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 think any censorship heavy instance doesn’t deserve attention in the fediverse.
So, most of the fediverse instances don’t deserve attention is the fediverse? That’s an interesting take :)
Its about time people bring up the .ml tankie problem. Lemmygrad was defederated but .ml was ignored due to basically being their PR instance. This is the main reason I have stuck to kbin social despite it having a lot of spam and errors and why I am now on Mbin.
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.
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.
Yes.
This was my experience. My first interaction was me asking a question in good faith. I was then attacked en masse and banned. When I asked about it, I was told how I was a terrible person for not already knowing and believing what they do.
Keeping in mind that “knowing and believing what they do” is itself a perilous notion because one of them might be a “Post-Madrid 1933 purple throated” Marxist while another might be a “Modernist new path” Marxist (I made those terms up). I mean I know “lol factions” is an old discussion with the farthest left, but they can’t even agree with each other.
Honestly once you sort of realize that you can’t be on the left and also support authoritarianism/fascism (regardless of the label or intent) the factionalism kind of isn’t as troublesome or confusing.
You end up with those who believe in supporting progress informed by rational, current understanding of reality and then you have those who cling to failed ideas the same way conservatives do.
The left can debate solutions and data reasonably without splitting into contradicting camps, people just need to always check and see if they’re actually oriented towards the defining principles of left wing politics; bolstering human rights and well being, strengthening democratic institutions and outcomes using the most current understanding of the world we have available to us right now.
The left, by definition, flexes and adapts to reality to achieve an outcome, conservativism is when people try to bend reality to fit their ideology.
My wife and I have a saying we find ourselves using far, FAR too often: “Conservatism lurks in the most unexpected places…”
I really want to understand their relationship with the CCP.
Do they genuinely believe the shit they’re peddling or are they paid propagandists or is their something more nefarious afoot.
They get half a yuan per post. Not sure what the rate is on banning or deleting comments.
i’ve seen you say this more than once. do you have a source?
This is what’s being referred to:
Do they genuinely believe the shit they’re peddling or are they paid propagandists or is their something more nefarious afoot.
From my interactions, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re mostly seriously broken people who’ve discovered Marx, convinced themselves that capitalism is the cause of all suffering and believe socialism is the solution that will free them from their trauma. The degree of their attachment to socialism is a reflection of the degree of their suffering and brokenness.
If they weren’t so toxic, they’d be deserving of compassion and forebearance.
I mean… that description quite accurately describes me. I’m a broken person who has become convinced capitalism is a major source of strife in today’s world, and have come to believe in socialism as the answer.
However… that hasn’t led me to champion authoritarian states that repress people. There must be a little something extra thrown in there. My guess would be an unacknowledged desire to replace their oppressors.
This reminds me, I wrote something on the subject once:
When you’re privileged, and never had to fight for anything in life, you probably won’t even recognise it when you see it happen right in front of you. In fact, you might even write it off as baseless antagonism, a thoughtless disruption of peace, and side with the oppressors.
“What do you mean he didn’t pay you? He’s an honourable man! He pays me, every friday, on the dot! You must be lying.”
Even more insidiously, though, is the fact that, even if you do suffer and fight your whole life, you still may not see it as oppression. You may even begin to think it the natural order of things, even begin to value and love the suffering, as a trial that proves your worth in life, internalising the values of your oppressors, until even the thought of a better life becomes not only fantasy, but dangerous sacrilege.
“He didn’t pay you? Of course he didn’t pay you. Welcome to life. Pay? You want a blowjob with that, too? Get real.”
And with this internalisation of your oppressors’ values, this adoption of their mindset, and the unquestioning acceptance of the status quo in its current form, once enough does eventually become enough, and you finally get it into your head that things can change, the inevitable form of that change becomes a mirror image: yourself in the throne of oppressor, cracking the whip not only upon your former master, but also upon your former comrades (now, as ever, seen only as competition) for the simple reason that the throne exists, and must be filled, for why else should it exist, other than to seat a whipcracker?
