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.
Best thing to do is to personally ask your instance admin to defederate, as well as other users and admins of other popular instances.
Yes, DEFEDERATE LEMMY.ML
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.
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…”
This is their job. They get half a yuan (wumao) per post.
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
Yes.
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s/about /bull/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.
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…
ok
Would rather have .ml or hexbear than whatever this is
Oh no please not this shit
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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
Hmmm… I just got here so I haven’t seen it in action, but if true, far left mods abusing their power to censor and ban people they disagree with? Where have I Redd it before?
Probably !support@lemmy.world
Go to lemmy.world and have a look at the Sidebar. That’s where instances publish info like that. And they list several methods to contact them, there.
Thank you! I just did and already posted there :D
Probably start with buying them dinner first
hehe well, you can always edit your comment!
It’s funnier this way :P
Is there a way to massage instance owners/admins?
I think you’d have to meet up with them IRL for that…
Crushing people with tanks
Just a heads up, while it is established that the CCCP killed tons of people on that day, the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia and mostly considered inaccurate news reporting.
The famous “tank man” photo shows a guy standing in front of a tank in order to prevent them from moving tanks to another part where the protesters had gone. We have no evidence that he was driven over by that tank.
the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia
There are photos of people clearly crushed by tanks?
Those “academics” are wrong.
We know this because there are photos of bodies and bicycles smeared into a paste [Source. Warning Blood/Gore].
And because people who were there literally said that’s what happened:
"The shooting was going on and people were still running to try and block the tanks, which were travelling at high speed, some positioning buses in the road. But the tanks crushed the buses and people, they didn’t care. People’s bodies were merged, moulded to their bicycles. They were flat.” [Source: Shao Jiang to The Mirror]
The CCP has desperately tried to cleanse the most brutal images and interviews of the massacre from the Internet, but even 30 years on they can’t completely scrub it clean. There’s a reason The Pillar of Shame monument is designed as it is.
A hexbear in that thread is literally claiming that “the soldiers did everything they could to avoid hurting him” when there’s a photo of him lying dead on the street after the tanks have gone through. They don’t think it’s fine, they’re saying it didn’t happen (curious)
This loony bullshit is why tankies go full useful idiot and parrot shit most of them know isn’t true. The right-wing disinfo about Tianamen square - or any other communist atrocity - is so widespread. Tankies think that the most ultra counter-narrative will somehow combat that even if its just as loony.
Inaccurate - the tankie pulling the switch would be smiling
And there would be more people on the track.
That photo (I’ve seen it circulate on the internet myself) is a photoshop. Every reputable source says that no one knows what happened to that man, and we have no evidence whatsoever of him getting run over.
He is bundled off to the left by other protestors, nobody knows what happened to him, there is no photo of him dead.
Of tank man? The guy in the famous photo?
Where’s the picture of this? I’ve never heard that before. It doesn’t appear in his Wikipedia page, it just says there nobody knows what happened to him after.
Was it actually him? I was under the impression that history did not relate what happened to him afterwards, nor who he was. That’s not to say the CCP did not murder a couple of thousand people during the crackdown regardless, because they did, but I have never seen a verifiable claim that a picture of any particular corpse actually was the Tank Man. There are numerous theories I’ve seen floated over the years alleging what may have happened to him afterwards ranging from him being caught and imprisoned, executed, living anonymously in China, or fleeing to Taiwan. All of them are unverified and, of course, mutually exclusive.
The tank operators absolutely did attempt to (and succeeded at) avoid running him over. That much is plainly visible in the video. Whatever happened after the video ended is undocumented and pure conjecture. Plenty of well documented atrocities actually were committed that day, before and after that moment, so there’s not much sense in inventing new ones and bickering over details we haven’t actually got.
Imo, when tankies get that bad, they might as well be nazis.
.ml = Marxism-Leninism
This wasn’t obvious to me because ML could also mean the country of Mali or machine learning, but based on their content and moderation patterns, it’s unmistakable that the “.ml” in Lemmy instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml stands for Marxism-Leninism.
Hope that clears things up.
Two-character TLDs are country codes
I know that and that’s why I said .ml could stand for the country of Mali. However, the .ml in lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml clearly stands for Marxism-Leninism, not Mali, the same way the .tv domain suffix often stands for television, not Tuvalu.
I say Twitch dot Tuvalu and people give me weird looks for doing so.
gesundheit
.ml top level domains are very cheap, as well, so I think it was a happy coincidence for them to choose the .ml TLD.
They most definitely didn’t mind that .ml can stand for Marxist-Leninism, but I don’t think that was the only reason it was chosen.
Oh, right. .tk, .ml and others
What is their Rule 1?
