Hey everyone, I’m new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says “Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.”).
The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the “lemmy.ml” server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”.
So I thought I try that one when it’s from Lemmy’s own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?
Welcome to the Fediverse! Somebody has probably told you this, but I just realized that I forgot to hit “Post” before I went to dinner. Here it is anyways.
When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
The applications and copying of a particular line is a simple form of spam prevention. The fact that the line is from “The Principles of Communism" is probably because the owners of that particular instance (who are also the main developers) are communist. I believe they also run Lemmygrad, which is full on Marxist, and one of the more commonly blocked instances. Lemmy.ml is intended to be a more mainstream instance but like much of the Fedi leans hard left.
I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here
Lemmy is censorship resistant, but not censorship free. There is a difference. Censorship (or moderation, depending on your view point) happens at 3 levels, user, community, and instance. You can’t do much if other users find you obnoxious and decide to block you, but if you find the moderation of a community to be over bearing and if your current instance allows, you can create your own community from your current instance and mod it how you see fit within the guidelines of your instance. If you find your instance’s moderation to be overbearing, you can create your own instance and moderate it however you see fit. However, you will still be subject to the moderation policies of the communities (and their home instances) that you subscribe to.
In the Fedi you have absolute freedom of speech, but nobody is required to give you a soapbox or megaphone and nobody is required to listen to you.
The fediverse is not really about avoiding censorship as it is about providing choice. That means the choice to listen to who you want to listen to (i.e. what servers to (de)federate from/to), the choice to post whatever you want (but you might get banned from your own instance or any other instance, that’s their prerogative), the choice of administrators and moderators (i.e. which instance you sign up to and what communities you participate in).
All of that stuff doesn’t really have to do with censorship directly, but it has implications for censorship. The fediverse is not built primarily to avoid censorship though, and in some cases it is made to make “censorship” (moderation) easier, rather than harder.
neutral meaning “makes space for fascists and genocidal liberals”
Lol, what are the hexies mad about now?
Settlers and nazi bars go hand in hand to my understanding.
OP was already posting from Lemm.ee
lmao at believing a site is “neutral”. Just because you do not perceive your bias does not mean it is not present
You’re right, that Sunaurus admin guy is pretty cool.
lemmy was made by communists. if you don’t like it go back to reddit.
I suspect the devs wouldn’t even agree with this take.
Edit: really? They’d rather everyone align with their views 100% or fuck off to reddit? Why even make something like lemmy then?
C’mon dude, they just asked you to copy a quote from the Capital, not to recite a whole brochure with the latest analysis on imperialism. And/or swear by it,
It is the most basic common ground for every left wing person and a monumental text in modern Western literacy.
Most people I would care to discuss with should have a basic understanding of what is written in there, and I believe it is the same for people running their own instance.
If you take such a vehement stance against “quoting” Das Kapital, then you probably you lie so much off center that I would personally could have no productive discussion with you.
I mean, even the notion that this is some kind of pledge of allegiance is suspicious enough in its own sake, like letting us on you believe leftists are somehow indoctrinated[^1]. I you weren’t a little removed about Das Kapital you could even subvert the text by quoting something out of context so that it says something unintended by the authors.
But indeed, if you are turned off by this playful screening question, then it only shows that such screening serves its purpose most effectively.
[1]: To be frank lemmy.ml does not even defederate neoliberal instances, so perhaps there is a paradigm shift for you right there.
No where have I said I personally have a problem with it.
How about freaking No!
Lemmy might be written by communists, but nothing stops you using it on an instance that is not.
Also, there’s other threadiverse apps out there that work fine with the federated network if you really don’t want to use one created by “communists”
I don’t think making this place a total echo chamber, by telling people to “go back to reddit” is in any way a good thing.
Freakin epic bacon sauce.
The .ml admins (and devs of Lemmy the software) are from that crowd, basically. If you don’t like it, try another instance.
Edit: .ml is for Marxist-Leninist, even. There’s no connection to Mali.
Edit: .ml is for Marxist-Leninist, even. There’s no connection to Mali.
this is a literal lie, its because the servers are held in mali not because of ‘marxist leninist’
Mali is a Saharan country with low population, spotty, super expensive internet and unreliable power; I’d be surprised if the machines are literally there. And anyway, Dessalines has never mentioned being from a Malian background, but he does identify as ML.
Welcome. Admins and mods of every instance, not just ml are very trigger happy to enforce their opinion. Going as far as fully disabling users accounts. Not by using an automatic word filter though.
Each instance has different political opinions you need to agree with. This one likes communism. Upside is no email verification required, so it is very private.
Lemmy is much more wild west than moden Reddit. Similar to old Reddit. Enjoy the ride.
As the internet should be.
There’s plenty of censorship on Lemmy, but unlike Reddit, the censorship is orchestrated by the individual server, not by a corporation in control of the whole ecosystem. Go post something pro-capitalist on lemmy.ml, or something claiming climate change is a hoax on slrpnk.net, or something anti-trans on lemmy.blahaj.zone and see how fast it gets taken down - you could consider that censorship, but the reason Lemmy is better than Reddit in this regard is that you can go post that same thing on another instance, in a community that supports those views, and it’ll stay up. It’s all up to the administration of the individual instance.
