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.
.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.
.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
I say Twitch dot Tuvalu and people give me weird looks for doing so.
gesundheit
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
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.
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?
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. :-)
Happened to me with an even bigger instance because of an asshole admin making shit up. A solution might be to divide up the host of the user comments versus the moderator agents versus receiver of the comments. If your host bans you, that’s it, but if the receiver bans you, that only affects their users, and if a moderator agent group bans you, that only bans you from their distribution group of moderator agents but could be read by other groups.
If a community / group-of-moderator-agents-under-a-community-tag-for-a-particular-host bans you, you’d have to find another groups of moderator agents or accept all that are allowed by your host. Accepting all allowed by your host could only realistically exclude the worst offenders - spammers, doxxers, etc - so you’d really be incentivized to find a better block of moderator agents if you want to avoid certain types of comments. People who want to live in a bubble could live in a bubble but people who want to prioritize the greatest participation would try to find the most lenient host and the most lenient moderation agents, at least to their particular sensitivities.
It would be a truer federated model, but this is not lemmy as it is.
I’ve been banned from .ml for being a ‘racist’ for being anti-Xi, despite the fact that I am Chinese, and pointed out my ethnicity as such in the discussion. I guess antisemitic Jews aren’t the only weird accusation getting thrown about nowadays.
I don’t think any of this is even real to them. The same way that a majority of the white-nationalist 4-channers are just roleplaying and losing themselves in the storylines, as a species we tend to do that, we just get lost in a narrative because it explains how we feel.
The tankies are doing the same exact thing. They’re not impacting policy, they’re not marching for anything, they’re not taken seriously and it’s just another in-club that has its own language and imagery and secret handshakes and a unifying message to rally behind (America bad!) and instead of turning that criticism into actionable plans for changing representation and making anything better, they put on WW2 Russian Tanker helmets and have erotic fantasies about a communist uprising that will never happen.
Children.
If anyone would like more context about the kind of think they were posting:
Yep, the horror. I absolutely deserved an instance-wide ban for the terrible things I said.
I do love the amount of facts and proof that is been dug up and displayed in this post, many thanks to all those going to the effort!
I got a ban for pointing out the nuclear strikes on Japan killed less than the conventional firebombing runs leading up to it, and if nukes wouldn’t have been used a shit ton more people would have died.
Like, no opinion on if what was morally right or not, just what the numbers worked out.
It’s all trolls over there, when a rational person makes a community, the admins start drama there and troll the mods till they leave or get kicked out for stupid shit.
I just blocked the whole instance. I never see any of their posts now, and as an unintended bonus I don’t even get notifications when their users reply to my comments.
Like, it would be best if we defederated from them and that hilariouschaos troll instance.
But I can just block them, works the same.
Like, no opinion on if what was morally right or not, just what the numbers worked out.
I don’t want to get in the merit of the comment, but unless you see the future, this statement is simply not true. Your argument is simply based on accepting certain assumptions as true.
Coincidentally this argument is routinely used by people supporting american atrocities, who consider nuking hundreds of thousands of people the humanitarian solution to WWII.
To be clear, I don’t agree with that line of moderation, I don’t agree with most of the views that seem to characterize .ml, but it’s a year that people make posts like this one, you can’t tell me you don’t understand the ban based on the above.
I suggest you learn about history before you form opinions on what happened
History is about what happened. “Otherwise it would” is speculation.
And even after the nuclear bombs, there was an attempted coup to stop surrender.
Prior to the bombs, there was no chance of surrender.
That is history.
And where is the count of deaths in the different timeline?
Look, my point is simple: human history is not deterministic and we simply can’t know what happens tomorrow like if we were predicting the laws of phisics. Maybe there were other 100 different course of actions leading to as many outcomes.
You can analyze what happened, but it’s foolish to say “this was better because the alternative would have led to”. You can only analyze and discuss what happened, otherwise anything can be justified with “it wouldn’t have been worse”.
“this genocide was good, because without it the oppressed population would have led to civil war and many more deaths”.
You think the nuclear bombs were a genocide?
Seriously, who “taught” you this stuff?
I am genuinely curious where people presented all of this stuff you’re saying as history.
Like, it’s almost like the only thing you know about civilian deaths in WW2 was American dropped nukes.
There’s sooooo much that you’re missing. But unless you dropped out of school at a very young age, I can’t be the first person that tries to explain this to you
So where are your opinions coming from?
