this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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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/linux@some.random.other.instance.world 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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[–] Aux@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 1 points 3 months ago

Decentralization is good for everyone.

[–] Darkpepito_tux@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] finder585@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] el_bhm@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

Pretty sure they are creating alt accounts on non-tankie instances.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] cloudless@lemmy.cafe 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

For people who want to avoid all content from lemmy.ml, including posts and comments:

I use lemmy.cafe now because it has defederated with lemmy.ml.

As a lemmy.cafe user, I don't see any post/comment from lemmy.ml users at all.

Communities on lemmy.cafe are invisible to lemmy.ml users, so I would recommend creating more communities there.

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[–] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Lemmy.world heavily censors criticism of israel over at /politics and /news

.ml is far less tankie than .world.

[–] fuckingkangaroos@lemm.ee 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Linkerbaan spreading more lies. Glad I have you tagged as "shill" so it's easy to recognize you.

[–] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

At the start of the Genocide debunking any israeli lie was absolutely forbidden over at /world. Muh beheaded babies. Muh mass rapes. Oh wait you still can't mention that israel lied about the mass rapes because israel themselves hasn't admitted they lied about it yet. Despite the overwhelming evidence that israel lied about it. If you do you get permabanned for "antisemitism".

MBFC only by the way, gotta make sure the site says that UNRWA = Hamas to be reliable!

The place is ran by Liberal Zionists.

[–] Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.de 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Describe to me what you think a tankie is.

[–] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

A person so brainwashed by their government that they will deny war crimes from said government and actively participate in censoring and lying about them in order to spread propaganda.

[–] Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.de 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Do you think you maybe missed an important classification there? Do you think Hitlers followers were Tankies?

[–] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Of course not. Nazis are rather honest about their intentions. You don't hear Nazis saying "No actually we didn't kill ze Jews, we really like them very much". If a Nazi supporter would actually say that previous sentence I would classify them as a Tankie.

The original definition is used to "distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring"

So you can try to deny it being about supporting war crimes by slapping on more labels but that would just backfire as CCP posters suddenly aren't tankies anymore.

[–] Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.de 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Of course not. Nazis are rather honest about their intentions. You don't hear Nazis saying "No actually we didn't kill ze Jews, we really like them very much".

Riiight, that's why it is necessary for the denial of the Holocaust to be a serious criminal offense in Germany, cause Nazis totally don't deny it happened.

You don't seem to be intelectually honest in this at all, so bye.

[–] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

Right, try to deflect to strawman and dip. If you can't even tell the difference between a Neo Nazi and a Nazi then don't bring it up.

[–] GreatDong3000@lemm.ee 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

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

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[–] therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz 0 points 3 months ago

Ironically, .ml seems to be blocked in China.

[–] TheFonz@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don't mind being banned from the ml instance. The issue is their users come to all the other instances and use the same old strategies to stifle any speech by engaging extremely hyperbolic language and name-calling. The goal is to have a chilling effect on any discourse where their opinions are scrutinized in the slightest.

They can't engage with any topics or offer counter arguments. Every response is:

"I don't know how to respond to your argument. You must be a _____________[insert 'racist' or 'genocide defending' or 'fascist' or my new favorite 'zionist']"

[–] retrospectology@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I do understand how the brigades can be annoying for sure, but I don't mind arguing with tankies, -- I think it's actually really useful for exposing their propaganda for what it is. It helps expose normal people to counter arguments so that they might become a little more aware, rather than just seeing propaganda go unaddressed and being morel likely to assume it must then be true.

The only issue I have personally is if the mods are in on it too and delete your posts/comments because you start to make a bit too much sense.

[–] MolochAlter@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I fucking hate tankies, but.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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[–] pukeko@lemm.ee 0 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Whenever this topic comes up, I find myself wondering what these folks do all day. Not in a Boomer "don't these people have jobs?!?" way, but more ... what is it like to be them? Do they just sit in front of the computer looking for conversations to disrupt? What is their daily existence? Because I find their volume and dedication to what they do fascinating. Cancerous and absurd, but also fascinating.

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