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.
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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.
Did that months ago; defederated completely when they turned into Lemmygrad-lite. At first I missed some more active FOSS communities, but since then, others on different instances have become more active.
programming.devhas a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on.mlso maybe check out what they’ve got.If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else, nurture it, and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about
.ml, and you probably won’t be the last.Related: I genuinely feel that
mlbeing the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.Edit: Oh yeah. Didn’t recognize your username at first, but I was looking at the modlog the other day from my LW account, and saw a bunch of individual community bans from Dessalines and wondered what was up. Figured it was something exactly like this, and it was. Thanks for sharing.
If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably wont’ be the last.
Maybe we should open a thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about this
TIL that community existed. thanks!
What? I thought I pinged you there a while ago! Anyway, have a look, there should be some topics you might find interesting
Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.
I had actually considered Lemmy before The Great Reddit Exodus. Lemmy.ml turned me off from that.
Now we have Kbin (you can make it, my love!) and Lemmy.world, and I feel much better.
I… don’t think Kbin.social is going to make it. Even if it comes back, too much trust has been lost. Ernst should have stuck to just working on his coding project, not also administering his own instance, b/c that carries with it a certain level of “always-on” responsibility - e.g. I have unfortunately had to block Kbin.social lately, b/c nearly all (>>99%) of the spam that I currently see on the Fediverse was coming from the communities on it. Since I blocked it, I think I’ve seen like 1 single spam post for the past month.
So Kbin.social is turning people away too, for different reasons.
Mbin seems healthy though?:-)
I want to use Mbin, but all Mbin instances are federated with tankie instances, including hexbear.
And Mbin doesn’t make it easy to see user/community instance.
I gave up on the Kbin/Mbin style entirely - it sounds nice to Federate with both Lemmy and Mastodon, but I don’t like the interface.
Can you not do personal user instance blocks like you can in Lemmy as of v0.19.3 half a year ago? That would be an absolute deal breaker for me too. On Kbin.social though it was not an issue bc they were defederated at the instance level.
I really want Kbin to succeed, but Ernest seems to see the project as something he checks on once every few months and then ignores, but he still seems to want to be the only one who gets to make decisions. I get that he has stuff going on in his life, but the solution to all these problem starts with communicating and working with the community, not disappearing for months at a time and refusing to work with the people who try to help him. You just can’t have a successful project with an approach like that.
That’s why things have largely continued with mbin. Ernest couldn’t do it, so someone else who could has taken over for him.
Kbin, please come back to me
It should be noted that the (visibility of) community bans are a result of better enforcement of site bans in 0.19.4, which for now is implemented by sending out community bans for local communities when a user gets instance banned: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4464
Prior to this, when a user got instance banned from .ml, they were also implicitly banned from .ml communities, but this was only known to the instance they were banned on. As a result, users were still able to post, comment, and vote on those communities, but it would be visible only on that user’s instance, not federated anywhere else. Visibility of this ban was exclusively on the banning instance’s modlog.
Is it possible to see who is behind a mod action? I’ve figured something like world news on ml has some compromised fascist actors as mods but if it’s the main creator doing this then that’s crazy
There’s an instance level setting to hide moderator names from unauthenticated and/or non-mod users. They probably have that enabled. Those actions federate, though, so the mod names won’t be hidden if viewed from an instance that doesn’t hide the mod names.
programming.devhas a lot of communitiesIs there a way to search for/browse communities on a single instance?
I use https://lemmyverse.net/
You can search for all communities of all instances, or click in a specific instance.You can in Tesseract, but AFAIK, that’s the only UI that lets you browse remote instances. Otherwise, you gotta go to it directly, browse communities, and copy/paste the URL into your instance and search for it.
Happy cakeday.
Shit, so it is (depending on tiemzone) lol Thanks!
It is actually tomorrow but there’s a bug that causes the cake symbol to appear a day early in the default UI, because 2024 is a leap year.
I’ve defended lemmy.ml in the past when people have blamed the entire instance for the actions of a solitary, overzealous moderator, but this genuinely concerns me:
This must have been action taken at the instance admin level, considering all those communities have different moderators.
Is there any way to probe the modlog to see which account it was?
Rule 1: Crushing people with tanks is fine so long as it’s our side doing it.
Literal fucking tankies. I wonder if they will ever come to their senses. Oh well, it’s not as if there aren’t Nazi instances somewhere on fedi as well.
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)
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.
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.
He is bundled off to the left by other protestors, nobody knows what happened to him, there is no photo of him dead.
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.
A hexbear in that thread is literally claiming that “the soldiers did everything they could to avoid hurting him”
ah the trolly problem defence
Inaccurate - the tankie pulling the switch would be smiling
And there would be more people on the track.
Imo, when tankies get that bad, they might as well be nazis.
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.
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.
the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia
There are photos of people clearly crushed by tanks?
