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.
I would have become a socialist way sooner if Tankies weren’t so prominent. ‘USSR good’ is not a great selling point.
I am a socialist, but I will not simp for authoritarian technocrats
Are you even a real socialist, then? If you aren’t excusing absolutely everything from an authoritarian country that calls themselves socialist but produces hundreds of billionaires?
Damn you raise a good point. Afterall capitalism is when the means of production is owned by small elite, and socialism is also that but like even more.
But you see that small socialist elite proclaims it’s doing it for the working class, therefore it’s okay now.
Don’t look at those prisons full of attempted trade unionists pls.
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Time for them to move on to a new hobby then, surely there are more sane people to take over the development
Yep. When I was migrating, I saw some advice to avoid Lemmy on account of its provenance, which is how I ended up on Kbin instead.
Unfortunately, it’s not going well on the original instance (getting in before “how’s that working out for you”), but for reasons very different to lemmy.ml.
Still don’t have a lemmy account, but I am, for my sins, subscribed to communities there. Like this one.
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And hitler made the trains run on time, but fuck both him and desalinator.
Lemmy.world heavily censors criticism of israel over at /politics and /news
.ml is far less tankie than .world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Linkerbaan spreading more lies. Glad I have you tagged as “shill” so it’s easy to recognize you.
How do you tag another user? Did you just mean you left a mental note or is it possible to assign custom tags to users somehow?
I use two apps to access Lemmy and both allow me to save notes/tag users. Maybe if you click their username you’ll see the option.
If you see accounts pushing agendas, you can tag with a note about their bias.
That sounds like a useful feature. Which apps are you using?
Connect and Boost
One of them is definitely Sync, don’t know about others
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.
I’ve been censored/shadowbanned in a couple .ml instances for calling out their overzealous comment-nuking mods. Not even political in nature, just seeing threads where 80-90% of the comments are ‘removed by moderator’ and commenting how suspicious it was.
Then they removed that comment, and after taking a screenshot of the new comment calling out that, I got shadowbanned and can’t even vote there anymore.
That’s just a regular ban. If you were shadowbanned, you would be able to vote but it wouldn’t do anything. As far as I know, Lemmy doesn’t have shadowbanning.
They could. But you can’t just ignore it, else they would see it missing when they refresh. You’d have to keep track of which things to actually count, and which to hide. It’s complicated, and Lemmy isn’t big enough to need it yet.
Instance admins could easily patch it in for their local communities
Any patch like that would need to be published publicly as Lemmy uses the AGPL license.
I imagine someone would eventually find out that their comments or votes aren’t visible to others users or somehow don’t register. But yea that is of course an issue.
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.
Very true, I saw a post about censorship posted on !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world that happened in !comics@lemmy.ml (instead of another instance with the same subject community) possibly because of this reason OP mentioned. This complaint post was also deleted from the community because it was violating the rules which I suppose it was since this was the reason:
The title of the post in the picture above was the reason given by the comics mod:
My unpopular opinion however is that simply de-federating won’t help as it just promotes those instances into becoming louder echo chambers. I think the simpler solution would be to have a dedicated community for mod abuse (I’m aware of !modabuse@lemmy.world but .world blocked /c/piracy so…) , so users can be aware of said issues and create or migrate to different communities as we see fit. Besides, users can simply block entire instances for themselves. Please don’t comment on the paradox of tolerance as I just mentioned blocking for oneself already.
P.S.
Devs please make it easier to browse the modlog, having to press the next button is bafflingly tedious. I had to resort to editing the url to browse faster, add a jump to by time/date or something.
I have them blocked and I can say I’m not missing anything at all.
I agree with the facts here but have a slightly different conclusion. This is a problem that exists on many similar platforms like Reddit, etc. If you give mods or admins unlimited power over their users, it is an almost foregone conclusion that it will be abused in some circumstances. While Lemmy.ml is perhaps the perfect storm of a bad example, I’ve seen examples of abuses of mod power from almost every community on both Lemmy and Reddit.
So how do we fix it? Migrating to different communities or instances can sometimes help, but the potential for abuse remains. Having more options for active communities and making migration easier is a step in the right direction. Despite its flaws, Lemmy is an improvement in this respect because its federated nature allows more choice in who has power over you, but the problem remains.
