This whole lemmy tankie dev thing has been discussed ad nauseam here for the past year or so. Not sure what solutions you suggest, but if I were to filter my software by who's an asshole dev and who's not, that list will end up really short.
As far as the ml instance goes, I don't agree that we should start defederating left and right with any and all undesirables, but to each their own. At least people now will be in the know, and it might take some weight off lemmy.world
I've only been on Lemmy a month, and this shit is already exhausting. Isn't a main point of this whole fediverse thing that you can just block entire instances as well as users? Why is this even an ongoing topic that spans multiple communities?
Isn’t a main point of this whole fediverse thing that you can just block entire instances as well as users?
You can do exactly that. OP wants everyone to do it.
I'm new here, so pardon my lack of understanding. But if this lemmy_.ml place is engaging in such disagreed upon behavior by so many people, why hasn't it been banned so I'm not even seeing it in the first place? I've recently learned there are whole lemmy servers ignored or banned by most other civil lemmy servers due to their bad behavior, why not ml?
If this really has been going on for over a year, and so many communities are against it, why is it not banned?
Who would "ban" Lemmy.ml? There isn't a "master instance" over all, each instance is an island.
Lemmy.world is currently discussing whether or not to sever ties with Lemmy.ml, just like Literature.cafe alreay did.
Lemmy.world has already defederated from Lemmygrad and Hexbear, the 2 largest Marxist instances, so Lemmy.ml is the last major Marxist-friendly instance that Lemmy.world interacts with.
For clarity, Lemmy.ml is seen very positively by some servers, and negatively by others. You are getting viewpoints largely from Lemmy.world, whereas other communities like db0, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, Blahaj.zone, or otherwise may have different or opposite stances.
That's the beauty and messiness of federation.
Please bear in mind that I'm a lemmy.ml user (though not a tankie, nor marxist, nor even socialist.)
Look at OP. How many lines are about smearing someone for their politics and beliefs (Even the subject line covers ONLY that), and how many are about the need to improve moderation practices at .ml (precious few, not even the subject line).
IMO that's one reason. The discussion rarely ends up being about moderation practices even when that's the stated goal. It ends up being about not liking someone's views.
The other reasons - you can personally block that instance if you choose, but for it to be hidden from EVERYONE on an instance, the admins of the instances need to make that decision. (To defederate.) There are lots of potential reasons not to do so, and I think many of them boil down to not throwing out the baby with the bathwater since there are plenty of users on ml like me who are not tankies and are just having the same discussions we'd have anywhere.
I got a 3 day ban from one single community at .ml within my first couple days here for using the term "whataboutism" - I suspect it was an automod action. I wasn't really happy about it, but eh? shrug
I have the same answer for folks now that I did when social media was somehow full of US conservatives claiming they could no longer speak their minds on social media. No one is obligated to give me or you or anyone a platform. If Lemmy.ml is that much of a shithole, it will eventually get defederated broadly, and everyone who isn't a tankie will stop using it.
The occasional thread like this, or someone complaining that my opinion is invalid because I'm an ml user (has happened maybe three times) are the only times I ever think about it really.
This would make a ton of sense if your choice of Lemmy instance were not just that; a choice. It's not a characteristic innate to your being that you're born with or something.
You can choose to associate with whatever instance you want and swap it up with another account somewhere else if you want at any time (you can prob keep the same username if you want too).
(you can prob keep the same username if you want too).
Unless it is already taken on the new instance, you absolutely can. Usernames are namespaced similar to email addresses. So, example@lemmy.world and example@lemmy.ml are considered two different users. This means that there is no technical reason preventing it.
This would make a ton of sense if your choice of Lemmy instance were not just that; a choice. It’s not a characteristic innate to your being that you’re born with or something.
Either I don't understand your objection, or you don't understand my point. Legitimately it could be either of those. I don't see what this has to do with most of what I said above.
You can choose to associate with whatever instance you want and swap it up with another account somewhere else if you want at any time (you can prob keep the same username if you want too).
OK, yes... Are you saying I should move my account elsewhere because OP (or some other people) don't like that my account says .ml at the end? Or because I'm only supposed to have an account on instances where I agree with the political leanings of those who run it?
There's an awful lot of political views around that aren't tankie.
And it's less about the users and more about the kind of lopsided, censorship moderation that happens on .ml
And it’s less about the users and more about the kind of lopsided, censorship moderation that happens on .ml
That may be your concern, but it's not the discusion OP started. That's the discussion OP claims to have started.
Quoting myself from yesterday:
Subject line: Nothing about moderation or censorship, it's about smearing the target's views.
First two sentences: Nothing about moderation or censorship, it's about smearing the target's views.
Third sentence: Links to archive.org link that fails to load. (I think they are still under DoS attack) May or may not be about moderation, but nothing OP wrote in the leadup to the link leads me to believe it's about more than smearing the target's views.
Then a couple links that sound like they are about discussing moderation.
Then another para smearing the target's opinions and politics some more.
I feel like those ratios are a bit off if OP is really so bothered about moderation practices.
There’s an awful lot of political views around that aren’t tankie.
Sure, but most of the time you don't know anything at all about who designs and develops the systems you use. I totally support people going to where they feel comfortable, and I'm a huge believer in defederation as one of the strengths of the fediverse. Block early and block often and all that. OP didn't spend time on that though, OP spent most of their time on character assassination.
Also, the target of these smears is the main Lemmy dev - not just Lemmy.ml. If OP is so concerned about their influence then OP should move to mbin or something.
Tankie is a pejorative. We should stop using that - I am not sure what the best replacement is, authoritarian? Fascist?