Is this a thing where you learned everything you know about a subject from YouTube videos?
If so…
Why?
I honestly disagree that blocking works the same. Social media relies on a network effect, and if they keep being allowed to operate popular communities then they will have that network effect in their favour, and new users that don’t know any better will keep joining.
Defederation is an important tool to turn certain instances into pariahs for bad behaviour, and individual blocks don’t achieve that.
This is a lot of the problem with gen z, especially among the left. Everyone is quick to smash the block button, which in aggregate just makes everything worse for everyone else.
It’s not a generational problem, it’s a platform problem. It’s a disempowered person problem. Generations are mostly made up anyway.
Hitting the block button is fine to deal with harrassment, it just doesn’t solve the wider issue.
I think zoomers are far more prone to refusing to engage with things that make them uncomfortable than previous generations.
And just because something isn’t clear cut doesn’t make it imaginary. It’s a useful but fuzzy categorization.
Well I’d be fascinated to see how you arrive at that conclusion but until then I’m going to have to disagree on the basic principle that the generalisations people make about generations are usually pretty useless.
If you truly don’t see any difference between Boomers, Gen X, and Millenials then I think our views of reality are so wildly different we might not be able to have any sort of communication.
Explain?
When you block someone you cede the conversation to them. When lots of people block someone, fewer people push back against their bullshit. Because the people most able to push back against it no longer see it.
So you make them invisible to yourself, but not to others.
More people were killed in the firebombing.
The theory that more people would have died of the nukes weren’t dropped is FAR from settled fact. The Japanese were already looking to surrender and it’s not likely the bomb played a big part in that decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki?wprov=sfla1
Regardless it’s nothing to get banned over, that’s for sure.
Whether that alone is something to be banned over is probably context dependent, and I don’t have any faith that that instance had a good reason for it. Nevertheless that person holding up their great take about the nuclear bombs being good actually does not paint a great picture of them as a person. It makes them look like a reactionary US nationalist who wants to believe anything that makes their side the “good guys”. They can pretend it was morally neutral all they want, but morality is the only reason anybody argues something like that because it’s so nebulous the only way you get there is with motivated reasoning.
At any rate I wouldn’t put that on the pile of reasons to hate on the .ml instances, not when there are so many good reasons.
the nuclear strikes on Japan killed less than the conventional firebombing runs leading up to it, and if nukes wouldn’t have been used a shit ton more people would have died.
That’s an absolutely disgusting thing to say. Japan was already surrendering, they were only nuked as a show of strength.
I’m not sure what you imply when you say that “a shit ton more people would have died”, but if you’re saying that the US should have napalm bombed an entire surrendering country just to make an example, I don’t think it makes your argument valid. It’s not ok to do something horrible, just because you could have done something even worse if you had wanted to.
Japan was already surrendering
Who told you something that ridiculous?
They weren’t already surrendering, ok. I’m not an expert but imo it could be argued that the Soviet Union joining the war (as they were about to) might have given Japanese command an excuse to surrender while saving face, or triggered an internal coup or something. They weren’t stupid, surely they could see the writing on the wall.
If you think there was anyway they’d have surrendered without nukes then yes, I will agree that you are “not an expert”.
For fucks sake, after the nukes there was still an attempted coup to prevent surrender…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
People thay think Japan surrendered because of loss of life, have no idea what they’re talking about about.
Japan surrendered because they thought America had more nukes, and if they kept fighting then Japan would be left uninhabitable for centuries due to atomic contamination.
The people who tried the coup, did so because they thought America didn’t have more nukes.
They weren’t stupid,
They weren’t, but honor was/is huge in their culture, and Japan was an empire for thousands of years.
They’d have fought to the last Japanese civilian was alive
They surrendered, and I know I’m repeating myself, because they thought their islands would be literally wiped off the face of the planet.
Anything less wouldn’t have won the war and cost more lives on both sides.
Even as a trolly problem, it’s not a tough call on if nukes saved lives.
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I’ve been banned from .ml for being a ‘racist’ for being anti-Xi, despite the fact that I am Chinese, and pointed out my ethnicity as such in the discussion.
And I’ve been censored (not yet banned, but I guess it won’t take long till that as well) on lemmy.world (and beehaw) for spreading “misinformation” about Ukraine, despite being a Ukrainian and actually reading (and sharing) the local news of what’s actually happening there, contrary to the government propaganda.