“There’s no law telling him to pay you, why are you even surprised? You expect him to do it out of the goodness of his heart? Of course not. And when I’m on top, I won’t pay you either.”
It is an interesting question because even China doesn’t believe in the disinformation they spread. It’s just a tactic
This is their job. They get half a yuan (wumao) per post.
Everyone should defederate from .ml, and most have already got rid of hexbear and lemmygrad.
It’s an absolute shit show of an instance, and the rest of us don’t want to be subject to their nonsense.
I just wish the instance block prevented me from seeing their users as well.
The confusion about how the protocol works for new users is real, and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading, firstly when you’re not used to how fediverse stuff works, but also when bizarre rules about no swearing or NSFW content are applied at an admin level. I first started on .ml, but moved here after some deliberation because people can tailor their feed and content through joining communities, not having their instance hyper-politicised by ban-happy tankies. (I’m very progressive myself, before it’s claimed otherwise)
I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption. Of course admins are entitled to their own opinions, but the entire purpose of communities like this is to try and decentralise the problematic censorship which has ruined reddit (among other issues). Having faith in the users and mods to consider content and conduct with as impartial as possible development and administration is vital to the site having any chance of being transparent and worth-contributing to.
I don’t want to see the whole concept of Lemmy written off by outsiders because their first experiences of the site are of the rabid circlejerk messageboards instead of a new and exciting format for online content with greater interoperability and user control. To this effect, I’m still on the fence about defederating with those communities at a user level, but I think that I’m going to make a more concerted effort to make content and foster the communities I want here, so that .ml fades into insignificance - I don’t want to feed into their narratives of persecution.
I wanna call on @dessalines, and @Nutomic, among others, with the greatest respect for their views and contributions to the project, to put the future of the platform ahead of turning it into an echo chamber - either by relinquishing themselves from one or the other (admin/dev), or by the admins collectively creating a clear policy about politicised banning to acknowledge people’s concerns about this behaviour.
When people ask about generalist instance recommendations, here’s my list
- lemm.ee is the second most active instance and avoids joining Lemmy.world which is already too big (you can join LW if you really want)
- sh.itjust.works works, if you don’t mind the name
- if you are based in Europe, discuss.tchncs.de is very well managed (they have other services at https://tchncs.de/)
- if you are based in North America, lemmy.ca is nice
- reddthat.com is cool if you don’t want downvotes
That’s pretty much it. Other instances are either topic-based or regional, but then people have to look them up on lemmyverse or fedidb
I see absolutely no reason why you couldn’t be a Dev and an admin, in a decentralized platform. If this was a single-server platform, maybe. But here, how does the moderation policy of lemmy.ml affects anything but posts over there?
Also, beehaw has a very politicized banning policy, would you say that is unacceptable? I see it as perfectly fine and I would be fine as well if they were to contribute to Lemmy code (unless they try to build their policies into the code and therefore enforce them everywhere - which is something we know the Lemmy devs are not doing).
and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading
I’d say more than a little. I always suggest they look at the instance rules and also who the instance blocks to make sure they’re OK following those rules and being blocked from that content before picking. Part of why I picked SDF was that they block no other servers.
I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption.
Why? They explicitly haven’t baked any of their moderation/administration preferences into the code and have rejected suggestions that they should bake things along those lines into the code. If they decide to, that sounds like an awfully good reason for a fork. You don’t have to love the devs and their politics to use the software they developed, though you should probably be on board if you want to use the instance that they run.
Don’t go on the instance
removed by mod
Yeah it was only a matter of time before you explicitly lumped Indians into the persona non grata list. I always knew you guys would eventually just say “fuck all brown people”. This is exactly why Indians born in the West to Indian immigrants have strong solidarity with other brown people regardless of their religion. We don’t trust you conservatives and never will.