OP seems to believe that the unfair admin/mod practices stem from their political beliefs. e.g., going against their very own Code of Conduct, the amins in question used subversive database manipulation practices to eliminate the mod-log explanations for their actions, and also preemptively banned various people from communities that they had never (even so much as once) commented in, in the past. The latter is EXTREME, and the former is disingenuous.
Oh, but the admin is an authority-loving fascist, hence it suddenly all makes sense: "service to stated principles that serve the community good" give way to "whoever has the power to accomplish things does whatever they want", in that world-view. So they are not entirely as disconnected as you might wish in a purely mathematical & theoretical world. This is the real world, where it gets messy, and EVERYTHING gets political. But okay, what if OP made a poorly-written post - b/c their heart jumped out ahead of their brain - what then? It doesn't mean that it's not true, or a good thing to do, even then, and moreover what to do about it now? Re-word it if you like and write and post a new one? But this is the one that we have. Yeah, again, irl gets messy sometimes.
You missed some stuff yourself btw. As individual people block you - by which I do not just mean personally but your entire instance of choice - increasingly you will find yourself speaking to an echo chamber consisting of fascists + those who are more neutral towards authoritarianism. You will reply to people, and wonder why so few ever reply back to you - but it won't be b/c they don't like you (well maybe some, I dunno:-P), and rather they won't even see your replies unless they happen to visit that section of the comments for some other reason. They can do so, but they will not be notified so they will not be made aware of your desire to communicate.
This event is happening, like it or not, and one way or another. This OP at least gives us the chance to talk about it, before things go too far and even this much communication becomes impossible. i.e., the Western world is offering you this lifeboat, to let you know what is coming. Truth Social surely does far worse, and when Elon took over Twitter and renamed it to X, he didn't warn people, and instead just started removing and banning at will/whim. But the rest of the Fediverse isn't going to remain associated with fascism just b/c some innocent people have an account on Lemmy.ml.
Btw, in your Settings under "Import/Export Settings" there is a large button Export that can make a JSON file, and in a new account you can Import it, for easy transfer of your settings. You'd lose all your past comments/replies/up-/downvotes, but if you also transfer your iconic avatar and keep the same name, many people may not even notice.
I am sorry that this is upsetting to you.
First, thanks for the thoughtful and thorough reply.
I am sorry that this is upsetting to you.
It's not upsetting to me, it's just annoying. I strongly support the block early/block often culture that seems to pervade the fediverse, even when that is folks blocking me. I also support the ability to defederate, and strongly support (for example) pre-emptively defederating from threads.
Indeed, such decisions at the user or instance level are potentially messy, but the whole thing just seems self-healing over time to me. There's an equilibrium that needs to be reached, I think, and I doubt we're anywhere near it yet. Some instances are going to end up isolated, either by themselves or by others, and some won't. New instances will spring up, instances will shut down, etc etc. People will move around to find a new instance when needed. It's all really sloppy and the outcome for any one user or instance isn't necessarily going to match the outcome for another. That's freedom to me. And not in some maga "free speech means I get to be a jerk but no one can call me out" way, but in a "we're all empowered to influence our own experience here" way. People can block, instances can defederate, people can deploy their own instance and make it as open or closed or personal or public as they want to. Hot damn.
And all that is going to create friction and people are going to disagree with each other about how to do it and what the right way is, just like we're doing here.
But, despite your very reasonable rationalizations for OP, and regardless of their intent, this very subconversation and others are evidence that this isn't what a discussion about moderation practices looks like. It's what a discussion about publicly calling someone out with a pejorative term for their beliefs looks like. Expressing that opinion, and defending it when required, is the extent of my involvement or concern. I don't share the beliefs of OP nor their target. Whether folks want to change how they are discussing the issue or not is up to them. That's also freedom, in my opinion.
I might migrate instances at some point, I might not, we'll see how things go, but it's not going to be because of this post from OP. Folks can run their instances as they see fit. They don't owe me a platform, nor OP.
It’s what a discussion about publicly calling someone out with a pejorative term for their beliefs looks like
Tbf, that's b/c that's what you turned it into... I think? You brought it up, hence we are now discussing that. Tbf that is what you saw within the OP to begin with, so I am not saying that the discussion was not worth having. And I did mention that OP might have done a lot better in their wording choices.
However, I am suggesting to look past the format of the OP, to more clearly see its content, even if OP could have made that process a lot easier from the start by having chosen a different name than 'tankie'. Which starts not here but from reading the linked posts too - I know it's A LOT of comments (~800 iirc at last count), but at the very least start with just the top-ranked ones. It's not good. OP presumed that people already knew that, and just in case, gave those exact links so that people could catch up to that, before getting into depth into this post.
They don’t owe me a platform, nor OP.
Oh absolutely 100% agree. The Fediverse is what we make of it, as you said, and we are doing that right now.
So if we are past the poor wording choice, the real issue (imho at least, perhaps OP themselves disagrees) is that those linked posts describe a situation where the admins are using database manipulation to edit the mod logs. Think about what that means. Slightly less but still extremely offensive, those admins are also mass- and preemptively banning people from communities that they have never so much as commented in even once, for a comment made in some other community that said something negative about China. This is not okay. People are not going to put up with this. The former is actually a deceptive practice, and the latter isn't nearly as bad but is still abusive, on the level of Reddit.
These posts calling for defederation of the rest of the Fediverse from Lemmy.ml aren't going to simply disappear, unless those admins step down. Instead, some instances will defederate from them, others will proudly remain federated with everyone, and overall a new equilibrium will be formed, but in the meantime there will be much turmoil.