You claim Zelensky is illegitimate and authoritarian for not holding elections in the middle of a fight for the country’s survival. The logic there is hilariously bad. Setting aside the absolute waste of resources, the last thing any country needs in such a scenario is for their leaders to start campaigning over who’s going to take control. It’s not the time and place for it. If you want to blame anybody, blame Russia
Right, so basically it’s okay for countries to be authoritarian, it’s okay to slaughter thousands of people and making everybody else live in constant fear, as long as the government aligns itself with the west.
Why would I blame Russia? It’s not Russia, it’s not Putin who is kidnapping people of the streets in Ukraine and sends them to die. It’s Zelensky’s regime.Very cool and humanitarian and obviously I don’t agree with that. But out of curiosity - can you please explain to me why is North Korea different?
It is also officially still in a state of a war with South Korea. Does it mean Kim Jong Un is suddenly also a hero that leads his country against the enemy? It doesn’t matter that people are trapped there, it doesn’t matter that people may not support him, all the atrocities committed by him do not matter as well, because they are in a war, am I right?Who kills the Ukranians that are being send to die?
Russia.
Now, I answered your question, would you please be so kind to answer mine now, which is also quite simple?
If there are two men, man A is simply operating a meat grinder while man B kidnaps people from the streets (soon he will start breaking into people’s homes as well), forcefully pushes them into the meat grinder, and watches to make sure they can’t get out of it, he also makes sure nobody leaves the city so that he can continue his game, who do you blame more for deaths of people in the meat grinder?
The man who operates the meat grinder? The man who started the business of shoving people into a grinder??? An everadvancing grinder? Jesus. At least get your metaphor right
The man who operates the meat grinder? The man who started the business of shoving people into a grinder???
Those are two different people though.
Because South Korea is not actively trying to wipe out NK from existence, but actually the opposite is trying to reach out to NK and stabilise relations. ‘War’ is a hilarious way to describe their status. Way to strawman the argument.
but actually the opposite is trying to reach out to NK and stabilise relations
That’s just super fucking ironic, considering that Russia never stopped saying that they are open to negotiations (and the very first peace deal was actually they they go back to before-2022-invasion borders) and it is Zelensky who always refuses to negotiate and instead sends more Ukrainians to die.
Oh you mean the deal where they tried to make their seizure of Crimea legitimate?
Ok, this is reaching russian troll levels of disinformation. I think it’s clear enough to any 3rd parties just why you’re getting your comments deleted.
Oh you mean the deal where they tried to make their seizure of Crimea legitimate?
This has already happened, and is going to stay that way, whether you or I or anybody else likes it or not…
So it woudn’t have changed anything, except, you know, such a tiny little details as hundreds of thousands of lives.
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
Yeah, I’ve been banned because I said something about Uighur genocide, on the other hand I’m wondering about dessalines’ nationality and his knowledge about communism, it’s easy to be communist of you only touched it online, I for example live in post communist country and remember some of it, old people are talking about it, it wasn’t that good
I’d “understand” if everything would be transparent and they admitted it’s tankie instance and you’re banned because you don’t like China but no, everything is saying their own COC
Do we want someone like that not only administrating the oldest Lemmy instance but developing the whole platform?
I for example live in post communist country
I don’t believe you. I think your country was state capitalist, and would have described itself as economically socialist rather than communist.
I live in an actual post communist country, Australia, and everyone here understands that when capitalism arrived here, it was genocidal and environmentally destructive.
In what universe was australia ever a communist country?
Take your medication dude
You misunderstood me. Australia was never a communist country, because it wasn’t yet a county back when it was communist. It was a landmass full of communist tribes
it’s easy to be communist of you only touched it online
This is almost certainly the case, these kids read about the ideals of communism and think it sounds great, and they know about how things are in the USA and think that’s bad. Two fair assessments, but they then deduce that the because capitalist America is bad, then Soviet Russia “communist” China must be good, ignoring the fact that every person who survived/escaped those reigemes described them as hell.
What is this link supposed to tell us?
I now understand why you get downvoted.
But you do “give fluff”, there is a reason you posts random links. You want someone to see something, but do not want to talk about it, which I find odd.
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First of all, anecdotal evidence. Also survivorship bias. One - the type of person that goes to study abroad is usually wealthy, well off. Two, your family is collateral so you are guaranteed to return. Saying negative shut about the regime can get you in trouble so they’ll sing praises of it - just like in Russia.