In my view the internet has always worked best when problems are solved democratically rather than autocratically. Content aggregators already allow for this to some extent in what content is presented, but moderation remains quite undemocratic. I think it may be that a new platform with new innovations to make moderation decisions more driven by community consensus instead of owners or founders of communities will be needed. Exactly what this will look like, I don’t know, but some brainstorming might be in order for the next evolution in social media.
My first idea would be to have users report posts and ping a random sample of like 20 active and currently online users of the community and have them decide (democratically). That way prevents brigading and groups collectively mobbing or harassing other users. It’d be somewhat similar to a jury in court. And we obviously can’t ask everyone because that takes too much time, and sometimes content needs to be moderated asap.
This comment is kind of fascinating because it’s essentially reinventing Slashdot’s metamoderation system 25 years later.
It was good then. No reason it wouldn’t work again today.
Basic sortition method, I think that has a lot of merit.
But then if you report something nobody should see, say CP for example, you’re suddenly subjecting 20 random people into seeing it.
Right but you could have filters to opt out of mod requests or certain types of mod requests. It could even be opt-in, with some trust level requirement before you’re included.
Also “CSAM” is a better term, because putting “porn” in the name focuses on the intended use by abusers, whereas the term “CSAM” focuses on the victims.
Also “CSAM” is a better term
I see. I had noticed people using that term instead, but I never knew why. Thanks for the info.
Also “CSAM” is a better term, because putting “porn” in the name focuses on the intended use by abusers, whereas the term “CSAM” focuses on the victims.
Why is that at all important?
Because calling it ‘porn’ makes it sound appealling to people who associate porn with sexy things. It makes it sound like something they might want to seek out. It also demeans the victim by rhetorically placing them as the subject of pornography which can contribute to the damage.
Calling it “child sexual abuse material” centres the victim and puts distance between this material and pornography that was made consensually and ethically.
In a similar vein, “revenge porn” should be called sexual abuse material as well. And in fact a lot of technically legal “porn” would fall into the category of sexual abuse material if the full circumstances of its production was made known, but in the case of children the distinction is unambiguous.
The problem is that someone has to host the data. That will always be true. Even in the cloud, someone has to own the servers that the data are on. The only solution I can see is something basically like what we have the fediverse, only where other instances are sharing copies of the same community and the posts on it, kind of preventing one place from having ownership of it. But then if the instance goes down or gets defederated, I suppose you’d still have different versions of it floating around, plus the problem of someone posting CSAM and it getting pushed to all the instances and stuff.
Still, I agree that I think the closest solution is going to be something like the fediverse we’re seeing now. I just don’t know how to solve the problem of overzealous mods still, because we need mods. Having some democratic control over modding seems dangerous, too. Imagine a place gets brigaded by The Donald at 3am and everyone wakes up to their community being totally different. Or sometimes people are just wrong, like we have the problem of pre October 7th where 99% of the US believed Israel was a golden angel thanks to propaganda and dismissed all criticism. Same thing with socialism in the 50’s, or racism. Democratic modding at the time would lead to MLK getting banned lol.
It’s definitely an issue, because the ml mod and mods like them are way too trigger happy on the bans, but it’ll probably take some time to think of good solutions, and lots of experimenting with new forms of social media, like the fediverse.
Regarding server ownership, yes that is a thorny problem. One could dream up some kind of communally owned server system but that might be far fetched. However, I think the issue of mod power is distinct and might be easier to address.
As for the flaws of democratic systems, yes, they are real but most of these flaws apply to more autocratic systems as well. And we see from numerous examples that more democratic systems tend to abuse their power less often and severely than autocratic ones do. It’s a higher bar to get the whole community together to ban MLK than just one racist mod. Carefully thought out governance structures can also help. You certainly don’t want 51% of the community to be able to ban 49% whenever they want to, but the ideal would be to enable easy involvement with a structure that guides users towards making the right decisions.
The structure and culture to make this work could be difficult to build, so I’m not saying it’s an easy answer but it does seem like something to consider and maybe experiment with.
We have decades of proof of chuds brigading and building up hate speech hellfests in these “just let capitalism decide” laissez-faire models.
Moderation free environments just turn places into kiwi farms.
Nobody is saying that there should be no moderation at all. What we are saying is that lemmy.ml moderators tend to remove users and content that are seen as even mildly critical of China, Russia, or Marxism-Leninism, and then sometimes hide the evidence of the removals from the modlog. That’s not acceptable to many people, including me.
