I just realised, I can’t post anything on lemmy.ml
So, I checked https://lemmy.ml/modlog, there’s a new moderator.
All posts and comments talking about China, Jinping, Russia, and Putin have been deleted and users banned
Coming from Reddit, the very existence of this thread is a breath of fresh air. That there are mod logs at all to be able to document this, that there is a place where it can be posted that is not under control of the mods being criticized, is an enormous improvement over an unaccountable centralized platform.
The other beautiful thing is that if you aren’t satisfied with the behavior of mods and admin on one instance, there are literally hundreds of others to choose from. You aren’t stuck dealing with bad actors if you want to participate. And if moderation of a particular community upsets the users, they are free to move to or create a similar community on a different instance.
The major downside of this is that it’s going to create echo chambers, but that’s unavoidable. It’s not like this is a new problem. Communities that reject outside ideas outright have existed long before the internet.
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A meme I just saw mentioned Tiananmen Square on lemmy.ml, the comments were an absolute dumpster fire
I think this is bad for Lemmy as a whole, as a community but only due to misunderstanding and generalizations… People are going to equate the “censorship” on the server lemmy.ml as censorship on Lemmy, the platform/software. That is just NOT THE CASE. Please, whenever someone mentions lemmy.ml and its censorship or the likes, be fast to mention that that is a specific lemmy server and the beauty of lemmy is its decentralization and the fact that it is open source. There are plenty of other servers.
I fear that this kind of thing drives people away from Lemmy, when it should not.
Well, the situation is a bit more complex. Admins of this “specific Lemmy Server” are creators and main maintainers of the Lemmy project as such.
So, generalization you are afraid of makes some sense.
I have replied to someone else further down with my opinion on this topic. I think it also fits in a reply to you, so I will just copy paste it here:
Yes, it might sound worrisome, but I dont think you are pushing authoritarian ideology by using Lemmy. The code itself is fine. The code is not authoritarian. The server which hosts your account is also not authoritarian.
Lemmy is, right now, the best alternative for a reddit-like platform. It is something created for the users, by the users. By using lemmy, you are not enriching the wallets of the shareholders. By using something like reddit, you provide content and a select few get to buy a new yacht.
Also, plenty of people are contributing code to lemmy. It is no longer just these 2. The code is also Open-Source. Anyone can fork it and create a new version of lemmy, with compatibility with the current version of lemmy. By using lemmy, you are allowing the possibility that, at any time in the future, someone else comes and says “I have some ideas to improve lemmy, let’s do this on my own terms”, forks it and continues the work without massively spliting the community.
You have many good points here. Still, I have a feeling that Lemmy as a platform and as a software is still very coupled with its creators.
Yes, there are other contributors as well. But these guys currently own the official repo and make key decisions. And if you donate to Lemmy you pay a salary to these two guys (afaik, Lemmy is their full-time work these days).
So, for me, it is still rather complicated.
I don’t see a problem about their work, just because of their political orientation. And frankly, neither should you.
They develop good software, which is open source and everyone can inspect it. There is nothing wrong about them getting paid for it. Not giving donations to them because of what they believe would be the same as an employer running you through a political evaluation before actually employing you.
Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing wrong about not donating (i did not). But not donating, solely because of some ideology a developer of open source Software has (which does not reflect in the code), seems quite stuck up to me.
I guess lemme ask this. If the devs of lemmy were open Nazis, went to rallies, openly promoted it, etc, would you still feel the same way?
What are you asking about? I don’t support extremist ideology - be it left or right. Extremism and violence was never beneficial to the political discourse or greater public. So i disagree with those ideologies. I vote on laws and elect people which i believe will keep extremism out of our system.
If it comes to the quality of someones work, private conviction does not matter. Sure, they might let personal beliefs bleed into their work. But there the beauty of Open Source comes into play: I can check it myself and if i don’t have the capability to do so, many others do.
So if they are on the far spectrum of something i disagree and i am very greatfull for good quality of work they provide for free, i might still give a small donation. If they are actually extremist, i prefer to let the authorities deal with it. Where i come from the police actually cracks down on this kind of people and they probably are better at doing so than me myself.