Second, the USSR thing is complete dogshit and you can see why now in Ukraine. People hated the russians. Speaking russian in western Ukraine after it disolved could get you threatened or punched in the face. Same thing with the Baltics. Same thing with Poland.
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Yeah, okay, you are just a tankie. Fucking bloodless invasion my ass you ignorant moron. You are insulting the history of my country and my people. I won’t be wasting any more time on you - you don’t deserve the wear on my phone screen from replying to you.
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Ah yes the tankie forgetting about Katyn in their assessment and countless other massacres. You heard it here folks, the war in Gaza is bloodless. So many nazis we need a denazification special military operation, huh?
Everyone who wants communism has never lived it, and those who have don’t want it.
It sounds great on paper, but humans will always have those who wish to hold power.
I mean… the Soviet Union was illegally dissolved and as far as I remember, the people didn’t want the dissolution to happen. A lot of tomfooleries happened after that and many former soviet countries did lose protections for their least economically safe population.
This is not a defense of the Soviet Union, but dealing with the first statement you wrote.
What? No just no…what type of crazy revisionist history is this…the people on the other side of the wall tried to escape constantly, they wanted Western goods and entertainment, the ussr was made up of forcefully captured countries. I don’t know where you got this idea that they liked it, maybe the people in charge did.
It’s not revisionist what do you mean? It’s a very normal fact that is literally even easy to wiki.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum
When you live in an authoritarian system, votes mean jack shit. People don’t escape the ussr because they want to keep it together…
So when faced with facts you just turn away. I mean, I’ll even concede that some of the member states didn’t hold elections and therefore, we have no statistics on them. Not every facet of your enemy can be unreasonably demonized. Not every element of Soviet life was as bad as you think, and it’s totally fair to say that the lower socioeconomic class was harmed by the dissolution.
In the aftermath of the dissolution oligarchs did dismantle a lot of the social security nets that existed and concentrated a lot of wealth.
I can just as easily shit on how Norwegian social security has been harmed by for-profit initiatives on the back of 8 years of Høyre and Frp rule.
lemmy.ml has changed their level of transparency about their political leanings twice. Look at the history of their home page description:
April 2021 to June 2021:
The flagship instance of lemmy.
June 2021 to November 2022:
A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers
November 2022 to now:
A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers
on the other hand I’m wondering about dessalines’ nationality
I’m guessing US, on account of the whole “America Bad” thing. Can also be seen with European tankies but they’re not nearly as much USSR stans and way more likely to identify as Trots. South American is another option but then I’d expect at least some of his output to be Spanish/Portuguese. It all does have that US exceptionalism turned around “The US is the source of all evil, ever” kind of vibe you generally only see from Americans as the rest of the world plain and simply isn’t seeped in US jingoism and self-importance.
…also I didn’t really invest much time in this at all, if someone else did, please enlighten us.
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.
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, …
So what you’re essentially saying is that these moderators are effectively propagandists/state actors for China, Russia, and so on. I left Reddit to get away from psychic attacks like that, so I’m perfectly happy to defed from the instance. Glad I have the option, too.
Defederation is a good step but I think it blocks only posts and leaves you still able to see user comments on other instances.
You are talking about user-level blocking, whereas iirc defederation is an instance-level blocking that also stops user comments too, as well as votes.
I usually refrain from replying to threads on those instances and when possible use the non-.ml equivalent
Thanks for illustrating that I was banned from not just one community I don’t participate in aside from upvoting, but several that I have never even visited. All for “Rule 4,” which as far as I can tell is spamming ads, which I have never done. I’ve tried to message the mods of those communities, but haven’t gotten any kind of response.
It’s really disappointing that this is how Lemmy seems to work. As a new user, I had to actively persevere through the .ml bullshit to understand that lemmy as a whole is not like that. But it’s almost impossible to be a progressive (but not full blown anti-western communist) on an awful lot of this platform.
It really does the other large instances a disservice that those mod/admin practices are so commonplace.
I know the answer is to defederate/block them, but I genuinely find the news and posts interesting, and .ml was one of the instances that I was first looking into, because I literally didn’t understand how the fediverse worked but kept hearing “just pick an instance, there no wrong choice since you have access to all the other instances.”
But even those posts about topics I am educated in and care about, it all just literally seems to be a vessel for a specific type of (dis/mis)information in the comments, which actively preys on the gullible and shuts out even moderately different views.