Read the linked posts - most especially https://lemmy.world/post/16211417.This is not just about OP disagreeing with them politically. They may have worded it to look like that, but that is not all that is going on - it's not even the half of it. THAT post at least is about how modding should be done. And this one seems to have been meant as the next step. Though if you want to make a new post to replace OP's wording choices with your own, it may help? As you say, OP made the mistake of wrapping the real issue inside of an easily-dismissable minor one as if they were one and the same.
Edit: Oh but I should have said: and if you choose not to make such a post, that's fine. At least we are enjoying this conversation about it all:-).
At least we are enjoying this conversation about it all:-).
Well you've certainly given me more to think about. I don't see much more to debate with you, but wanted to reply anyway so it didn't appear I was leaving in a huff. Have a good rest of your day.
Honestly, this kind of kindness, consideration, & compassion from you is what I love about the Fediverse, where we don't all have to agree with one another and in fact it's arguably more fun if we start off not that way, but all along the pathway from start to finish we respect one another (potentially barring some heated moments, hopefully forgivable, and I already don't recall but apologies if I ever did slip into that for a moment). I am told that Reddit used to be this way, before the authoritarian Huffman changed it to become mere "social media" (rather than older forum discussion board style) to increase his profits, but I barely saw it before it was gone, having joined far too late. Therefore I held out hope that I could see this in the Fediverse, which I did, then that was dashed when I encountered chapotraphouse and lemmygrad.ml, restored when I user-blocked them, and now I hope to preserve that for others to be able to enjoy it as well:-).
Fwiw I do see that you were right - this post was about differing political views, but that other post about the moderation abuses... that's some heavier stuff that I am glad you will take time to think about. B/c it is absolutely disrespectful of the admins to the community for them to not follow their own rules, but also b/c I hope to be able to converse with you again on the Fediverse!:-)
And it is complicated - b/c without power, what good is having "rightness" of thought? And yet, the world is what we make of it, so if we all band together and say "this is right, whereas this, this we will not put up with", then our collective might wins out. Speaking of, there is also a chance that Lemmy.ml could lose its grant over such practices, or be barred from the EU. At the very least, I see posts like the OP as providing fair warning that bad things may come in the future, so best start preparing now - e.g. by making communities elsewhere.
And the Federation model is so beautiful, that it seems worth attempting to preserve, by spreading communities out regardless:-).
I already don’t recall but apologies if I ever did slip into that for a moment
No apology needed, if anything I'm the one who gets a little terse sometimes.
that’s some heavier stuff that I am glad you will take time to think about. B/c it is absolutely disrespectful of the admins to the community for them to not follow their own rules
Will do!
also b/c I hope to be able to converse with you again on the Fediverse!:-)
And you as well!
I'm sure we'll bump into each other again. Whether I'll still be on this instance or account though? Only time will tell... :)
Because the Lemmy user base is still relatively small, so the drama in one corner takes up a nontrivial amount of the total area. If it were the size of reddit or tiktok, you wouldn't pay threads like these any mind.
I can't even see what instance you're from, but your account is only a couple months old. Why not create one on a different instance?
You are, for the next 7 days. This is your modlog actions on Lemmy.ml:
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=9504078
Some of that stuff would get you banned from shitjustworks though too - e.g. civility.
Well I hope it helps that now you know how to check your modlog actions:-). You put your name in the box, but the hard part is figuring out which modlog even has the record of the event - though usually the instance where the community is located at.
Yeah I wonder how much assholery those admins bring upon themselves by being that way to others first, it's like they almost do it on purpose and then use it as an excuse - e.g. Russia will say "poor me, the Ukraine is attacking me, it's so not fair boo-hoo" :-P.
It's because they're on the same instance as you (and me)
Ooh, good to know. I'm still a noob here, lol
OP wants to feel like a saviour of us all from tankies.
OP has been here two months, and they were shocked to find out an instance literally named after Karl Marx and John Lennin would pretend to be on the left but support authoritarian governments...
And they assume since they just "discovered" it, no one else knows.
... John Lennin?
Father of the gulag, founder of the Beatles
"Imagine no private ownership of the means of production, I wonder if you can"
It's crazy to think about, but even after all these years, people insist he was bigger than Jesus
Imagine all the Pol Pot...
I'm the walrus
John Lennin. Rofl Mao
It's as if people are joining and learning things.
Been here an almost year and literally just learned that from the above post.
It’s not named after Lemmy from Motörhead?
They probably mean the .ml part.
Yeah, like linus is a known cunt to work with, i'll still update my kernel regularly though
Not defending his behavior but I would note that he has been actively seeking to remedy his cunty-ness after becoming aware of how problematic it was and the problematic people that it attracted.
I'd certainly say so. I've yet to see him even coming off as dismissive without trying to clarify why in a polite manner.
Not sure what solutions you suggest
That's why I included this section in my post:
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances: https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
They were wondering about the dev thing. Having a lead dev be an asshole isn't that big of a deal. It's open source, so any code that would somehow benefit them would also benefit you.
I had to block a handful of bad actors, maybe around 15, and don't have much issue now. As usual it's a very small, very vocal minority that's doing most of the shitting in the pool. Unfortunately many are also mods of communities like politics@lemmy.ml, so generally not subscribing to stuff there is a good policy too.
It's the Vampire Castle phenomenon of online leftist spaces. One dev and instance admin of Lemmy has problematic personal beliefs, so now we aren't allowed to be on Lemmy anymore because it's failed an ideological purity test that OP decided for the rest of us. In other news, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is a hardcore Ayn Rand style freemarket libertarian, so I guess we should all ditch wikipedia and each buy a 400 pound Encyclopedia Britannica set. Because that'll show him to believe things I think are terrible.