Just because there will be people who ask about freedom of speech… Someone way smarter than I said something like: “Your freedom ends where someone else’s freedom begins”. This should be the base rule to identify extremism. So to stay with NAZIs: A far right person who doesn’t want Jewish people owning a store infringes on someone else’s freedom. Therefore that person is an extremist, should not be protected by his freedom and authorities should deal with them.
Yes yes, the authorities should deal with them but would you support them? Would you recommend their software if it was good, would you use their products?
By using lemmy, you are not enriching the wallets of the shareholders.
You actually have no guarantee that any given deployment doesn’t harvest and sell data. They probably don’t, but it’s not guaranteed.
The data is public. It doesn’t matter.
Only if it’s actually having an effect on the Lemmy project.
From what I’ve seen, the Lemmy devs recognize that their opinions aren’t welcome everywhere, and that Lemmy should not have any biases.
That might still have secondary effects such as in what kind of moderation features they develop and support
Hint: the moderation tools they are choosing to develop are none.
They are intentionally refusing to develop any moderation tools despite current moderation tools not working and it being the biggest issue instance admins are facing.
“Intentionally” is a bit overdramatizing, don’t you think?
It’s just not as much of a priority, which is still questionable.
It also has the largest worldnews community, which bans you for discussing a literal war in Europe
psssst… check out [email protected]
Censorship is certainly the kind of thing that drove people away from dotworld for preemptively defederating from Hexbear by fiat.
Curious to see how this develops
Fuck these tankies man. I’m as leftist as they come and I HATE what these people are doing to the cause. We want healthcare and equal rights, and these loonies are dragging us all down with their fascination for those horrible fascist regimes (it takes 2 braincells to realize the CCP is 1984 incarnate).
I’m at the same time horrified and fascinated by them. I saw a comment that accused NATO of causing he war to “drag on”. When I brought up that Russia could just leave, I got people unironically replying that Ukraine was the aggressor in the war and that it was Ukraine committing genocide and attacks on civilians. I understand that I could be trapped in a western bubble… but really? I didn’t bother asking for a source because I’m sure the only source for that misinformation is the Kremlin. What’s crazy is that you would think the Russian shills would be spread out trying to infect other communities with disinformation, instead they all flock to this echo chamber apparently, so it seems likely that they genuinely believe this stuff.
They know it’s bullshit. The United States in this instance is doing the largely correct thing. However historically that hasn’t always been the case. Were usually the ones attacking and destabilizing other countries. South America, Hawaii, the middle east, Korea, Vietnam and on and on. Anyone that opposed US homogene as pushed by wealthy oligarchic fascist throughout American history. Has historically met and unfortunate end.
Realistically in this instance Russia is much closer to what the United States has been historically. Than they are any Ally of leninist regimes. But to leninists. They are the enemy of their enemy and an ally of convenience. Because overall outside of World War II etc. The United States has been the biggest constant enemy to much the rest of the world.
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I’m a progressive who thought I was moderate for the longest time because tankie rhetoric on the left. I fully recognize now though that the tankies are a laughable minority. They’re just a bunch of loud people on the Internet.
You ironically have a post saying that Muslims are culturally terrorists and all Muslims need to fall in line with French cultural authoritarianism. Totally not tankie behavior, just regular normal, “leftist as they come” behavior, right?
https://lemmy.world/comment/2941761
You sound like another run of the mill racist, bigoted liberal who wants to smear the leftist label by LARP’ing as one for the sole purpose of attacking leftists.
this thread is just you stalking people and copying their comments. can you do me? maybe the one where i enjoy watching mobiks getting blown up in drone videos, that seemed to upset a few tankies
What?
Muslim is not a race, just as Socialism is not a race. The idea that religion deserves special treatment needs to die.
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Yes. People who just consume content can easily switch. But for people who create content this is not that easy, especially for users who created communities there.
I agree it sucks but at least you have that option considering the nature of the Lemmy project.