Kiwi farms?
I obviously didn’t explain myself clearly if that’s what you took from this. I’m saying the community should be in control of moderation, not that there should be no moderation.
It’s a cute idea but in practice, very, very few users want to deal with content moderation. The far majority of users just want to consume good, moderated content without worrying about removing bad content. Getting people to volunteer as mods is already hard enough. Making it democratic will not help I think.
Also, mob rule is not always the best. It is not uncommon for totally reasonable takes to be down voted - sometimes just because it started getting down voted and then others went on the bandwagon.
The way to achieve democracy in communities is not by making moderation democratic, but to make community switching easy. So if you don’t like your community mods, you can easily go elsewhere. That is also a kind of democracy I would say.
Maybe a middle ground could be moderator elections. At least then it’s a representative democracy and it would largely work as it already did. But again, very few people volunteer as mod so I believe you’ll find that the mods you could vote for would be very, very few mods (potentially just 1).
All moderator elections would do is let chuds stack the ballot. Look up shit like the sad puppies debacle.
The answer is that a site needs to decide what its rules are and then moderators need to enforce those rules, regardless of how the community feels. Which, ironically, is what ml is doing (even if they don’t publicize those rules). And if the community dislikes the rules, you disassociate with them.
The issue with the fediverse is that you need to defederate or else you are tacitly approving of their bullshit.
Thanks for posting this.
I read the article you posted also.
I think the article is likely entirely true. One of the difficulties I have, as a regular reader not highly educated in Asian politics and history, is that I know Western governments do lie in order to protect their interests. Not only that, many of their rules allow them to lie. There are gag orders, and levels of secret classifications, and ps-ops and we all know that exists.
I am pro free speech and pro protest rights. I think since China does not allow free speech it’s likely the entire post is completely true. I really wish I could believe it completely. One thing that many Western pro-free speech countries don’t understand is that lying frequently, even if it’s sanctioned by the government and justified somehow, means they lose moral credibility with the truth of anything they say. Is it the truth this time… or is this one of the lies?
I still want to live in a world of free speech and women and LGBT people having rights and Western governments seem to be the best at doing this, but I just wish I could believe the article you linked without any doubt at all.
If it’s really that bad on lemmy.ml, couldn’t all the communities be replicated? I use lemmy.world and don’t know if there’s an option for me to block lemmy.ml unless I change federations. The plight of the poor and concentration of wealth among the upper classes has become very bad, and environmental problems will likely kill us all within 300 years (capitalism and democracy have environmentally failed) but I don’t want to be a part of something in which mere discussion of different views results in banning and deletion of comments, even if I have very pro-poor people views.
Using the website interface, you can go to your settings and block specific instances from there.
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
Communities living on instances is a feature i think actually. Where else would it be? It must be hosted or originate from somewhere. I’m also not sure how you would make it more decentralised in practice - I mean, what if you defederate from the instance that has all the mods of the community for example? How is moderation handled in general?
Also to be clear, it’s more of an ActivityPub thing than a Lemmy thing. This is just how ActivityPub works.
[OT; tl/dr: the issues with forums and user accounts being under hegemony of server instances is by design but it’s not actually the way one would design a truely de-centralised network]
It’s a feature but not the best practice if the idea would be forums (and users) being free of domains (and the dangers of domains being taken down, and host admins’ whims). The design approach of Lemmy however, speaks “hegemony” all over. It says a lot about the mindset of its creators.
An alternative would be indeed distributed directory systems, employing concepts like DHT … well proven de-centralized resiliency for quite a while. Would it have been done in such a way, there would be no difficulty with migrating forums and users across instances, and even a domain getting lost would not necessarily lead to all forums/accounts there-on to be lost. Also the issues with link creation across instances were due to forums being bound to domain names instead of them having Universal IDs thus being agnostic of which node they are actually hosted on.ActivityPub, AFAIK only defines a protocol for communicating datasets between instances, not the structures in which federation should be done.
It’s a feature but not the best practice if the idea would be forums (and users) being free of domains
I don’t think the idea is for users to be free of domains. One of the key benefits of tying users to their instance is that you defederate from the users of an instance when you defederate from an instance. If users were not bound to instances, it would be hard to defederate from certain groups without manually defederating a million users. Users being tied to domains makes moderation via defederation much, much simpler.
The design approach of Lemmy however, speaks “hegemony” all over. It says a lot about the mindset of its creators.