You came invaded our ancestral country, subjugated us, stole our natural resources, and divided us. You still have items you stole from us in your museums. And you have the audacity to say that Indians and Muslims are invading Europe after Europe invaded us and stole from us.
Naw. This is why we’re on the left. Fuck you all. If you say we’re invading you, then fuck it. We are invading you, and we’ve raised “anchor babies” as sleeper cell spies – and we’re going to save the West from you pathetic conservative colonizers.
i love it when racist Europeans show their ass
I’d like to note for the record that I downvoted you not for using the term “racist”, that definitely seems to be an accurate assessment, but for saying “European”. For one, a European racist wouldn’t care about Canada, for two, Indians aren’t really a large or noticeable or denigrated immigrant group anywhere in Europe but maybe the UK, and for three, UK racists wouldn’t care about “the continent”.
No, what we’re looking at here seems to be a Canadian racist. They can keep them.
ok
As a Canadian, we don’t want him either. How about we dump 'em in the ocean?
Hmm… Gulag on Hans’ Island?
We’ll have to ask Denmark and see what they think. I’m sure they won’t mind…
s/about /bull/Oh no please not this shit
removed by mod
You’re free to talk all you like, in fact -but you’re going to be rightfully considered a dipshit. It comes with the territory. Be prepared, my fragile friend.
Look, I’d love to discuss, but usually with this kind of bigotry it amounts to pissing in a violin. There’s no room for hate in my world
Would rather have .ml or hexbear than whatever this is
Sad to see. Feels like Lemmy has no bright future with people in charge of it thinking russia’s and China’s government is good and ban difference of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs.
Are you saying that all popular instances are run by “tankies”?
removed by mod
If their community mods ban enough people, won’t they eventually no longer have the biggest communities?
In theory, yes. In practice, not necessarily.
Pourquoi?
No, come to think of it, you’re right. I was thinking of communities that ban people in droves, but they still have a lot of members.
But the keyword in your comment is “enough.” So, yup, again in theory, if they ban 99% of the whole Fediverse, they won’t be the biggest community in it.
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.
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
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.
So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”
That is really the solution though, isn’t it.
I don’t think so. It’s a bit like being bullied and your friends are being bullied, too. What do you do? Leave the room and be happy they bully your friends and not you? Keep silent which ultimately enables them? No. You’re being vocal about it. You warn your friends not to go in there. And you try to do sth about it. In the end it’s the bullies who should leave, not the nice people. Or the whole place is doomed and just getting worse.
Silly. The internet is full of echo chambers. Just move on. If an instance is run by people you can’t reason with, why hang out there? Will you try and change 4chan too?
And am I supposed to let other people be subject to that, too? Let people like that drag down Lemmy as a whole? Shouldn’t I have a nice and welcoming place on the internet for me and my friends?
Do you like echo chambers? If you want my perspective: I have until now recommended Lemmy to exactly zero of my friends. Because of things like this. Lemmy has quite some potential. But it just has so many issues to tackle and the culture here just isn’t what appeals to “normal” people. If other people share my experience, that’s exactly why Lemmy still is below 50k active users and super small.
Sure. I moved away from the .ml communities a few weeks ago because I think it’s the right thing to do (for me). It’s just dragging down everyone and making Lemmy a worse place. Like we see constantly with all the posts like this. Should we (the people who want more than an echo chamber, and want fair and honest discussions) all abandon Lemmy?
And am I supposed to let other people be subject to that, too? Let people like that drag down Lemmy as a whole? Shouldn’t I have a nice and welcoming place on the internet for me and my friends?
It’s… Lemmy. One instance does not represent all of it. Move to a friendlier instance. That’s the beauty of the fediverse.
And in the end, lemmy.ml, like many other instances, are run by its owners, technically for the fun of it. They’re absorbing the cost. Not us. They can do whatever they want with their little toy server.