Lemmy ml has always been radically pro-fascist, honestly it’s your fault for having made communities there. Start again but this time make sure the server is someone trustworthy
The most popular (?) Open source software community is hosted on Lemmy.ml
Time to make another one popular in another instance then
What? I don’t have a community, I’m not even a moderator. I’m trying to help lemmy to grow by populating small communities because there are a lot of people complaining because lack of content.
Then do not invest your time in communities hosted on lemmy.ml (if you do not agree with the instance ideology).
I’m quoting your comment
Yes. People who just consume content can easily switch. But for people who create content this is not that easy, especially for users who created communities there.
Look there community on lemmy.ml who might have similar things to say about China or Uyghurs. Do they have to move?
Misread, mb, but the point stands like the other commenter said
I’ve already done that twice. It’s annoying, and a pain in the ass to reset subscriptions and blocks. If I am forced to do so again, I don’t know if I will. I doubt I’m alone in this feeling.
For me, 4th time’s hopefully the charm
Hah I’m in that screenshot. I just caught my second ban for suggesting that mass deportation of children might qualify as genocide.
It’s infuriating, because if you talk to actual survivors of genocide, they use words like “vigilance” and “never again.” Meanwhile, tankies literally just want to gatekeep the word to protect their ability to simp for tyrants.
Mass deportation of children is literally (one of) the dictionary definitions of genocide.
Not if done by Communists. According to tankies.
Not if done by anti-west authoritarian dictatorships. Russia isn’t communist.
Power to you. I feel like whenever I say anything trying to inject some form of “genocide is bad” into one of their conversations, I get about 20 comments telling me I’m a shitty person for saying that. Or like, a copy and pasted book that they want me to read and then I’ll understand why genocide is “justified.”
It’s fucked.
So yeah, thanks for your effort, you aren’t alone 😅
They don’t seem to understand that genocide, as a term, does not exclusively mean a violent purge nor Holocaust. The erasure of a group of people can happen with minimal violence too.
It’s hardly surprising though, considering the USSR regularly practiced genocide with “Russification”. This wasn’t so much the violent kind, but more trying to erase a people’s culture and make them assimilate into Russia’s.
To tankies, that’s not genocide, even though it is erasing a culture to impose your own.
Removed by mod
Your removed post does talk about genocide, but it also talks shit about Hexbear users. Which I get, I won’t join instances that federate with them, but it’s not exactly comporting with their Rule 2 of “Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.”
Like to some extent yeah, tankies kind of provoke it because apologia for oppressive regimes actively invading their neighbors is itself offensive, but you’re conveniently spinning this to be about genocide rather than the aspect of the comment that would run risks of removal in most communities trying to not foster flame wars. And since you’ve been banned before, it’s hard to believe this isn’t your first time doing it.
What’s the problem here?
All the stuff is listed as rule 1 and rule 2 and they seem to fit the description even without the helpful context.
There’s one ban evasion in there too.
Sounds like the Marxist mod is doing a good job.
A Marxist is the only thing that can defeat a Tankie.
Ladies and gentlemen, the CIA!
give it up for our brave intelligence assets risking their time to implement all of the ideas presented in the Simple Field Sabotage Manual!
They’ll be here all week, so make sure to come on back for the floor show tonight, i hear they have a real ripper planned ba-dum-tiss!
Seriously folks, enjoy your meals, tip your servers and stick around for the rest of the night.
Take it away boys!
The creators are known to lean towards tankie rhetotic and I‘ve read they chose .ml because of Marx and Lenin before. That rose concerns from the beginning so it‘s hardly surprising a moderator there would do this. It is very concerning nonetheless and threatens to throw the creators‘ work into jeopardy because at that point you might as well use twixxer or whatever it‘s called now.
It was always a tankie den. The Lemmy developers are very openly tankies.
They held their heads relatively low during the whole Reddit exodus, but that’s about it.Here are some examples: https://raddle.me/f/lobby/159606/is-lemmy-still-a-tankie-platform-or-are-there-actual
Reading this really troubles me. I don’t like the implication that using lemmy is pushing authoritarian ideology.