-
Be a tankie
-
Dont not be a tankie
-
“No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.” - plus a link to the lemmy Code of conduct
Someone should write an honest version of it.
They include anything less than fawning over CCP under “xenophobia”.
“Be nice and civil” - which is a fair enough rule, but it’s always used as a blanket ban. Most of the removed comments weren’t hostile or uncivil
The thread was posted into the memes community too so there’s always going to be a bit of banter, but most comments that weren’t in support of China were removed.
“Don’t write any facts about China.”
That’s a con and a pro of decentralized net: if you don’t like the owner, pick another instance or create your own and be the king. Bad news is, every instance is controlled by couple regular folks who’re not responsible financially so they can imply their own rules and post and ban whatever they want.
Like the jungle: you gotta learn to survive and avoid the monkeys with rabies.
You don’t see even a bit of hypocrisy in that? Holy shit…
I have exactly the same complaint about lemmy.world - it’s censuring everything that doesn’t align with leftist views (and on the other hand, when I post on lemmy.ml it’s usually not deleted).
Oh I know, I know, let me guess, they are censoring people because they are evil and authoritarian and are bad people, but you are censuring people because you are all democratic and for freedom and so on and anyway the ones that get censored are tankies and fascists and russian bots/propagandists?..
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2355607-our-blessed-homeland-their-barbarous-wastesYeah, very ironic that deleting misinformation is equated to deleting accurate information.
Oh yeah definitely, I forgot that one - everything they say is a misinformation, no matter the included sources and any proofs, and everything we say is the purest truth possible!
Seriously, it’s like the meme was created exactly for this post 🙃everything we say is the purest truth possible!
People obsessed with purity will think like that.
It’s not exactly the same complaint at all. You got a single comment removed from a single thread by a single moderator.
The equivalent would be if the admin of lemmy.world stepped in and not only banned you from World News but also every single other LW community you posted in, out of spite.
Okay, that’s fair enough.
Still, complaining about censorship while engaging in censorship is hypocritical 🤷
Not only do they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology, they often do it in such a way that it is untraceable by other mods. I’m not sure how they accomplish that, nor is the admin who messaged me letting me know that it was happening and he couldn’t figure out how. Anyways, my solution has been to completely block that instance, and delete my account there. If they want to exist in a little untruthful echo chamber, then so be it, but I don’t need to be a part of it. I recommend you do the same thing.
So it seems they do indeed clean up the modlog… my bans are still in there, but all mod actions where they removed China critical comments are no longer there.
I’m not sure how they accomplish that
If they have database access, which they would have being the admins, they can do anything.
Their mod actions usually do federate out, but their outgoing federation is a bit borked right now with some instances, perhaps due to the recent upgrade to Lemmy 0.19.4-rc.6. I believe they are at least aware of it now, though they have been basically non-responsive to the issue so far.
The Lemmy devs are .ml admins to boot.
Pretty hard to boot when they own the instance
Ah, I meant “to boot” meaning “in addition to”
Ah, makes sense!
they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology
That is EXACTLY what is done on lemmy.world.
Nice, didn’t know there was a possibility to see deleted comments, thanks :) (not every deleted comment is there though, but enough to show the total hypocrisy of lemmy.world)
https://beehaw.org/modlog?page=1&userId=4130334
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&userId=1782109
It gets difficult to find them sometimes, depending on who removed it and from where. If a moderator, from the community, removed it then the removal reason could have originated from where the community is located at, whereas if an administrator of an instance removed it then it would be elsewhere.
For all that the lemmy.ml admins enjoy going on sprees of mass-removals, it sure would be nice if they would add to the code a way to see the reasons for removal linked to directly from the comment itself.
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Oh yeah, that’s the other one, thx!
I did not even get a notification for that comment why it was deleted, but now I see, and sure enough - it’s misinformation (despite providing 5 or 6 links to sources in a comment below, including reputable western (!!) media and tens/hundreds of footages…). 🤷♂️
It is extremely obvious that the .ml admins run a malicious version of the Lemmy code which gives them additional levers of control. This alone makes them a serious threat to the entire fediverse.
It is not obvious, most likely not necessary and in any case completely unproven. Why are you so busy making stuff up in this thread?
There’s a ton of misinformation on this post and some of those spreading it seem to be vigorously doing so.
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.
As being new to Lemmy, I do understand what you are saying. There is no balance of conversation - it’s I’m taking my ball and going home type of thing.
Rather not all cases, but it does happen.
**People just want a good conversation **
**People just want a good conversation **
Feel free to join at !casualconversation@lemm.ee
Eventually lemmy will grow to a point where these communities are moved off that instance.
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.