Look, I’m not defending them. They suck. I’m just saying that the internet is vast. Why focus of one small corner of it? Again, that’s like trying to change 4chan. Or moving to a tornado area and trying to get rid of the tornadoes.
I get you. But they’re the flagship instance. At least they used to be. They shape the brand identity of whole Lemmy. And that’s being tankie and having a culture that could be nice, but regularly isn’t. So everyone on the internet knows Lemmy isn’t really something I want to subject myself to. And if we’re being honest, alsmost nobody knows the fine nuances of power abuse on specific instances. It’s just “Lemmy” that this gets attributed to.
Every interaction here represents Lemmy. Some disproportionately so.
And we’ve established, me leaving (which I’ve done) is not gonna change anything about it. The communities are still amongst the largest and where most of the users are, and also attracting the new users.
Your argumantation would be perfectly valid if lemmy.ml were some small instance that’s unheard of by most users. Or blocked by the rest of the network. We could ignore them then, let them do their own thing like the Fediverse does with a few nazi and conspiracy instances. But this isn’t the case here.
Regarding money and doing it “for the fun of it”: That’s not correct. They get money for two or three full-time jobs from the NLNet fund and the EU. They could be having fun, too. But they definitely also get a substancial amount of money for it.
Concerning the 4chan example: That’s on point. 4chan is the epitome of echo chamber and incel culture. That’s mainly because there’s no one else. They left. And now, why would anyone else visit a place like that in the first place? I’d rather not Lemmy become like that. Do you?
Wait… is lemmy.ml really the flagship instance? I thought that was lemmy.world.
Here’s how I see it: an instance becomes bullshit, all the rest of the instances defederate from them. It has happened in the past, it will keep happening in the future. Lemmy self-corrects.
And if it doesn’t, welp, it will go the way of Slashdot, Digg and Reddit. I’d be okay with that.
It’s lemmy.ml . During the API wars on Reddit lots of people came here and lots of new instances were founded. lemmy.world was part of that and quickly grew into -I think- the now largest instance by far. But lemmy.ml is at least 2 years older and hosted by the actual developers. And due to history hosts to this point some of the large communities.
Yeah. And “Lemmy self-corrects” is kind of what this post is about (in my opinion.) I’d like to see lemmy.world and a few other instances now do it and defederate. That’s how it should be, call out bullshit, be vocal and then do something about it. My point is, we’re at phase 1 or 2. Now we’re going to see if Lemmy self-corrects. As of now it didn’t.
I think just hoping for a bright future isn’t cutting it. And if you ask me, all the infighting and defederating each other also isn’t healthy.
I’m all for defederating from tankie instances. They suck.
Reread OP
Yes, we should all recognize that Lemmy.ml is a tankie instance.
Thanks for bringing this up, it’s really needed.
Your example is just one of many I’ve seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.
I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.
The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign
That’s too subtle a statement. It is a willful, bad-faith, full-on attack on objective reality via the rewriting of historical facts, redaction of massive volumes of information and constant aggressive, knee-jerk silencing of voices.
As such, it can also be described as a malicious assault on the mental health of individuals and society as a whole. Their actions a clear example of the type of repressive, miserable society they would have us live in, if given the chance by hook or by crook.
Or simply working out of troll farms in China or Russia while being bankrolled by Republicans in USA. Same M.O.
edit: for example: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/chatgpt-bot-x-russian-campaign-meme/
Yet so few people see this reality. And engage in pointless fights where there is absolutely nothing to gain but only lost time and effort. Meanwhile this strategy seems to work very successfully and not only here…
I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.
This is essentially the same problem Reddit has (mods/admins can control what is discussed on their boards), stems from the same place (mods/admins have essentially unlimited power over their boards/instances), and has the same basic solution - let the echo chamber echo chamber and create alternative communities that don’t have that problem. And on the upside, since this is a federated space you can just have whatever@otherserver.net instead of r/truewhatever7alpha.
It’s just more noticeable here because the censorious leftward fringe is both more extreme and more aggressive about it.