I got a 14 day instance ban for calling a tankie a tankie on ML. Their authoritarian ideology is dangerous and it needs to be quarantined.
You are more than welcome to block any and all content from that instance. You can do this by going under your user settings and clicking on the "Blocks" tab and searching for lemmy.ml in the Block Instance section. That's the thing about Federated content. You have the power to selectively engage with the content of your choosing. You don't get to quarantine others because there is no centralized authority that gets to say "your instance gets stuck in an internet ghetto where it isn't allowed to interact with other users." You have to quarantine yourself by excluding content. If that doesn't work for you, then maybe it's less that you dislike their authoritarian ideology and more that it isn't the same flavor as your own.
I blocked ML months ago. I'm still going to keep calling for large instances to defederate, because sticking my fingers in my ears doesn't make the problem go away.
Yes, that will happen when the "problem" lives solely between your ears.
It's all so melodramatic. I'll take a jaunt into the comments sections of these posts once in awhile to see what the libs are clutching their pearls over now. Today we have:
Oh nooooo, a dev is a ban happy shithead! How unusual and extreme! Better raise the banner and gather the troops, the tankies are coming for us all! We must defederate and/or fork a parallel Lemmy because only tankies have weird ban happy power trips! This will solve all the issues!
On the bright side, block op and the surprisingly small number of the other more vocal tankie drama lords and it gets a lot quieter.
On the bright side, block op and the surprisingly small number of the other more vocal tankie drama lords and it gets a lot quieter.
Getting worked up over a Lemmy instance upholding principles misaligned to yours, while Lemmy constitutes 3% of the Fediverse and the Fetiverse is still unknown to the vast majority, is a pointless waste of energy.
Yeah, I honestly give very few shits about the political opinions of the lemmy devs as long as it doesn't taint the project itself -and if it did at some point in the future, forking an open-source project is stupidly easy.
I even donate a smidge of money to the development effort via librepay - man does need it to live after all.
Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.
Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.
I'll add that they're also generally quite pleasant when I see them on Lemmy. And I haven't seen either of them involved in being ban-happy. Some will argue otherwise based upon misconstruing the relationship between FLOSS devs and FLOSS consumers as a business/customer relationship (expecting customer service and product manager input on software that's donated free of charge). But, I think that those folks are just not yet familiar with how FLOSS development works.
I had my first ever comment, in decades of forums/reddit usage, get mod deleted because I was critical of China and the USSR. It was a fairly mild criticism. That action turned me off the whole instance.
Sad that you chose an .ml community to come back to. You can't talk about Russia or China at all without getting deleted there, unless it's saying that Tienamen Square never happened or something like that.
They learn from who they are worshipping. Exactly how the CCP control the narratives.
They learn from who
they are worshippingpays them and might disappear them if they say the wrong thing.
Same here, but they tried to claim I called a Steam Deck a "Rice Burner" as a racist insult when I randomly chose "rice" as the title for this meme to fill the mandatory title block. 
Like, bro? Even if that was my intent, which it wasn't even a term I had ever seen applied to a computer, it doesn't make sense.
I looked at your downvotes because I see you at -2... Wear this like a badge of honor!
Most of the downvotes I see are lemmy.ml users. Which I find funny. Rice exists in so many countries outside of china, but because it reminds them of China it's instantly bad since you're using is negatively. It's absurd.
LMAO!! Thank you! I've got them blocked but the fact they're even voting me down is silly. It wasn't even an insult because if I was even mentioning "ricing" it was the better of two options.
wow, you can see who up/downvoted a post? how do I do that?
Host your own lemmy instance. Or use Kbin(shows up as likes).
For some reason they decided that even though other activitypub services can see it just fine, lemmy will not show these things to normal users.
I thought it only showed Reduces from Kbin users? But then Kbin.social stopped showing any Reduces at all, and now Kbin.social is defunct for several days.
I tried Kbin.earth and Fedia.io but both show the Reduces as greyed out, at least for https://lemmy.world/comment/10490177that I used as a test. I will try creating a login and see if that unlocks it.
Apparently its to do with a sport car scene where the Chinese couldn't afford such luxuries but still want to participate and westerners or Americans would call these vehicle mods ricing
Now with linux theming we call ricing and that carries a racist connotation. How racist it actually is I am unsure but either way thats the reason people get upset.
Regarding lemmy.ml: yes, you should avoid it. It does not make sense to create politically-neutral communities on a politically-oriented instance.
Regarding Dessalines: The great thing about Lemmy is that I don't need to give a shit about the lead developer's politics, because he's not in control of how Lemmy is used, and if he ever tried some kind of heinous cross-instance power grab, it would get shut down before it got started.
Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦
As a fellow communist, I was always bewildered by this urge of many tankies to prove by all means, against any evidence, that China is socialist and ultimately good.
It's neither. China turned to markets, privatized many industries, and really did commit atrocities on Tiannamen square and in Xinjiang.
Doesn't mean socialism as a system is dysfunctional. United States are directly responsible for insane atrocities all over the world, and we don't need to deny that either.
We need to learn from the experience and strive for it not to happen again. Not close our eyes, scream "blah-blah-blah" and pretend it never happened.
China and the Soviet Union were responsible for acts of genocide, mass murdering/starving people, etc.
Doesn't mean this didn't happen in a capitalist world, and doesn't mean we should close our eyes on that to defend the good look of the system. If anything, this does the opposite. Problems need to be solved, not ignored.