Even if you can’t find an instance / community that will espouse your unique views, you can create your own, and post whatever you like, and everyone who federates with you will be able to see it. That’s how Lemmy is resistant to censorship.
I’m not touching the lemmy.ml question with a ten foot pole, someone else can field that one.
I only use lemmy.world and find it more open to free speech than reddit ever was. Reddit has gotten worse over the years. I was never a big reddit user, but just a few weeks ago I was in a non political non controversial group. None of my comments violated the rules. Out of the blue I was banned. I was scratching my head. I was told that the asshole mod of the group went through my post and comment history and found “one” comment unrelated to the group in question that they didn’t like and therefore banned me. The mods and Admins over there are dedicated to the hive mind. I am never going back
Filters out conservatives pretty well and stops bots because it requires the user to read.
Interesting. Must be newish because that wasn’t a requirement when I signed up a few years back.
So um here’s the thing.
The fediverse is a network of interconnected servers/instances that are independently hosted.
Within the fediverse, there’s Lemmy
There are many different “servers” (I’m just gonna call it servers, instances is not a commonly used word) of Lemmy. Each have different owners. But they all run the Lemmy software of their servers.
The Lemmy software is an open source project, contributed by many different people who know how to code. The main developers believe in Marxism-Leninism, basically what countries like USSR and People’s Republic of China claim to also follow this ideology (or at least they used to).
lemmy.ml is one of the first servers, run by the main developers.
So there, if you disagree with their ideology, you should probably use a different server.
Thanks for that information!
Lemm.ee is a great neutral instance and the admin seems nice, you probably made a good choice choosing it over .ml. Glad to see you were not scared away from Lemmy by it. Welcome! It can get confusing, but it just takes time. It’s a nice little place, overall and feels more like reddit used to be once.
“Neutral” here meaning “holds space for nazis, baby-fash, and other assorted vile-assed settlers”.
Any particular reason for those claims?
The many fascists on lemm.ee and their abhorrent, ahistoric, unfactual worldview being regularly celebrated is the reason for those claims. I constantly see the dumbest shit upvoted, the most trite clichés presented as novel insights. Actually reading an article is a rarity of the people on lemm.ee and I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve met a lemm.ee user capable of introspection.
It’s not just the spawning ground for the most basic neoliberal baby-brained takes on lemmy, it’s also incredibly dull. It’s like someone managed to gather all the worst redditors. Just a bunch of stupid, uneducated, unfunny, smug, idiotic assholes.
A disturbing preponderance of settler-colonials who can’t help but go to bat for theologically-motivated genociders every opportunity they get seemingly originating from .ee, .world, and .works; never mind the obnoxious sealions who never fail to come out when these descriptors are ascribed.
The fact that each instance can have its own rules and culture is f a b. I love that’s one of the criteria. Mander.xyz should have a ‘identify all the creatures from the Triassic’ image captcha.
I don’t know how to set up a specific image captcha, but I like that idea! I have added that to the registration form 😛
If you have an email address, you’re already used to the federated service pattern. When you sign up for a gmail, you’re making an account with Google to be able to send emails to anyone else with an email address. And there’s nothing stopping Google from making you fill out a “sketchy” application to get an account.
On Lemmy, each instance has its own set of rules, and if you don’t like them, you just make an account on a different instance.
As far as censorship, each “community” (analog to subreddit) lives on a certain instance and the rules of that instance apply.
Edit: also on the topic of communism, however you feel about communism in the physical world is irrelevant when it comes to the digital world. Free and Open Source Software makes the world go 'round, and is often communist in nature, even if done unintentionally. The pattern of people developing software for their own purposes, and then sharing it freely with others is the purest form of “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” That said, running an instance isn’t free, so make sure to kick your instance a few bucks if you appreciate their work.
Okay but implying that a given instance is the main community for Lemmy by promoting that it’s run by Lemmy’s developers and then making people repeat phrases from the Communist Manifesto just to make an account ain’t exactly the best first impression to give, no?
If they’ve been trained to immediately recoil at the word “communism”, and don’t understand how federated moderation works, then yes, it’ll probably scare away a good number of users. But on the flip side it’s not a for-profit business trying to hook DAU using predatory and emotionally exploitative patterns, so who cares about first impressions? The people who use Lemmy know why they’re using it.
It’s not the context of the article, it’s the presumption of solemn affirmation as a requirement to entry that is agregious, no?
You’re just restating what OP said. I refer you to my original post.
Yeah, you’re discussing communism specifically. I have no beef with communism or any other political ideology. Except perhaps capitalism, I might have beef with that. Digressions aside, the ask could be for quoting an article about Spongebob Squarepants and I would have the same grievance. Can we discuss the action itself, without going into a discussion about communism?
Ensure you aren’t a bot I guess, and if somebody programs the paste text they can switch the text to copy from?
If you don’t like SpongeBob, pick a different instance, that’s federation.