If more people would just block that instance and it’s childish admins/mods, this wouldn’t be a problem. If people think it’s exaggerating to call out the clowns at .ml, I’d definitely urge you to look into the posts/comments the remove and their reasoning.
Most are violations of Rule 1 where there is clearly no violation.
Others are removed simply for being “liberal” or “blue MAGA” which neither are violations of any rule, and the latter is just a childish nonsensical insult. Which IS against the rules.
Having said this- it’s their instance and their community to do with as they please. If the freedom to disagree violates their emotional safe-space and hurts their feelings- then they don’t deserve your traffic and interaction. They have no intention to help grow lemmy, because it’s easy to see by their example that choir preaching only appeals to the choir.
Just block them and forget they exist.
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.
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.I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism.
It’s because tankies are just contrarians that use communist ideology as a vehicle to be anti-west / anti-United States (anti-liberal democracy). Tankies will defend any cause or ideology that is against ‘the west’ even if that means happily ignoring the blatant homophobic, genocidal and repressive authoritarianism.
And capitalist regimes. The Russian Federation was literally founded by a betrayal of a reformist movement in the USSR, and China consulted with Milton Goddamn Friedman on their economy, ending up with billionaires. I even saw .ml users crying about Russian *oligarchs" having their assets seized (“stolen,” as they said), and unironically citing Matt Taibbi. Not even “back in the day” Taibbi, but literally The Twitter Files. Using bought & paid for corporate propaganda to make their point.
They’re just campists. I don’t want to run afoul of a “No True Scotsman” situation, but fuck, for people who seem to think they’re the Only True Socialists, they’re willing to drop socialism in an instant if it means they can be edgy dickheads on the internet.
That describes them well imo
wow this is literally them
It’s called second campism, and it’s been happening for a long time, it just used to make more sense when it could actually seem like there was two hegemonic camps during the cold war (still an oversimplistic view).
Now they just support any regime that’s anti-US/the original capitalist camp because they have no hegemonic camp of their own to support, just a broad smattering of authoritarian regimes with completely different ideologies.
As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.
The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.
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
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.
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
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 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?
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? :)
What evidence do you have that they’re eager for any kind of censorship?
You just made me realize that I have been banned from some of the communities over there while never having posted on them, mods are reading conversations in other communities and preemptively banning people…
Oh, boy. Back to the old Reddit patterns. How long before they start using bots to preemptively ban anyone who has ever posted on certain communities regardless of context as a time saving measure, because that was a thing on Reddit as well?
Any idea which subs are banning like that already?
Ah reminds me of good ol’ reddit
Bingo.
I honestly thought it was more along the lines of they read a comment/post from another community that they didn’t like, more than likely checked their history and then decided to ban them.
Tankies warming up to call you and Lemmy.World fascists in 3, 2, 1…
Tankies: The word ‘tankie’ is meaningless because it gets overused by disingenuous people on the right.
Also tankies: Everyone who criticizes my position is right-wing.
Every word used by disingenuous people on the right becomes “useless” - freedom, patriot, Christian, help, law, order, justice, democracy, Constitution, agreement, good, bad - you name it, they twist it into a 100% polar opposite of what it used to mean before they got their hands on it.
So at some point, I think perhaps they should not be in charge… of what words “mean”? :-P
That said, ‘tankie’ is pejorative so perhaps we can find a better one for that different reason. I don’t know what, or for sure that a pejorative is bad, but maybe “authoritarian”, totalitarian, or fascist seems accurate - as in not beholden to “principles” so much as whoever holds the power gets to do whatever they want.
Pretty sure they are creating alt accounts on non-tankie instances.
They are. Many usernames are strangely familiar despite being relatively new accounts, and there’s often a matching .ml or Hexbear user. They know their nonsense is unwelcome.
I’m all for defederating from tankie instances. They suck.
Yes, we should all recognize that Lemmy.ml is a tankie instance.
Reread OP
Tankies are modding many communities here as well. The solution is to fight them tooth and nail.
Oh they are all over the politics communities. Both as mods and as trolls.
as a communism sympathizing leftist, i hated these mods on reddit and i hate them here. the behavior is idiotic
That’s the most frustrating part. These “leftists” are the stupid kind who seem to care more about relitigating idiotic cold war drama than evolving or pushing forward leftist philosophy. It’s straight up brain rot, mixed with obvious right wing agitprop disguised as leftist ideology. That fact that anyone other than trolls, spies and teenagers would engage with it is astounding.
“leftists”
They’re not, that’s just a cover for spreading CCP propaganda.
Let’s play identify the ml propaganda! Is it CCP or from the Kremlin?
Tough game, as part of their “super authentic bff” relationship they seem to be loosely coordinating social media disinformation operations.
Some people just have daddy issues and need an image of a power figure to guide their life. It’s obvious on the right, but I’ve seen various shades of it in the left as well.