If I was born 50 yrs earlier I would literally have been put in the gas chamber. I tick several qualifiers for it.
Yes, it might sound worrisome, but I dont think you are pushing authoritarian ideology by using Lemmy. The code itself is fine. The code is not authoritarian. The server which hosts your account is also not authoritarian.
Lemmy is, right now, the best alternative for a reddit-like platform. It is something created for the users, by the users. By using lemmy, you are not enriching the wallets of the shareholders. By using something like reddit, you provide content and a select few get to buy a new yacht.
Also, plenty of people are contributing code to lemmy. It is no longer just these 2. The code is also Open-Source. Anyone can fork it and create a new version of lemmy, with compatibility with the current version of lemmy. By using lemmy, you are allowing the possibility that, at any time in the future, someone else comes and says “I have some ideas to improve lemmy, let’s do this on my own terms”, forks it and continues the work without massively spliting the community.
I really enjoyed reading your explanation. Thank you very much.
This calms me down quite a bit. :) have a good day.
I think you mean 80 years. Unless there were genociding gas chambers in 1973 I haven’t heard about.
(And I would have been put in one too, just not in 1973.)
[email protected]: >If I was born 50 yrs earlier
FlyingSquid: >I think you mean 80 years
You presume to know his/her age?
Actually, I just misread.
Yeah, that happened to me once too.
OK maybe twice.😋
I don’t think comparing communism with fasism, at least when it comes to exterminating ethnic minorities is accurate. this is an opinion shared by academics, including coauthors of “The Black Book of Communism” (the book which claims communism killed 80M-100M people, though the upper end of the range is the one which has more attention. this number is disputed, again also by coauthors)
I could explain why I believe you shouldn’t do this in my own words, but I will use the words of Nicolas Werth, one of the three main coauthors who distanced themselves from the book:
Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union.
and
The more you compare Communism and Nazism, the more the differences are obvious.
Another quote I will give is from Amir Weiner an American historian and associate professor of Soviet history at Stanford University who wrote:
[w]hen Stalin’s successors opened the gates of the Gulag, they allowed 3 million inmates to return home. When the Allies liberated the Nazi death camps, they found thousands of human skeletons barely alive awaiting what they knew to be inevitable execution.
I sourced these quotes from Wikipedia: “The Black Book of Communism”, references 19 and 14.
My point isn’t to say the Soviet Union, or other states which had or have Marxist-Leninist governments are without critique, but that comparing them to the III Reich, at the very least diminishes the crimes committed by Nazis and makes analysis of the aforementioned States more muddy.
I am kinda skeptical as zig has admitted to using sockpuppets and retracted their statement which doesn’t sit well with me.
Obviously a bit thin skinned, but IMO lemmy.ml can do what they want with their moderation. It is not anybody else’s decision how they moderate, except of course keeping it legal.
Seems to me almost all those comments are somewhat offensive, for instance calling people tankies, claiming they should go back under their stone, and frequently use the word fuck, as if those are some sort of argument. I’m guessing rule 2 is something about not being rude. Personally I find that perfectly OK not to allow rude comments.
OP should “read the room” better, then maybe they could have a proper debate.
PS: I am absolutely pro Ukraine, and against the Russian war and occupation of Ukrainian territory, and I totally agree with much in for instance the bigger highlighted post, good points IMO, but then he ends it with a tankie offense?
But they are taking away free speech!!! \s
Truly sad to see a majority is down voting this, meaning they believe free speech includes how a lemmy instance is moderated?!
except of course keeping it legal
This is also up to them. If the admins are ok to get corresponding consequences - they can do this.
Posts like this posted here from time to time.
And I think the main problem is: the fact that an instance has a very strong political view and even a censorship becomes a big surprise for people using this exact instance.
It looks like an instance and community policies must be somehow better visible.
