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.

(page 4) 47 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

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

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.

I think this is a core problem of lemmy as it is right now. This place is meant to be federated and decentralized. Instead it is heavily centralized as communities lie on one instance. What one needs should be federated communities as well. Like say c/linux@lemmy.world is the same as c/linux@someotherinstance.com. this way one could subscribe to communities on your home instance and if the home instance defederates from one other instance the community can defederate from the community on that instance without completely breaking apart

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

What you are describing is basically Mastodon (or, if you like porn and hatespeech, twitter... non-consensual porn because a lot of Mastodon instances are REALLY horny).

The moment you aggregate communities across instances you remove the ability to moderate them. Because maybe a hexbear mod wants to remove all mention of the Uyghur people, an ml mod wants to remove all mention of genocide against them, and a zip mod wants to remove all the comments about why genocide is good in a thread about god damned Bluey.

Do they all get to delete everything across every instance? Do you start having different views of the same community depending on your home instance?

[–] Nomecks@lemmy.ca 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No, they control their content and you control whose instances you sub to.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Again, how does that work if c/linux is "the same" on every instance?

Will comments and posts exist on the world view of c/linux but not the zip view? At which point... what are we actually getting over the status quo? Because you can bet that anyone who has hexbear unblocked would see two different versions of every single thread because nobody else would see the hexbear posted thread.

[–] EunieIsTheBus@feddit.de 0 points 3 months ago

What I mean is that a subset of all Linux communities agrees on a common set of rules and forms a community of communities. Content of all communities is shared with everyone who subscribes to one of the communities. Every community moderates its own content. If one community decides to have stricter rules than the others it can defederate. Basically just like on the level of instances.

What stops us to just defederate from lemmy.ml is that the community is hosted there and all members are linked to that one point of failure.

[–] EunieIsTheBus@feddit.de 0 points 3 months ago

What you are describing is basically Mastodon

No. Mastodon and twitter are short message services. Lemmy and reddit are content aggregators.

The moment you aggregate communities across instances you remove the ability to moderate them. Because maybe a hexbear mod wants to remove all mention of the Uyghur people, an ml mod wants to remove all mention of genocide against them, and a zip mod wants to remove all the comments about why genocide is good in a thread about god damned Bluey. Do they all get to delete everything across every instance? Do you start having different views of the same community depending on your home instance?

Instance A also cannot moderate the content of Instance B. Your argument is therefore invalid. The point of federation is that instances can agree on a common set of rules and values or not. In that case they defederate from each other. However, this doesn't work in practice as communities are centralized. Obviously, most of us agree that lemmy.ml is a problem but we don't federate just because they 'own' the instance.

[–] the_post_of_tom_joad@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Tankies make liberals uncomfortable because liberals believe they are the furthest left you can go before you become wrong and bad (forgetting that there are folks to their right on the political spectrum who think they are.

The worst thing for a tankie like me was running here to get away from the insane msn-pilled discourse, finding some actual leftists, only to have have leredditors chase me down sayin' i am following them.

I mean shit I'm just trying to talk leftist ideals that haven't been twisted into neoliberal business-school-bullshit talking points. I care bout the same shit yall do, i just don't think the DNC is going to help us get there. That prospect does not make me happy, believe me.

Libs? If you are burning with desire to debate politics? I am begging... begging you to understand that the education in school and the news yesterday on the tv Aren't. Acumen.(why would they be more credible than the commercials in between them?), and do not fear but embrace the idea/possibility that there's an iota of a chance you might not actually be right.

Does this notion mean i am? No. But if you don't think you might be wrong then you'll likely never find out you are.

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

That's not what's happening here. Not all marxists are okay with covering up Tiananmen Square or supporting the CCP. I used to be part of a Trotskyist org and they wouldn't be caught dead supporting either Stalin or the CCP. Anarchists certainly aren't okay with it, and they are further left than you are. Stop pretending all your enemies are liberals.

[–] the_post_of_tom_joad@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Liberals aren't my enemies though? I'm not pretending anything. Liberals are very high representation in lotsa comms and they are who i'm talking to seeing how this is a thread with a liberal complaining about me. Capice? Let's not fight, let's just chill today

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

Bro your the one supporting genocide denial, that's the reason people are fighting you. Stop doing things like that and maybe "the liberals" and everyone else will leave you alone. In fact no one actually mentioned liberals until you did. You are the problem here.

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg -1 points 3 months ago

The only thing you can really do is create new communities and wait for them to grow.

load more comments