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/[email protected] where there’s nobody to discuss anything with.
I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
I’ve been making fun of Lemmy.Ml for months, I’m glad to see I’m not the only one
Over the past year on Lemmy I have witnessed a constant fight between people on hexbear, lemmygrad, and ml and people on communuties like tankiejerk, meanwhileongrad, and the like.
Both appear to constantly brigade and overmoderate their respective areas of control. Since my instance: sh.itjustworks, is some combination of defederated to hexbear and lemmygrad, I mostly just see threads like these complaining about tankies. I only assume the effort is being matched by those instances I don’t see to warrant this problem being so persistent.
So to me there’s so much active bad faith behavior between the camps I assume they all just have a paranoid view of the fediverse and are mostly just perpetuating a cycle of bad faith. Maybe that relationship is terminal if just people can’t handle each other.
They’re also hyper sensitive and generally toxic with their reflex delete/ban/block. They’ll see what they want to see in the most mundane comments and nuke an entire thread. Best to just block them and ignore.
There’s no need to defederate from Lemmy.ml. I rarely see their content on the front page of Lemmy.world. The other day someone complained that Lemmy.ml users were brigading a different thread. I counted three users with a ml domain…
We have different admins and mods, everything is working as intended. The issue is people bringing up tankies, communists, and China every three posts. Yes, we get it, the benevolent people who wrote us this software are communists. They allow us to have different mods and admins, there is no problem here.
Honestly, I wouldn’t post to /c/[email protected] even though I’m happy with how pro-Palestine those people are. The only community I look at Lemmy.ml is /c/[email protected]. It’s not their fault no one posts to the Lemmy.world instance.
I think it’s time to start banning users who troll other instances and cross pollinate the fediverse with drama.
As a marxist, I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism. And I don’t even understand how people can stay with “Stalin was not so bad”, knowing that he never planned to apply the last state of the Communist theory, and even if it did, massacre are not acceptable (sounds obvious), same applying with China and their open market.
In my country (France), Stalinism isn’t a thing, all communists are against what happend in USSR, and most are anti-china.For people who want to avoid all content from lemmy.ml, including posts and comments:
I use lemmy.cafe now because it has defederated with lemmy.ml.
As a lemmy.cafe user, I don’t see any post/comment from lemmy.ml users at all.
Communities on lemmy.cafe are invisible to lemmy.ml users, so I would recommend creating more communities there.
They didn’t let me join in the first place lol. They are so weird.
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.
The mods of the non-political subs need to move elsewhere, eventually after that the content will just be tankie bullshit and everyone can just defederate them.
This is the fediverse and that is their instance. You just move to another instance and mute them if you are desatisfied with them.
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.
I’ve commented there on a /news community with sourced points to make my argument and was basically told to shut the F up and had my comments deleted.
So I blocked the community.
I’m not sure how to deal with extremist mods any other way. Their instance, their community, and other than defederating and putting a lot of effort into restarting and growing any valuable communities on another instance while keeping the undesirable .ml gang out, I’m not sure there is any other solution.
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’]”
Decentralization is good for everyone.
Tell that to the Chinese government lol
The only thing you can really do is create new communities and wait for them to grow.