About 30% (just my estimate) of the people here from Reddit had a problem with mods having too much freedom granted to them by Spez. There is an irony that such people would be attracted to a decentralized network where instances have even more freedom to shape their communities, but as you said- it doesn’t really matter what people think when anyone can go start their own.
I prefer looser mod powers
Reddit mods were capricious and drunk with petty power
Genuine question, is that 30% a real number with a source?
Yeah the first ban I got was warranted, but this time it was just using the word “genocide” consistently with the UN definition. That’s chilling as fuck and goes way beyond simple “stated moderation standards.” That’s straight up information warfare.
“Don’t worry, if you correctly call this a genocide, hexbear will ban you for genocide denial without a hint of irony.”
If you were already on thin ice, this shouldn’t have really been a surprise. Like most internet dwellers who get banned somewhere you’re dressing up your offending comment to make it seem like persecution, but while it’s not a heinous comment on its own, but if you have history I can absolutely see a mod not wanting to deal with you trolling the hexbears. And it certainly wasn’t just “using the word genocide”.
Noticed that majority of tankie and genocide defending users are from lemmy.ml, grad of hexbear.
Lemmy.ml and Grad are the same
I am all for a temporary defederation.
.world has power. It has the people and the content. Flexing a little in support of human rights is 100% a good thing.
I’m also for that.
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Never thought the official lemmy instance itself would have to be part of a temporary defed
As soon as the tankie stuff started coming out, I figured this was the inevitable result
Do you just call everything you don’t like “tankie”? Like every post in this thread is you calling everything else “tankie.” I don’t think you have a good grip on what the word means.
no just the actual tankie stuff
He’s not though. Look at his post history. Use your brain.
I’ll leave the sad post history stalking to you, seems you’ve been doing a lot here
If I punch kids, but publicly I am against punching kids, then I don’t punch kids!
Dude Dessalines has essays on his github where he thinks gulags were a good thing and that the holodomor was fake.
The creator kept a low profile during the reddit emigration. And since there were posts and comments about China, CCP and Jinping too. I thought it will be fine 👀
He brought in Hexbear in an attempt to silence the criticism towards China, but they quickly defederated themselves–So now I suppose he’s just banning things outright.
That is not what happened.
When the Lemmy software was first created, the original Hexbear (it had a different name, then) created a fork. A development or two down the line and the two forks were incompatible. The Hexbear devs started working on a fix long before the Reddit API-debacle exodus. It wasn’t easy because the fork added features that were incompatible with, let’s say, vanilla Lemmy until recently. The Hexbear devs eventually made the fixes, which made federation possible again. And the long-planned re-federation occurred. The timing is a coincidence.
As for federation, Hexbear asked it’s community which instances should be federated. To maintain the friendly culture of Hexbear, there was an agreement to only federate with a few instances. Before that happened, dotworld defederated preemptively. Since then, I have no idea whose federated or defederated with who because I quickly lost interest with the drama.
I should say that I’d never used Hexbear before federation with my instance. I learned all this because it’s publicly available knowledge. After federation, with all the drama, I searched ‘federation’ and some similar search terms on Hexbear communities and learned what I’ve just explained. The key point is that you don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain motives for and the chronology of federation because, like the modlogs, the relevant conversations are still available to read.
Their “anti-Orientalism” (read as pro-tankie) policy has been known for a good while.
Hang on what. Could you expand on this?
Sure, there was a post back in June posted in [email protected] about a dam in Ukraine being destroyed. Obviously a contentious topic. There were several threads speaking poorly of Russia and its administration, many such threads were deleted and users banned, with “Orientalism” typically cited as the reason in the modlog.
It’s the admins’ right to dictate what is or isn’t acceptable. Generally they are hands off on most topics, but Anti-Russia, anti-China sentiment is looked down upon by admins and often removed/banned within lemmy.ml. Just saying that this choice of new moderator doesn’t change their moderation philosophy, it only complements it.
That’s a weird description to give it in the mod log.
Anyway it’s fairly obvious to anyone who isn’t a tankie that their leadership bans dissent and wrongthink. Imagine if places banned you for calling someone a lib like .ml folks love to.