Are there people that don't know that Lemmy is developed by Marxists, and their instance is run by Marxists? Thought that was common knowledge, that's why Lemmy exists in the first place, it was developed along Communist principles.
I'm glad that this is the controversy on Lemmy, and not things like Reddit had with r/JailBait.
I'm perfectly fine with just avoiding interactions with lemmy.ml communities. They can exist, even if I disagree with them. And if I wanted to participate, I'd probably be welcome so long as I follow the rules. Unlike r/Conservative, which required proving yourself to the mods to get a pass to enter or something...lol
But yes, it's definitely good to know what the .ml stands for, and to keep that in mind whenever one sees Lemmy.ml.
Good thing that Lemmy is an open source federation, then. It's not like Spaz on Reddit, where one dude can ruin the whole damn thing for everyone with a few bad choices.
Yeah this is the origin of Lemmy. Reddit banned some far left subreddits years ago and so some Communists went and made Lemmy.
Just block the instance if it bothers you. Jeez.
I may not agree with the devs political view, but I think their work developing lemmy is excellent and made me subscribe to monthly donation on opencollective. Lemmy is an open source project where the devs have absolutely no say over how the software being used, as evidenced by so many lemmy instances defederating from lemmygrad and lemmy.ml. Their political belief won't affect other instance.
I‘m glad that the fediverse resists excessive moderation and silencing of unwanted political opinions. I‘m not a fan of some of the things said or done on .ml but we wont do anything which is awesome. You can make your own instance and defederate, ban, block whoever you like.
To make my point clear, I made a large donation to the lemmy devs as I think they are doing awesome work. @dessalines@lemmy.ml especially is a tremendous help for the open source community.
But of course you‘re entitled to your opinion. Have a good day.
Nice comment, have a good day too
Yes let's all just pretend their propaganda is actual opinions held by real people.
- how will you prove they’re not „real people“?
- you‘re using a platform made by them
- the post itself is also propaganda since it pushes for a „solution“ against „tankies“.
-
Hold my hand and we'll go visit their house and ask them
-
Creating something doesn't give them the right to spread lies, and they probably funded it specifically in order to spread propaganda
-
This post isn't a systemic campaign of disinformation... a single person saying we should do something isn't propaganda. I'm talking about government-driven efforts to change thought and opinions. In this case, from a government with a long history of murdering and oppressing people.
I‘m not saying you cant be right. I still dont agree with your assumptions. Have a good day.
This entire thread glows and is extremely consistent with CIA goals.
You're beyond naive if you think the Marxists are brainwashed, yet you and the "people" in this thread aren't.
I don't think Marxists are brainwashed at all. Can't you contribute without putting words in my mouth?
Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares.
It's one of those things where the very tankies you're talking about made it trivial for anyone not wanting to interact with them, their instance, or anyone in specific can just block whatever. And then there's the instances that defederate from .ml and/or grad, which is a decent amount of them.
They may be assholes (though they tend not to be in interpersonal ways, only in their political views), but they're assholes nobody has to interact with for very long.
You're beating a dead horse with this one
That horse fucking deserves it though. He knows what he did.
Yeah honestly let's make an example out of that horse
I mean, we should probably care at least enough to make sure they're not smuggling in any backdoors that would allow them take over the entire Lemmyverse.
I know it's open source so that's somewhat difficult to accomplish but not impossible (see the recent stealth attack on SSH/OpenSSL). At the very least, it requires people from outside their echo chamber to regularly review commits being made made before admins begin rolling out new updates.
That's a valid point, imo.
But there supposedly are people doing just that. Been too long since I ran across it here, but when the last big version change happened, some of the instance running folks looked over the code, and found nothing hinky. I know my asshole cousin has his own instance, and he said he scanned through it a little out of curiosity and "it ain't the prettiest" was the worst he had to say about it. Which, second hand info like that is like toilet paper, but it serves okay for a casual conversation like this.
I would hope so, since it's THEIR hardware it's running on (or in case it's rented, responsible for).
But as long as they don't put anything iffy into the code and leave their political opinions separate from that, they can certainly run their own instance however they please. That's the whole point of Lemmy after all.
Jesus christ.
I'm not sure if He knows Rust well enough to do that, and having some sort of background in infosec would likely also be helpful.
Oh come on downvoters, that was funny! Haha
Thank you, I tried.
Tough crowd, eh?
Well, things have turned around! Haha
Guess it was just a slow burner then
You probably got hit by a bunch of lemmy.ml brigade downvotes then real users showed up and upvoted you.
I was only one or two in the red and it's three downvotes total. I wouldn't exactly call that a brigade.
Fair enough. Just saw a similar but more extreme thing happen to another comment so I made an assumption.
Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares
The 730 people who upvoted this post do care.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don't want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them. I understand that awareness of why people want alternatives is important for those alternatives to have a chance at attracting users, and being discovered in the first place. I just have yet to actually see these alternatives receive the care they (imo) require to justify switching to them.
The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody.
Maybe it's too soon to make such a judgement call, we'll see over the next few days as people get the chance to see this post.
The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them.
Agreed. Maybe I should try creating and managing a community some day. (hopefully this didn't come off as sarcastic)
The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody.
This is a wildly misleading and unfair comparison. Let's take the Trump verdict as an example. The most upvoted post about this had ~2700 upvotes. But that's only 6% of the MAU! Is that "nobody"? Obviously not. 2k upvotes is a huge deal on a rather small community like Lemmy. How often do you see posts with more than 3k upvotes?
~500 upvotes is already a moderately large number of upvotes. You need to compare this number with how many upvotes a post typically gets.