Edit: mobile formatting fix
Same. I’ve only ever made one post, and it wasn’t to lemmy.ml, nor have I made a significant number of comments, yet I was banned first from the instance, then from the communities, for allegedly spamming. I asked in the Matrix chat linked in their sidebar, and they suggested I message dessalines, so I did. He rejected the message request.
If this is their ideal of Lemmy, then Lemmy is dead on arrival.
It really does the other large instances a disservice that those mod/admin practices are so commonplace.
Agree.
On the other hand nowadays now most of the communities are on LW (https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active) so at least it’s a bit better compared to a year ago.
It’s a good trend, but I still think it would behoove the admin of more reasonable instances to make it more obvious that there is a sizable and aggressive group of people with nearly unlimited (internet) power, and making it clear that they do not associate at all with those instances/individual practices.
There is a huge dearth of naming and shaming bad actors, and it’s going to reach a size where people won’t do their research as I did, but will assume that all of the fediverse is run by authoritarian Communists and (not) engage based on that.
And that wouldn’t be an unfair understanding, given who the creators of Lemmy are, who their disciples/mods are, and their influence across the platform.
Lemmy really runs the risk of being “left wing Truth Social” otherwise.
Lemmy really runs the risk of being “left wing Truth Social” otherwise.
Indeed. I’m still on /r/RedditAlternatives to talk about Lemmy, and I usually have to explain that most of the instances do not share the political stances of the main devs.
it would behoove the admin of more reasonable instances to make it more obvious that there is a sizable and aggressive group of people with nearly unlimited (internet) power, and making it clear that they do not associate at all with those instances/individual practices.
The situation here is a bit tricky: instance admins still have to debug the software (as they are the ones using it), and they have to interact with the Lemmy devs. Getting too much friction with them could break that collaboration, and leave everyone with worse software.
https://sublinks.org/ is still under development, hopefully once it will be ready instance admins will have another option to potentially replace Lemmy
I hear you.
I’d just offer a slight counter, which is that if the devs want their software to succeed, they should probably work a little harder to police how their politics overflow, or work harder to contain them. And bringing these issues into the full light of day may help with that, or at least convince them to crack down on bad actors they a currently allow to function with impunity.
convince them to crack down on bad actors
The Lemmy devs have expressed several times that they don’t want to interfere on how people use their software (e.g. admin the instances and mod the communities).
Which is good (and allow us to say that they can’t indeed interfere with Lemmy as a whole), but that also means that they won’t be the one “cracking down on bad actors”
https://gui.fediseer.com/ might be something along those lines, with a chain of trust between instances
People are naive if they think the .ml admins and devs don’t intend to keep their thumb on the Lemmy scale. More instances need to take this threat seriously and defederate from .ml, and possibly even fork the Lemmy repos for when the devs inevitably decide they want to start building quiet exploits into the code. There are serious cyber security implications here that people are sleeping on
There are serious cyber security implications here that people are sleeping on
No, there are not.
At most, if they decide to kill the project by adding malicious code they can affect Lemmy itself. 99% of users don’t run Lemmy (which is where the “quiet exploits” would run), and the frontend simply doesn’t allow you to have a serious impact, unless you think they will stumble upon a browser 0-day and they decide to burn it by committing the exploit to an open source repo instead of selling it for millions (or use it elsewhere).
What’s with the fearmongering? Their stance is crystal clear since ever.
possibly even fork the Lemmy repos
Right, and who maintains the fork? Who, among the large population of external contributor, I mean?
What do u mean their arnt any security issues here. Ive played enough 2b2t to know a backdoor makes u a literal fucking god. If u own all the servers u have everyone’s ip, u can control everyone’s interaction. U can can literally 1984 the entire federated history. Do u not see the issue here they could take control of your account post cp then report ur ip and get u locked up for long time.
I am a security engineer by profession, so I do have at least a decent understanding of what I am talking about. Every server in this case has that potential. There is nothing preventing any admin from patching code and manipulating the network after TLS termination (I.e., changing payloads of POST requests etc.). That said, not even in a videogame you would be “locked up” by someone posting CP on your behalf like that. This is simply not a threat and if you think it is, then you should be worried about every website you visit.
Yep. Something needs to change if we want Lemmy to be something besides a place for Soviet simps to hide from criticism. Authoritarianism cannot be tolerated.
Authoritarianism cannot be tolerated.