[…]
ActivityPub, AFAIK only defines a protocol for communicating datasets between instances, not the structures in which federation should be done.
I’m not an expert on ActivityPub but I think you’re wrong about this being Lemmy’s design decision. I think ActivityPub is designed in this way and it is intentional. I mean, all other ActivityPub apps do the same thing (e.g. Mastodon users are also tied to their instance).
forums being bound to domain names instead of them having Universal IDs thus being agnostic of which node they are actually hosted on.
Just want to point out that domain names are also perfectly capable of being agnostic about nodes - i.e. you can host multiple websites on a single computer or distribute the hosting of a website across many computers. I’m not really sure what you’re saying here but I don’t know if it’s important.
Umm… I was not so very clear perhaps. The idea would still be that user accounts as well as forums all contain their domain name, as their site of origin rather than a location identifier. Just that the host could change to any other domain (after negociation with the new host, that is). So it’s not about domains being tied to specific hosts/IPs but entities being tied to domains. It would be up for design discussion if that identifier should change or not, iin the case of a migration. The idea would be to give entities the ability to roam or be resurrected from any federated copy in case they are dissatisfied with the policies of their hosts, or in the event a domain gets taken down by authoritrian actors. (That’s why this actually is off-topic here)
From my glance into the ActivityPub doc, I concluded that it’s really only about the data exchange protocol, yet I might have overlooked something as I never had an in-depth talk with people who implement the thing. Yet, just because many do it in a certain way does not mean to me that this is written in stone somewhere. :-)
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?
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.
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.
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.
So… exactly what we already have except instead of c/linux@lemmy.world it is c/linux@lemmy.worldANDlemmy.zip?
If we keep going we might accidentally reinvent Usenet news.
Not saying that like its a bad thing, just saying we might be able to take some inspiration from there.
Join literally any other community if you’re upset at their moderation, which again is only upsetting y’all because it doesn’t align to Reddit and the US state department
It’s upsetting because of the reasons listed in the post, and everywhere else in the thread
Thanks for spreading the word. We get these complaints every few weeks. More people need to be educated and move away from these instances to make the Threadiverse a better place.
thread as in threaded posts as opposed to other parts of the fediverse with another layout. it’s not about the instance Threads, but the type of fediverse service allowing a lemmy/kbin type of conversation.
Threadiverse is just a general term to refer to the parts of the Fediverse that behaves like forums (cause forums have threads). It has nothing to do with threads.net.
They speak like a bot. Zuckerberg sending miles to infiltrate?
Are you referring to me or BigFig? I’m neither a mile (I’m European, so we use the metric system), nor a mole. If you make me choose an animal, I’d like to be an alpaca. And I’d be willing to do a captcha to prove to you that I’m not a bot.
Are you new here? “Threadiverse” has been used to refer to thread-based fediverse technologies that use threaded comments since before Zuck’s “threads” was even announced!
I’ve only really heard Fediverse. I don’t really get into the meta discussions on here though. I’m also getting hyper sensitive to chatters that sound like bots. They mentioned “we”, but it doesn’t look like they’re a mod or admin, so I thought it was a bot using some PR speak from the dataset.
I don’t think there is a solution.
Effective moderation to protect vulnerable people needs more centralization. Avoiding the influence of bad-actor mods needs more decentralization. The two seem fairly mutually exclusive. Or rather, they trade off against each other.With more users, having a fractured community wouldn’t be a huge problem, because they could all have critical mass. But with the current user base that is generally not feasible, even for really popular topics.
Defederation of lemmy.ml from the larger instances would be a solution.
Man do you know how many instances exist? I hate this idea of trying to coordinate defederation across all bigger instances all at once. You have the option of migrating to an instance which is already defederated from them, or hosting your own instance and defederating from whoever you want. You can also mute them. Don’t come to a decentralized network with the expectation of imposing centralized decision making behaviour?
I’m talking about systemic solutions for the general problem of bad-actor mods.
Defederating an instance is fracturing the community which difficult for a community to withstand with our current user numbers.
Giving mods less power, such as making communities themselves defederated, makes problems for good-faith mods who are trying to protect vulnerable community members.
It’d be neat if the community itself could vote to migrate to a new instance, but that’d be so fraught with abuse that I can’t see it actually working.