Cold war drama is still alive and well. You could see it when people call freaking Bernie, or even more laughably Biden, a communist, or in the fall out of every country in the global south, from Latin America to the Middle East, from propped up divisions of countries in East Asia, to the poor former Soviet block of Eastern European countries looted in the wake of the fall of the USSR. Our present interference in South Korea, Taiwan, Cubs Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere are all relics of that time. The US has never really left the red scare mindset, and the global geopolitics of that era will reverberate for generations to come. It’s why everyone celebrated when Kissinger died.
Still, saying all that commie and socialist stuff, I still think lemmy.ml is too ban happy. I like that they don’t defederate as fast as Lemmy.world, which I think is too eager on that front. But in terms of their posting moderation, I think lemmy.ml is way too heavy handed, and hence I don’t like their moderation style at all. It’s why I made sure not to choose either of those instances despite them being the biggest and most default. I do like having the choice, though, which is one big thing I like about the fediverse. There’s no way to avoid that kind of shit on Reddit. I just wish people would split up the communities among different instances better, though.
No, we want EVERYONE to feel welcome.
wait, so if someone is a Nazi, you want us to be respectful of them too? you’re falling into the tolerance paradox again. “EVERYONE” here shouldn’t really include the intolerant. if the intolerant feel welcome in a space, that space quickly becomes inhospitable to anyone who isn’t.
edit: yeah i misread the image and the intent of the comment. apologies.
The thing is, the Fediverse, link the original concept of the Internet is flexible and can survive losing nodes - it just routes around and issue. If there are problems it can mutate and survive.
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.
This is the best solution - the answers are in our hands. Communities only thrive because the users are.posting and interacting on it. If the Mod goes inactive or an instances goes down, we can switch to a new community. That then gains the momentum and goes on to thrive. It’s survival of the fittest and why having more than one community on a topic (especially big topics) is a feature not a bug because it gives the network flexibility and resilience.
So if there’s an issue with lemmy.ml, boycott it - unsubscribe, give the other communities on more agreeable instances your time and they will grow and prosper. If there isn’t a relevant alternative start one.
Lemmy prevails.
This is a good answer and probably the right solution (still not 100% convinced defederating isn’t, ultimately, going to be the answer though).
But your Jane/Joe Average User doesn’t look to see which instance that
pr0ncute picture of a cat holding a teddy bear is on. They probably don’t even understand the concept of different instances showing content from others. Hell I’ve been online since 1992 and it took me a couple of days to get my head around it when I joined.So I think we need some kind of step by step “If you see X, then do Y” sticked to the instances that care about this for the people who (like me) do care about this issue.
still not 100% convinced defederating isn’t, ultimately, going to be the answer though
It may be, but only as a last resort.
So I think we need some kind of step by step “If you see X, then do Y” sticked to the instances that care about this for the people who (like me) do care about this issue.
Yes, the map of thr Fediverse needs “here be dragons” sprinkled around.
This is the best solution - the answers are in our hands
There is the problem of network effect though. People who frequent communities on lemmy.ml are often blissfully unaware of how problematic that instance is, like I was until a few days ago, and so they’re unlikely to just move as they have no immediate reason to.
It’s easy to say just pack up and move … but I’ve been really struggling to find an alternative for !linux@lemmy.ml, to name one example. The equivalent communities !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@programming.dev are rather stale with days old posts without comments.
So I think it’s not just something an individual user can solve for themselves, and I think that the larger instances also have a role to play here. If they would defederate from lemmy.ml, it would urge users along to move away from lemmy.ml communities towards communities on other, more suitable instances.
Next to that, we should also spread awareness about the lemmy.ml problem, and that was my intent when I originally made this post.
It’s easy to say just pack up and move … but I’ve been really struggling to find an alternative for !linux@lemmy.ml, to name one example. The equivalent communities !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@programming.dev are rather stale with days old posts without comments.
!linux@programming.dev now has 983 weekly active users: https://programming.dev/post/15328354
I think that the larger instances also have a role to play here. If they would defederate from lemmy.ml, it would urge users along to move away from lemmy.ml communities towards communities on other, more suitable instances.
People have choices. If they want to keep using the Lemmy.ml community, that’s their freedom. The alternatives exist, if they want to switch, they can.
Intrigued by your name change, you are really pushing for this.
People have choices. If they want to keep using the Lemmy.ml community, that’s their freedom. The alternatives exist, if they want to switch, they can.
Because network effect is a thing, it’s really the illusion of choice. When a lemmy.ml community has 50k subscribers and the equivalent lemmy.world or programming.dev community has just a tenth of that, it’s not really a choice. People will always gravitate towards ml and the smaller community will never gain critical mass unless some strong enough outside force influences that decision.
Which brings me to …
Intrigued by your name change, you are really pushing for this.
I think defederation from lemmy.ml together with raising awareness about ml should be the outside force to move communities off lemmy.ml.
Same link
- 18 comments on https://programming.dev/post/15376570?scrollToComments=true
- 0 comments on https://lemmy.ml/post/16741275?scrollToComments=true