Except when it suits your agenda, in that case it’s not only tolerated, but actually encouraged! :)
I’m so bored of that line. At least come up with something different.
You’re bored of people pointing out your hypocrisy?
But it’s not surprising, you’re not supposed to be entertained by it, you’re supposed to think about it…What is there to think about? I complain about people who support Soviet-style dictatorships having full control over online platforms moderating exactly as one would expect, and I get told by Random Guy On The Internet #368,452 that I’m apparently a hypocrite because wanting action to be taken to stop authoritarians from controlling social networks makes me the real authoritarian or something. All this to “suit my agenda”, which in this case is wanting to be able to say that authoritarians are bad.
God forbid I find arguments like that incoherent and unworthy of taking seriously.
I’m apparently a hypocrite because wanting action to be taken to stop authoritarians from controlling social networks makes me the real authoritarian or something
No, you’re a hypocrite because you see “them” censoring “you” and you scream “censure, you can’t do that!!”, but when it’s “your” side is censuring “them”, then you have no complaints, because obviously “your” censure is good, and their is “bad”.
Or maybe I’m wrong and you’re against censure in general? :)
I complain about people who support Soviet-style dictatorships having full control over online platforms moderating exactly as one would expect
I will ask in good faith: given that those people started the whole project to have that space, but built it using federated technologies which allow others to run their places, what is exactly the basis for your complaint? As absurd as they might be, instances can decide their own moderation policies, whether you or I agree with them or not. Given the fundamentally distributed nature of this platform, there is no such thing as “having full control”, and instead we can choose instances based on our preferences, so we are free to not subject ourselves to those policies, they are free to do, and both a free to use the platform in the way we use. The code is open, there are plenty of other instances. What exactly is the complaint here?
if we want Lemmy to be something besides a place for Soviet simps to hide from criticism
There is definitely a place for Soviet simps in the Fediverse, it’s just in a corner all by itself. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.
It’s also a great place for AI training as you have total access to data you federate to your instance. Or for Cambridge-Analytica to track tankies
Imo, when tankies get that bad, they might as well be nazis.
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)
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.
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.
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.
He is bundled off to the left by other protestors, nobody knows what happened to him, there is no photo of him dead.
Inaccurate - the tankie pulling the switch would be smiling
And there would be more people on the track.
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.
I don’t mind being banned from the ml instance. The issue is their users come to all the other instances and use the same old strategies to stifle any speech by engaging extremely hyperbolic language and name-calling. The goal is to have a chilling effect on any discourse where their opinions are scrutinized in the slightest.
They can’t engage with any topics or offer counter arguments. Every response is:
“I don’t know how to respond to your argument. You must be a _____________[insert ‘racist’ or ‘genocide defending’ or ‘fascist’ or my new favorite ‘zionist’]”
Or a bunch of memes that are on the same level as what a MAGA idiot would make.
I do understand how the brigades can be annoying for sure, but I don’t mind arguing with tankies, – I think it’s actually really useful for exposing their propaganda for what it is. It helps expose normal people to counter arguments so that they might become a little more aware, rather than just seeing propaganda go unaddressed and being morel likely to assume it must then be true.
The only issue I have personally is if the mods are in on it too and delete your posts/comments because you start to make a bit too much sense.
removed by mod
While I will be the first to admit that name calling and being incapable to engage with arguments is typical for social media platforms, I can also testify that it is the only treatment I’ve ever received from LML users. And the goal is pretty clear: you’re with us or you’re not. When you haven’t forged your own independent conclusions through reflection and any deeper examination but rather through mimicry and simulated discourse your only option is fall back to in-groups or out-groups.
As an LML user the game quickly becomes: how fast can I “otherise” my interlocutor so that I don’t have to respond to their points because that would require looking in the mirror and not liking what I might see.
And I received no such treatment from LML users (but do receive such treatment with almost every comment at lemmy.world and similar instances).
Hm, can it be because both instances just censure the opposite opinions and label it as misinformation resulting in echo-chambers and both groups believing their own (false) truth?..
Nah, no way, after all we are the good ones and the other side is bad and is censoring the truth while we are censoring misinformation and propaganda 🤦I’m curious if you’ve ever pushed back against the grain of lml or if perhaps your opinions already align? lemmy.world is a big tent so you’ll get a bigger diversity of users. LML skews heavily in one narrow direction so they have to contend with more outfielders and by default need to cater to their own insularity.