It’d be neat if the community itself could vote to migrate to a new instance
You kind of already can do this. It’s just that instead of voting directly, people choose individually where to go instead. That is also kind of a “vote” - you vote by choosing a community and so whichever gets most votes becomes the new major community of that topic.
There is no need for a systematic solution, it is already in place. The admins/mods of lemmy.ml are acting in questionable ways and people are pointing this out and some are even trying to rally to defederate and trying to get people to move off the instance and all that. This is the systematic solution. The system is working as intended.
But again that fractures the community.
You lose all the community history, and not everyone migrates to the new community. You end up with a bunch of new splinter communities, none of which have critical mass to survive.
You can’t have decentralisation without the possibility of some amount of fracturing. I mean decentralization is essentially fractured by design. I think this won’t be such a big problem in the future as instances and communities mature more.
I don’t necessarily agree that decentralized is fractured by design, nor that “working as intended” means that it’s the best solution for this/every situation.
I’m saying that as we decentralize, we get both advantages and disadvantages. I’m saying that this is a situation where we can’t both have our cake and eat it too.
For example:
We could decentralize communities themselves, preventing them from fracturing. Instead of having communities hosted on a single instance, communities could be feeds aggregating all posts tagged as belonging to that community. Then if you defederate an instance you simply stop seeing posts from users in that instance.
But then good-faith mods are defanged and can no longer protect vulnerable community members from antagonistic actors.I think my straw example tradeoff is a bad one, that’s too much decentralization of power.
Effective moderation to protect vulnerable people needs more centralization.
No it doesn’t. Centralization would make it so that if there are bad mods, you would have nowhere to go instead. That’s how reddit is - if you don’t like the mods in a subreddit, tough luck.
Decentralisation helps by providing alternatives if the existing mods/admins go bad.
I actually already discussed that if you go back and read the comment that you’re replying to
I’ve commented there on a /news community with sourced points to make my argument and was basically told to shut the F up and had my comments deleted.
So I blocked the community.
I’m not sure how to deal with extremist mods any other way. Their instance, their community, and other than defederating and putting a lot of effort into restarting and growing any valuable communities on another instance while keeping the undesirable .ml gang out, I’m not sure there is any other solution.
The problem is more that they’re holding several large bona fide communities hostage this way. For example !linux@lemmy.ml is by far the most active Linux community on Lemmy, and because of network effect it’s not easy to get people to move to another instance.
It would take something huge to get people to move, for example some of the larger instances like lemmy.world defederating lemmy.ml.
I don’t disagree that it’s an issue, the only thing I can offer is that Linux shouldn’t be a community full of controversy needing block/bans of participants - the issue being is views the .ml mods do espouse being placed deliberately or left as propaganda.
I’m all for defederating from tankie instances. They suck.
Yes, we should all recognize that Lemmy.ml is a tankie instance.
Reread OP
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.As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.
The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.
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.
That describes them well imo
It’s called second campism, and it’s been happening for a long time, it just used to make more sense when it could actually seem like there was two hegemonic camps during the cold war (still an oversimplistic view).
Now they just support any regime that’s anti-US/the original capitalist camp because they have no hegemonic camp of their own to support, just a broad smattering of authoritarian regimes with completely different ideologies.
And capitalist regimes. The Russian Federation was literally founded by a betrayal of a reformist movement in the USSR, and China consulted with Milton Goddamn Friedman on their economy, ending up with billionaires. I even saw .ml users crying about Russian *oligarchs" having their assets seized (“stolen,” as they said), and unironically citing Matt Taibbi. Not even “back in the day” Taibbi, but literally The Twitter Files. Using bought & paid for corporate propaganda to make their point.
They’re just campists. I don’t want to run afoul of a “No True Scotsman” situation, but fuck, for people who seem to think they’re the Only True Socialists, they’re willing to drop socialism in an instant if it means they can be edgy dickheads on the internet.
go back to reddit if you want to live in the bubble of “America does nothing wrong”
Showing pictures of the protesters murdered at TS is absolving the US of all wrong i guess.
This is a classic strawman argument. Nobody is reasonably arguing “Americs does nothing wrong”. Criticism of the East is not implicit support for the West, nor vice versa. Turns out, both can be wrong. Ain’t that a surprise?
See, I don’t think anybody says that
Living in the bubble of “CCP did nothing wrong (and we will ban you from all your favorite communities if you dare to disagree)” isn’t exactly a great alternative.
