictatorship” are actually equally opposed to considered correct reasoning being normal, or owning authority… both oppose correct-education for all, preferring propaganda/brainwashing ( Leninism through “education”, Murdochism through TV & biblical “education” ).
Accommodate it if you want, or hard-block it if you want.
I’m not claiming a “vote”.
it is my opinion that they ought be defederated, hard, absolutely, by all who value civil-rights, just as all who are machiavellian/gaslighting ought be locked-out.
but I’m not claiming any binding-vote, of any kind, in any community.
_ /\ _
IMHO, some of their communities are sketchy, but as long as it’s contained in their communities, that’s easily manageable with just the user-level instance block feature.
Not for a new user who is not aware…
It would be preferable if lemmy.ml were an opt-in feature rather than one that someone has to learn how to opt out of, on top of trying to figure everything else about the Fediverse at the same time.
I am now strongly hesitant to recommend Lemmy to people irl bc of all the heavy mandatory curation that must be done before someone can have a pleasant experience. After accidentally responding to a comment in chapotraphouse, and another in lemmygrad.ml, I almost left the Fediverse entirely rather than put up with the barrage of many tens of responses that continued for weeks despite me not responding to them anymore, and I don’t want people to associate that with me. i.e. it is a bad look for us all when the “we” includes “them”, and it hurts our growth overall. I strongly believe they should have the freedom to be however they want… (even though they do not reciprocate that thought) but that doesn’t mean that I want to help bring new people into their audience for their amusement.
Right, while it technically has a user-level solution, you’re right that a brand new user would simply not know about any of this.
I stumble upon a few now and then when they try and report stuff from there.
So… something like autoblocking the instance on user creation… which might make more sense than outright defederation. A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.Thanks for your input
I love that thought!
There is also the site.content_warning rolling out with v0.19.4 to consider - many of the details were not immediately clear to me from that page (is it just images and visiting the community, but what about text-based posts from a community? it says the warning will be delivered the first time a user triggers it, but will a cookie allow that to persist for a user across sessions or need to be re-done each time?), but it does seem a promising avenue to explore.
I liken it to porn - if you enjoy it, then have at it, but at least warn someone prior to it showing up unannounced, or regardless of the fact that it came from elsewhere, people will judge us for having brought it to them. People will ofc complain about being labelled - and fascists will complain the loudest of all (despite their own heavy-handed practices, yet realizing that we actually care about such, it is a tactic that sadly works far more often than it does not) - but honestly it’s just a thing that they could/should do for themselves, akin to how people of consideration will add warning/apology labels for e.g. a long reply to a comment, to let the recipient know that perhaps the read-through may be easier to postpone until a more opportune time for it. And there is nothing preventing them (those people whose content would become labelled) from being included in the process of designing what the precise text of that label would entail? Though if they refuse to participate in good faith then as you suggested, there are ways around dealing with the situation that are just as effective. And maybe the latter solution using tried-and-true methods needs to be done regardless, while the labelling option is still in the experimental stages (especially if the code developers drag their feet making it work in a manner contrary to their philosophy - i.e. they simply remove content that they don’t like, not label it but leave it up, as we are talking about here).
TLDR: opt-in offers maximum friendliness + welcomingness to people and will increase our overall content submissions, whereas out-out turns people away and therefore lowers that.
I did not even know that you were an admin - and would have written a much shorter reply had you not mentioned it - but since you have some ability to influence things for the good of us all, then I thank you for your consideration to actually implement some solution or another to aid with these matters that many of us care so much about: growing & maintaining a healthy Fediverse, even between people with such disparate ideals!:-)
This was my only meaningful personal interaction with lemmy.ml that stands out. It was not a good experience. It became very clear, very fast that I would simply have no meaningful discussion with these people. So I left some downvotes on the awful comments promoting violence and stopped engaging.
I haven’t blocked the instance or any users. But i am considering it.
To be fair to lemmy.ml, that post came from a lemmygrad.ml user. Lemmygrad is worth amputating and blocking wholesale on your account, but lemmy.ml tankies tend to keep their ideology inside their bubble for the most part.
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 🙏
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.
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 think that any accusations regarding their moderation policies or agitprop should be supported with actual, physical evidence, and not just personal accounts from individuals who claim to have had negative experiences. It’s lemmy. There’s a record of everything. Getting that evidence wouldn’t be difficult. Time consuming, maybe, but not difficult. That said, if we are banking on personal accounts, I’ve been on .ml for a while, and while I don’t comment in political threads, generally, I’ve seen little to nothing that coincides with what other users have said they’ve seen or experienced. I have an array of accounts across several major lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml seems…normal…banal even? There’s a lot of benign, largely apolitical communities there that are worth participating in. Saying “well, their political communities are terrible” is all well and good if that’s your opinion, but there is such a thing as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Honestly, the ongoing discussion of defederation I keep seeing here and in places like lemmy.world comes across as ideological competition. If some instances, like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, want to reproduce the same kind of vaguely liberal ideological soup that you find on reddit, that’s up to them. And that’s what it seems like is happening. I could be wrong about that, but lemmy.world comes across to me as a Fediverse Democrat stronghold. I’ve seen a lot of people there unironically defend things Joe Biden and the Democrats have done that are, from a leftist perspective, completely indefensible. And I have to wonder how many of the complaints about moderators abusing their authority are a result of people going into a Marxist space and pushing unwelcome liberal perspectives where they are obviously not wanted and suffering the consequences of those choices.
I suppose it’s probably a natural course of events that you’ll see instances defederating from one another as time goes on in order to produce the ideological echo chamber that generates the least amount of complaints from users. It’ll start with .ml, but I imagine eventually .world and .works will defederate from any instance still federated with .ml, like hexbears and blahaj. This will, of course, reduce the content and average user count across all instances, leading to people becoming progressively dissatisfied with lemmy instances that already had little discussion and content as they become virtual ghost towns, with people eventually abandoning lemmy and going back to reddit with their tail between their legs or some other godawful source of corporate-sanctioned content.
But part of what’s great about allowing self-determination in a profitless, federated network like ours is the choice of allowing said network to slowly wither and die for the sake of its users avoiding minor inconveniences, like having to interact with people they might disagree with in any capacity or suffering a temporary ban from a community.
And I have to wonder how many of the complaints about moderators abusing their authority are a result of people going into a Marxist space and pushing unwelcome liberal perspectives where they are obviously not wanted and suffering the consequences of those choices.
It doesn’t even take receipts to know this is usually the case, often the users complaining will say they were posting a completely reasonable take about Tiennemen square and then OUT OF NOWHERE they were banned and their comments were removed. It’s not like they spend any amount of time discussing that topic on their instance on their own, people go there specifically to kick the nest
If there’s one thing I understand, it’s the desire to bicker with people. But I will say that anyone who is a true flamewar veteran knows you have to be able to pick your battles well enough that moderators won’t get involved and will let you have it out in the comments with people.
Learning the ml is a shitty place for news and politics is a right of passage for using lemmy. Defederation isn’t the answer, at least not until they do something more than ban people who disagree with them.