It’s possible that your experience has been positive so far. The reach of this post alone which started this thread shows how much of an existential challenge LML is. How many threads are there on LML about being banned from lemmy.world? This one is like the 3rd or 4th i’ve seen (just from this month!) about being banned from LML.
I’m curious if you’ve ever pushed back against the grain of lml or if perhaps your opinions already align?
I never post about communists and stuff, I post about horrors that are happening in Ukraine (not the ones that are committed by Russia, but by Zelensky’s regime with support from the west), and I guess it so happens that it aligns with their narration of anti-imperialism/anti-USA (that’s why I’m not censored and generally agreed with there), but it totally misaligns with heavily left-leaning views of lemmy.world and similar instances who think they are the good guys and are helping Ukrainians instead of slaughtering them (and that’s I’m censored and generally disagreed with and even called fascist here).
How many threads are there on LML about being banned from lemmy.world?
I guess being banned/censored from left-leaning communities is so not surprising anymore that people do not even see a point in doing so? I see no point in creating such a thread. But that’s just my opinion.
Your statement sounds like: “being banned from left leaning lemmy.world is so common we don’t even bother talking about it over here at lml”. Ok, I guess? Not much for me to contend with there.
I don’t want to take the bait about your Ukraine stance, because it’s a peculiar insertion at this point but ok. Suffice it to say it seems like you already agree with the de facto LML stance: west is evil. I push back against statements on l.world every day and I’m not worried about being banned. I push back one time on one thread on lml and the rest is history.
I do take umbrage with your stance on Ukraine, however (bait taken): That the US is a giant military industrial complex pulling the puppet strings from the shadows and sending Ukrainians to the slaughter. This is also a typical LML position that I hear often and seems to fall apart pretty quickly when examined a little better. This position seems to divorce Ukrainians of any agency in determining their future. Are they not entitled to defending the sovereignty of their nation? Who are you (or I) to tell them under what circumstances they should be allowed to push back against an invading force such as Russia? They are a sovereign nation that agreed to the Budapest memorandum and regardless who supplies them with weapons they can determine for themselves their destiny. It isn’t for us to adjudicate from some kind of moral high ground which parts of Ukraine should be sliced off to the highest bidder even if the bullets they fire are made in capitalist imperialist evil America.
Suffice it to say it seems like you already agree with the de facto LML stance: west is evil.
Yep, that’s correct. (btw I definitely do not associate myself with communists, it’s just that we agree on this particular point)
This position seems to divorce Ukrainians of any agency in determining their future.
It doesn’t! Those who want to fight, should definitely fight, and I don’t argue against west supporting those who want to fight with weapons, training, and whatever else. It’s actually the west that is not giving Ukrainians any choice in determining their future (see text below).
Are they not entitled to defending the sovereignty of their nation?
Again, they absolutely are! I totally support right for self-defense.
Who are you (or I) to tell them under what circumstances they should be allowed to push back against an invading force such as Russia?
Absolutely correct again and I totally agree with you, nobody should be able to prevent people from “pushing back against an invading force”.
They are a sovereign nation that agreed to the Budapest memorandum and regardless who supplies them with weapons they can determine for themselves their destiny. It isn’t for us to adjudicate from some kind of moral high ground which parts of Ukraine should be sliced off to the highest bidder even if the bullets they fire are made in capitalist imperialist evil America.
Again, totally agreed.
The thing that I’m trying to say, and the thing that I’m getting called a fascist for, is that it is not “west is supporting brave Ukrainians who want to defend their nation and fight Russia to regain the occupied territories at all cost” it is “west is supporting Zelensky’s regime (which I also consider absolutely illegitimate and authoritarian, their terms have expired, they ban all the opposition, they refuse elections, etc.) which forces people to fight by forbidding people to leave the country (which has already lead to many deaths of people who tried to escape this hell by crossing rivers/mountains and not making it), and kidnapping people on the streets, putting them into vans and sending them to the frontlines to die, and making the rest fear of going out” (you can find footages and sources for all of that if you visit my profile’s comments, but lemme know if you want me to repost it again here).
I post about horrors that are happening in Ukraine (not the ones that are committed by Russia, but by Zelensky’s regime with support from the west)
Any chance of a link? Just out of curiosity.
Sure, and not just one!