Fwiw (our disagreement aside), moderating a community anywhere online can be a very rewarding, and very thankless job. And it really can be a thing that feels like a job if the community is active enough.
But I would still recommend at least trying it for a few months to see if whatever subject matter you make it around draws users. That's when you get a real feel for moderation, and have the best chance at helping the overall fediverse work well.
I also think that moderating a big community would change your mind at least partially regarding vote numbers as a measure of anything significant. There's behind the curtain stuff that usually gives a better indication of how a given post/subject is being received by the individual community. It depends on the tools available, and lemmy is a wee bit scant on tools to help moderators gain understanding of the population of their C/; but it's still eye opening.
The biggest thing I think you'd notice in comparing people interacting with a given post is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that. And that's the ones that bother to vote. A lot of people don't. They'll click a link, maybe open that post and read comments, but just not care enough to do anything else at all. Back on reddit, that was a majority of posts, and I know it was the case on other forums back in the day.
So, yeah, disagreement about the numbers in this case aside, if you're this interested in how a vote using forum works, moderating your own would be a very cool experience on top of diversifying the instance/community balance.
[...] is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that.
Wow, now that I think of it, that is indeed how I vote most of the time.
Thanks, I will seriously consider opening a community.
I didn't necessarily think you were being sarcastic, but I appreciate the clarification.
You're correct, that was a rather shallow comparison for me to make.
I don't think raw upvotes give the full story either. I'd be interested in seeing, for example, from which instances the voters are distributed.
I'd be interested in seeing, for example, from which instances the voters are distributed.
That would be interesting indeed! I heard that if one hosts their own Lemmy instance, they can see who voted on every post. Don't have that for now though.
Votes mean as much as the shit I just took.
No. The shit that you took is more meaningful than fake Internet points.
True, it was a very healthy bm ;)
Usually I'd agree with this, but on this post, the upvote count is a direct representation of how many people care about this issue (out of the number of users who saw this post). That is meaningful.
I don't have access to traffic data to make a good argument on this specific post. Without the ability to compare total interactions vs votes, as well as the ratio of up vs down, it's a matter of general principle in my opinion.
It is also my opinion, having moderated off and on since the nineties on various types of forums that pretty much any post is ignored by a majority of users that come across it. Voting really only shows which people are willing to use the effort to hit a button. If a majority of users don't engage, I think that it is indeed a direct representation of how many people care. Again, I can't see those numbers, so it's kind of a moot point to make at all, but I suspect this post is like most posts anywhere.
But I still maintain that votes are meaningless across the board because they're a horrible metric for anything at all, especially when they're the only metric available.
Edit: again, fwiw, in the time it took me to type that up, the number of positive votes went down by 3. And, iirc, at the point where this tangent about the value of votes started, or was over 400, which is still meaningless, but taken in isolation would point to a general trend where there's significant disagreement with whatever it is about the post drawing votes.
I kind of see your point. The information we have is not sufficient, and we cannot really know how much of the Lemmy userbase cares about this issue.
In my view, upvotes are too easy to manipulate to take them seriously or expect authenticity. And I'm ok with that. I think Reddit and the like showed that karma and the like are not great measures of authentic engagement.
I have Lemmy.ml blocked and I still see them in other communities all the time. Defederation is the best solution for dealing with an instance that's designed to spread propaganda.
And no this isn't a dead horse, there's are other discussions ongoing about defederating Lemmy.ml
Your last sentence is contradictory with the meaning of "beating a dead horse" with the usage of the phrase I'm aware of.
To beat a dead horse isn to waste effort at an impossible or pointless goal.
When I used the phrase, it was with the second meaning in mind, but the first partially applies if op wanted anyone to do anything about the situation because the dev team isn't exactly open to some kind of takeover. The most that could realistically happen is that everyone leave lemmy entirely. Except for the tankies, obviously, why would they leave?
Since anyone that has spent enough time on lemmy to be called a regular user has run across the whole issue at least once, that means that if OP was wanting to raise awareness, the post was also pointless in that regard because it's kinda impossible to raise awareness past common knowledge and achieve anything useful.
Now, maybe our usage of the phrase "beating a dead horse" isn't the same. Language is funny like that. Maybe you just disagree that the post has no point, or that the point it does have might achieve something useful. That's cool, no worries, disagreements like that are healthy and fun.
I will say that in the first part of your comment, you actually echoed the point that I made; it is trivial to minimize/block instances in one way or another, including defederation. Defederation is an instance decision, not a personal one. But it is also a personal decision which instance/s we use to interact with the fediverse. There are instances that do not federate with lemmy.ml, and there's a ton that don't with lemmygrad.
So, based on that, I would even argue that, since we have the freedom to choose our instance (with the consent of the host of the instance of course), trying to get an instance that doesn't already defederate from lemmy.ml to do so approaches pointless since all of the major instances have been around for a while now, and have already taken part in that debate. Maybe you could change someone's mind with yet another rehash of the same debate, it does happen. But, again, all the major instances have had this debate multiple times, and the hosts don't seem open to changing just because someone brings it up again.
New instances? Absolutely have to decide if they want to federate with any of the "iffy" instances. And every user has to decide if they'd rather stick with a given instance that doesn't match their preferences regarding federation. But, uh, the instance this was posted on isn't new. The user that posted it isn't exactly new either. So the fact that they haven't already made a choice, but instead decided to beat a dead horse (again, using the "pointless" rather than "impossible" usage of the phrase) seems a bit meh.
I have Lemmy.ml blocked and I still see them in other communities all the time.