To me this is like having a problem with the flags someone else has in their yard. Not your yard, not your flags. You’re free to not like their flags, but if your grievance is with the action of them peacefully demonstrating free speech, that’s a you problem.
Sure, maybe that guy also happens to work at the flag factory down the street. Probably explains why he has so many flags. Doesn’t mean he’s going to make you put the same flags he likes in your yard.
Edit: for the record, I’m not downvoting you, I think you’ve been very reasonable in this discussion
I appreciate you addressing the downvoting; I had noticed the trend and it’s very easy to jump to the “I’m under a personal attack” conclusion.
While I believe 107% that each instance owner can do what they want; if this given instance is the first instance to which most people will be introduced, being the closest thing to an “official” instance, should they have a duty, or at the very least, an interest, in maximizing the inclusitivity of their community?
To their credit, I think the Principles of Communism thing is partially meant as a floodgate, since the devs really do believe in their project and want to avoid over-centralization from everyone defaulting to one instance. They know many people will go “What the hell? No!” and go somewhere else and that’s exactly the point. I’d be surprised if they really thought it would get almost anyone to engage with Marxism with the prompt, especially since you can copy the first sentence of the text and not read anything else (and even just reading it is not engaging with it). I think it’s more like a little joke.
Also, copying a sentence of your choice to a pamphlet is not a pledge and I think it’s silly to view it that way. If it helps, iirc, one of the sentences that appears is “No.” and they will accept that as an answer.
But assuming this was “promoting an ideology directly,” would you find it less sketchy for an instance to promote ideology indirectly? Because if you aren’t directly doing ideology, that just means you are indirectly doing it (sometimes very deliberately). Personally, I appreciate transparency.
I think it’s very funny that a lot of people will post “omg communism boogeyman? is this legal???”, but they won’t do a very basic introspection of ideology and online community moderation which is at the core the entire intent here.
Almost every lemmy instance has the same rule 1, those rules textually are often the same, those rules are often have the same meanings, but those rules are unevenly enforced between instances based on the ideology of that instance. That’s why you can be a transphobe on .world without actually getting the same amount of mod action going your way as if you were a transphobe on hexbear/lemmy.ml/lemmygrad/blahaj.
Furthermore there’s sociopolitical drama between the instances like between blahaj and hexbear on what transphobia actually is and what level of irony is allowed.
A lot of people interpret rule 1 as “don’t be mean” rather than “be mean in ways that aren’t racist/bigoted/sexist/transphobic/etc”. Which is why they often complain that certain communities they can’t post certain words, but user can dog pile them with community approved shitposting.
And then there’s the lib instances who think that being mean to Ukrainians online is rule 1 and if not it’s rule no disinformatsiya.
It’s like when Twitter had to clarify, you cannot call for violence unless it’s a call for violence that is part of the United States of America’s foreign policy, because Trump as POTUS called for violence over Twitter as part of US FP. But we gotta always put the the damn commies under the microscope for making us copypasta Marxist thought.
Lemmy.ml is explicitly a Marxist Leninist instance of the Lemmy software. It’s why it’s called .ml. You can use a different instance if you aren’t a Marxist Leninist. Lemmy.world is a Hitlerite instance.
Federation is censorship resistant, but each instance is still going to remove gross content for the sake of their users and instance culture. You can see removed content in the modlog, it’s public for every instance running unmodified Lemmy.
As for why you need to copy/paste the sentence – It sounds a lot like an anti-spam measure. Captchas and the like are extremely common, I’m surprised you find them novel. Are you asking this because you’re planning a spam-attack and need to make sure the spam isn’t removed? Your spam will be removed. While it’s technically possible to go find, no one will care enough to do so.
To clarify, Hitler and Marx are not in any way related. Hitler was a fascist, racist dictator (like Trump and Putin). True Marxism would be if the government of the USA was formed by, and responsive to the working class. A Marxist government (true communism) has an obligation to take care of it’s workers, not let them die because they can’t afford health care.
It’s a short explanation, but it’s pretty much correct. Join any server, and change later if you’re not comfortable.
I think it’s incredibly stupid to call Trump or Putin dictators just because you don’t like them. Fuck I even predicted Trump would win the popular vote this go around.
Hitler and Marx are related if you’re a believer in horsesh
itoe theory or in Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism. You’ll never guess who funded and promoted Arendt (who unsurprisingly came from a wealthy family) and her theory.One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front. Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world. Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” She pretty much nailed it, didn’t she? Fuck up education has been the Republican playbook since Reagan, and clearly successful.
As an aside, I was impressed by the Marxist kibbutz started in Israel when it was formed by the Brits (legally or not). They were wildly successful. I don’t know of any other true Marxist orgs.
Considering every socialist state invested heavily in education once they came to power, no, I would not say she “nailed it.”
Whenever people try to imply hitler was in any way leftist I like to point out that the term “privatization” was first carried out in any real way by the nazis.
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it’s not sketchy, it’s basically a captcha to keep down automated bot sign ups, and they link to that document in particular, i assume, because the devs are marxists and figure folks who are vehemently anti-communist would refuse and thus keep down their moderation load.
The most correct answer here honestly.