At least we haven’t started getting mods running bots to auto-ban anyone who has ever interacted with other specific communities yet.
I don’t think we can help them. They’re praising the authoritarian state capitalist nation of China as an ideal form of government just because the country lies about being socialist. (The “Chinese characteristics” are billionaires and capitalism.) They need cult deprogramming to re-enter reality. Just like the Trumpanzees who think Donald did a good job.
For the rest of us, a team should fork the code and the rest of us cut them loose. I came to Lemmy to get away from delusional far-right redditors. I don’t want to read similar idiotic doublethink from “communists” who love capitalism and think North Korea has done nothing wrong.
You don’t need to do a full lemmy code fork ffs. The problem is moderation style of a specific instance, just set up a new instance and defed from the problem instances.
If we don’t trust them to moderate instances with integrity I don’t know why we would trust them to maintain the source indefinitely. We’ll eventually have to fork even if it doesn’t seem necessary at the moment.
you can’t trust anyone to maintain source indefinitely. forking now just means everything has to be done twice
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.
do you mean i have to make a new account? or is there a way to “move” basically?
You will need to create a new account, but it is possible to export all of your subscriptions to a new account. There should be a thing you can click for that in your settings menu to download the export file, which you would then import into your new account.
Your old comments will not transfer, however.
I think some mobile apps have functionality to essentially move your subscription list.
I’m half retarded, any videos explaining the structure of Lemmy? No idea the difference between .ml and .cafe, is it supposed to be different subreddits? Or different websites?
Not video, but I will try to explain it in a simple way:
Lemmy instances are individual websites that run the Lemmy software. These instances are operated by different people or organizations and can have their own unique topics, rules, and communities.
Lemmy instances federate using the ActivityPub protocol. This protocol allows different servers, or instances, to communicate and share data such as posts, comments, and community interactions.
Different instances use the same software, but are managed by different admins.
For more detail about the admin of lemmy.ml, please refer to this post: https://lemmy.world/post/16239454
The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to email.
You know how you might have a gmail address, your friend might have a protonmail address and your parents might still have their old aol email address? But you can all still freely talk to each other anyways?
Lemmy is like doing that, but for something like Reddit. If you notice, usernames have an @servername on the end and just like an email address that’s the server that person is connecting through. For example, I’m Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org.
Which means I log in to lemmy.sdf.org and use their servers to read Lemmy, but I can read, post and comment on communities on any other Lemmy server that is federated with lemmy.sdf.org just like they’re on lemmy.sdf.org just like you can send an email to someone using a different email service and it makes no difference on your end.
Communities work the same way - so for example politics@lemmy.ml, politics@beehaw.org and politics@lemmy.world are all different communities hosted on different servers with their own separate posts, subscribers, mods etc. And users on any Lemmy server federated with the server that community is on can read, comment, post, etc (mod action notwithstanding).
This federation thing I keep mentioning is just which servers are willing to talk to which other servers - again you can compare to email. Sometimes email servers pop up to send massive amounts of spam, and when they do mail providers blacklist them and simply ignore all messages from that source. Defederating is the same idea. You use lemmy.world according to your username, so if lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml then you will no longer be able to see any communities @lemmy.ml or read any posts or comments posted by someone @lemmy.ml - to you it will be like lemmy.ml just doesn’t exist.
If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link labeled “Instances”, which will give you a list of which servers lemmy.world talks to and which ones they’ve specifically blocked. Lemmy.world has a pretty long list of blocked instances.
One of the reasons I picked SDF’s lemmy instance was because they don’t block **any **instances - as far as SDF is concerned it’s up to the end user what they want to see. Also SDF is kinda a cool entity - they’re a non-profit best known for maintaining public access unix servers and a bunch of retrocomputing stuff (like dial up internet and a gopher server) that has been around since 1987 (the name is literally an old anime reference because they started out as an anime BBS).