If that's the case, then that may be a bug. I advise you to report that.
It's standard, unfortunately, I'm not the only one
What do you mean by "it's standard"? As in that is the intended functionality? It shouldn't be — the whole point of blocking instances is for the user to be able to, well, block an instance, ie content originating from it no longer shows up.
Yeah, the software is set up so that even if you block an instance you still see comments from their accounts on other instances.
Is that stated in the documentation?
I don't know
And no this isn't a dead horse, there's are other discussions ongoing about defederating Lemmy.ml
It's a non-problem. No one forces anyone to interact with lemmy.ml
Malicious propaganda isn't a non-problem. I'd like a social media platform that doesn't have any governments openly pumping their lies into the conversation.
There is always a bias.
There's always murder, but we still try to stop it.
Wait what? A communism advocate who also develops Free and Open Source Software, which is literally communist philosphy applied to computers?
I'm blown away
Do you know the political views of the developers of every piece of software you use? Why is Lemmy different?
I had never heard so much about "tankies" before I joined Lemmy.
Before, I had heard it so sparingly that I couldn't remember what it meant.
Perhaps there may be something more to this correlation. Why are people with this worldview so common here? If it's not more common here than anywhere else, why is it brought up so much more frequently?
Lemmy was made by Marxists, along Communist principles, both the format and the devs attract Marxists and Anarchists.
There is a lot of conflict between leftists and liberals on Lemmy because there are close to no conservatives.
It's kind of like a Disco Elysium situation, even though non-Marxists can enjoy it and use it, there are going to be more Marxists enjoying it and using it as a proportion, and fewer conservatives.
Why are people with this worldview so common here?
Plenty of them aren't "people," they're simply anonymous accounts used to spread and promote propaganda. Some content generated by people, some from LLMs.
They're common here because they can run their disinformation campaigns without a corporation interfering. Tik Tok isn't the CCP's only attempt to influence people through social media.
Lemmy was developed, in part, to be a tankie community and they are around if you go outside of lemmy.world.
Tankie á la .world = anything left of center.
No, it is the Soviet Union did nothing wrong in 1956 definition.
The United States exterminated Native Americans and currently is a systemically racist country that murders its dissidents - see Kent State and Ferguson. It also has the largest prison population in the world.
You will be surprised how much of the open source software out there is written and maintained by lefties and tankies.
Sadly conservatives seem to have either lower education and are not notorious for their sharing and selflessness.
Yeah. Please note that phtn.app dev refused to change the default instance. I have moved back to Voyager since.
Edit: this has been resolved now. Photon has changed default instance to lemmy.ee
I haven't announced it, yet, but I've been testing ph.lemmy.cafe for some time now if that's your cup of tea.
Thanks. Photon is decent but I would use Voyager instead out of principle. Would you add v.lemmy.cafe?
I'll consider it. Need to manage the available resources a bit first.
They're going to change it soon.
Source: I asked them on matrix
That's good news. I will move back to Photon when that happens. Thanks for letting me know.
Done
Thank you
Thank you very much! Now I feel much more comfortable using Photon.
Thanks again for developing it and making it open source.
I never refused. In fact, it's already been changed to lemm.ee
He's not praising an ethnic cleansing. He elsewhere has claimed that the ethnic cleansing/concentration camp narrative is entirely western propaganda and isn't happening at all. Instead, it's some sort of... Incarceration, deradicalization, and rehabilitation program? Hell, I don't know.
Either way, he already does and says enough things to criticize, let's not make up more. It just makes us look just as dumb.
Lemmy.zip name is really unfortunate
The whole .zip TLD is really unfortunate.
Yeah, people pushed Google on that one specifically and they still went and did it. It should be removed.
As a worker in the Cybersecurity space, it's absolutely fantastic for job security.
Imagine making a claim like this and being so lazy that you couldn’t even throw it into virus total to confirm your hypothesis
Stop making wild ass assumptions and trying to peddle it as truth. It makes you look bad
Anyone else seeing the irony of objecting to ml politics being discussed on a platform built by a ml for discussing and organizing around ml politics?
You should know /politics and /news ban anyone critical of israel and Lemmy.world is ran by Zionists.
What are you implying here? People don’t use Lemmy because of this guy’s politics? Do we know the politics of other developers?
Mods and admins have enormous power to shape what can be discussed using comment moderation tools, bans, and promoted content. At the very least you should be aware of what potential biases an admin has that may inform how they moderate.
Oh nice, thank you. I didn’t realize they were an admin and mod too. I thought just a developer.
Only of their own instance, they cant do this shit on other instances
Only of their own instance, they cant do this shit on other instance
They can when they bake it directly into the lemmy code.
The ended up allowing instance admins to enable / disable that filter as well as customize it but the discussion shows how much power they wield across all instances and their mindset about using that power. The comment about something not being in line with their view of the the project (lemmy) is particularly telling.
To be clear I'm not disagreeing with the filter nor am I necessarily bagging on the developers, what I'm trying to demonstrate is the breadth and depth of their reach. They are most definitely not confined to a single a instance nor is everything they do, or can do, visible to most users.
i dont think you can take an instance of the devs considering maybe possibly baking in a poorly thought out slur filter and then being told what a stupid idea it is by the commuity as evidence that they can't be trusted not to bake in features allowing them to take admin actions on other instances
Such a change would likely trivially easy to remove by jusr forking lemmy, as they suggested people do a few times in that thread
Lemmy has a lot more contributors and eyes digging into its codebase now compared to 2021 so I think this is very unlikely to happen.
Right, but Lemmy is open source. It can be forked.