Here is a collection of footage of people being kidnapped from the streets, put into vans and sent to die: https://uadraftmuseum.ch/
Here is a recent news (in ukr, so please use a translator) that now they will be breaking into people’s homes to do the same: https://focus.ua/voennye-novosti/650441-mobilizaciya-po-novomu-voennaya-policiya-smozhet-zahodit-v-zhile-i-voznagrazhdat-za-pomoshch
And a few more links about how people are trying to survive this hell, and how people are dying trying to escape:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ukraine-urgently-needs-soldiers-but-some-men-are-desperate-not-to-fight/ar-BB1naQUE
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-russia-war-recruitment/32310040.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66542065
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/15/bribes-and-hiding-at-home-the-ukrainian-men-trying-to-avoid-conscription
I agree with you. Alot of hypocrites in lemmy.world. Think that censorship is okay when they are the ones doing it and it suits they’re agenda. I personally am of the belief that we shouldn’t censor any speech. No matter how uncomfortable it might make you me or them feel. Any kind of censorship should be condemned including Lemmy.world and lemmy.ml censorship. I think that both tankie nutcases and MAGA nutcases have a right to freedom of speech and expression. but so does everyone else.
Oh well, prepare for the downvotes now, I guess…
Downdoots hardly mean a thing to me. Bring erm on
I actually upvoted the comment because I agree that silencing voices (which aren’t harassing or abusive) is a bad thing, regardless of what opinion they are expressing. But downvotes aren’t the same as admins banning you based purely on difference of opinion, let’s not conflate the two. This thread is about the latter, while downvotes are just another form of free speech.
But downvotes aren’t the same as admins banning you based purely on difference of opinion, let’s not conflate the two. This thread is about the latter, while downvotes are just another form of free speech.
But I don’t complain about it and don’t conflate the two! I totally agree that downvotes is just another form of free speech.
That was just ironic “you agreed with me that censuring people is wrong and now people are going to show you how wrong you are” kind of thing, I have nothing against downvotes (I mean I’d prefer people try to engage in a civil conversation instead of that, but I’m definitely not forcing anybody to do anything, downvote away) :)
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?
I was imagining something like this in hexbear or lemmygrad, as people there seemed quite dogmatic at times, but even on Lemmy.ml? Sad to see this, as I had mostly positive interactions there till now
The hexbears realized that EVERYONE blocks them. One particularly humorous youtube even did a “One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let’s use hexbear as an example. Please follow along” gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.
Since ml was generally sympathetic to tankies, if not full of the idiots, the hexbears basically just joined that en masse.
But yeah. Caught a ban for racism/xenophobia because I questioned what positive benefit accelerationism would have for the Palestinian people. Reminded me way too much of attempting to interact with hexbear so I used that as an excuse to just start blocking any .ml community that I see in my feed. Not QUITE at the point of blocking the whole instance but… I expect to be there by the end of the month.
One particularly humorous youtube even did a “One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let’s use hexbear as an example. Please follow along” gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.
Interesting, do you have a link to the video?
Not off the top of my head. It was one of the various “tech” youtubers who will do everything ranging from “here is how to set up proxmox” to “I tried five twitter alternatives for a week” videos.
No worries, thanks anyway!
i’ve noticed a butt load of lemmygrad names appearing as lemmy.ml these days. Seems they got tired of existing in their little de-federated bubble
They won’t get paid if they don’t effectively spread propaganda.
Lemmy is far too small for any actual organized propaganda machines to target. These people are just zealots
Nonsense, go take a look at Hexbear or Lemmygrad. There’s very little moderation here, why wouldn’t they target it?
There’s plenty of moderation there, it’s just highly biased.
There aren’t enough users on lemmy for a state actor to bother putting resources into controlling the narrative.
Why waste time on a few thousand lemmy users when there are literally millions of gullible boomers on facebook that actually vote based on what they consume on social media?
“Here” as in the fediverse generally, not “there” as in Hexbear.
The Fediverse currently has over a million active monthly users, and had more in the past. You think it’s not worth it for them to spread propaganda to a million people in an environment they can manipulate? Come on.
I think unlike on hexbear and lemmygrad, most lemmy.ml users simply don’t know, and many communities hosted there are bona fide. I’m not throwing stones at them, it’s the admins of the instance that I have a beef with.
Stuff trickles down though, so that it’s not solely the admins, even if a large number of the userbase are innocent.
I’m throwing stones. Lemmy.ml is toxic and people managing communities there are partly to blame.