Their political ideologies that are anti-capitalism are actually Lemmys greatest strength.
I don’t know that I’d agree that the political beliefs of the lemmy.ml admins are lemmys greatest strengths. Certainly federation amd open source contributions are core to lemmy but support of a specific nation’s policies and actions certainly is not.
We already have a capitalist, Lemmy. It's called Reddit.
Lemmy exists explicitly because of anti-capitalist sentiment, not despite it. Remember that politics is two separate spectrums, possibly more. Economic theory and governmetal theory are completely different things. My point is that it is their economic communism that birthed lemmy, and thier governmental theory is really not releveant to the software in the same way.
What’s that got to do with censoring some discussions about some countries?
I literally just described the difference between their governmental philisophies and their economic ones.
Ok but they are administering and moderating their instance according to their political beliefs about a specific nation. They’re not defending China’s economic policies at Tiananmen Square or their notions on tariffs with Uyghurs. I don’t think you answered the question in the way you think you did.
Literally, the only statement I made was that if they weren't communists, they probably would not have made lemmy. A capitalist would have made Reddit. That doesn't diminish their faults. It's just pointing out that none of us would be here if they weren't communist.
Ok, I didn’t ask that, though. That is a completely different discussion that no one is having.
And the creators of lemmy (same dudes lemmy.ml) have done things like this. Specifically the insertion of automatic word filters IIRC:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
Here you can see all the glory of these devs.
Don’t forget, there’s lots of other federated media options besides lemmy.
Frankly my time around lemmy.ml has been pretty off putting to the service as a whole. I don’t see how endless user growth is sustainable for any volunteer moderation team either.
Don’t forget, you all can go look through the lemmy.ml mod log at any time and view the bullshit that goes on over there.
Here’s a link: https://lemmy.ml/modlog
Oh, my, god, they added an optional, configurable regular expression filter. The monsters!
Talk about over simplification of a problem lmao
To be honest the issue is more about the power tripping than politics. Banning someone from the Arch Linux community because they disagree with you seems strange
And people believed they'd escape the days of power-tripping mods by exiting Reddit.
At least with the festive there are no alternatives.
I appreciate the mod log here because at least you can see the receipts
Even more interesting with admin powers of your own instance. You can reverse shitty mod decisions locally and make your own decisions on evaluating if what they said if it's actually a problem or just overzealous moderation. Also means you get to see what mod took the action. Also looking at votes (which you could see as a kbin user).
festive
Like that new neame
That's the beauty of lemmy though - there is probably another community for the same thing on a different instance.
Yup. There were power tripping mods on Reddit, too. Except there, you'd be out of luck. On here, you can go to other instances, like communities on programming.dev or something.
To be fair you could've made a different subreddit but somehow this feels different
Because there the name was immutable. Here, you can take the name with you. You don't have to make up some secondary related name that has significantly lower SEO value (for lack of another way to describe).
Encourage users to create content on Lemmy communities hosted on non-tankie instances.
My problem with this ideology is while there are plenty of tankies on Lemmy, the term gets overapplied.
Some people think anyone to the left of Bill Kristol is a tankie.
Thanks for pointing this out. To some people, advocates for things like socialized healthcare are 'tankies'. Its hard to tell what people mean anymore by it, and one persons tankie might be another's centrist at this point.
Yeah... The label of "tankie" seems to be used to describe "anyone to the left of me".
It's so widely applied to the point of reaching meaninglessness.
Edit: missed that your already mentioned it, I guess the lemmy.ml link might still be useful
A list of alternative communities to the lemmy.ml ones: https://lemmy.ml/post/16531126
YSK
Why should I give a fuck
Here I am... Joined Lemmy.ml because it was supposed to be a security, privacy and FOSS focused community. Now people are probably going to block seeing my comments.
Really loving the "What does it matter if they support genocide???" commenters in here. Really showing where their priorities are.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that topics like this made the rounds in several subs at the same time.
Block the instance if you've got a problem.
No problem. Of course, you can always change the instance to something else if you dislike the default.
Edit: the first time I tried Sync it replied to the top level post instead of what I actually replied to.
Everyone that has been on the Internet for more than a few days has an illinformed hot-take floating around. You can learn something for a perspective even if it's not based in fact. Read with compassion and you don't have to believe everything you read.
Indeed, but this is more about admins banning users from the entire instance because they don't share the same political views.
That's fair. I appreciate that every instance host has the right to moderate their community any way they want however moderation rules should be clear and consistent. Banning people for posting respectful criticism of communism is inconsistent with the rules of lemmy.ml
.world does this all the time though, especially if you criticize Israel or Biden (or other CIA projects)
Yeah, I've had comments deleted and have seen others deleted that criticized Israel or that criticized Biden's support of Israel.
So my own eyes have shown me that this is true. My own eyes have also shown me that .world is run by mods who push an agenda that conforms with the CIAs goals of domestic control over the US population. Which, if I wanted to read that midwit drivel, then I would've stayed on Reddit.
Just report the ableism and move on. This person seems to think that everyone is a CIA operative and that autism is an insult.
Apparently, they’re now banned from their own instance.
Your comments get deleted because you seem to think autism is a derogatory to attack people with.
They do the shit constantly and dudes profile pic on git hub is still Fidel Castro
But go off defending these people I guess lol
I'm not defending these people. I'm saying illinformed hot-takes are common on the Internet. However they are an useful opportunity to understand an opposing perspective even if they're based in factual inaccuracies.
In my experience, most people are great. If a stranger has a wildly opposing opinion to myself, it's rarely because of differing values and more likely because of differing experiences.
But what we’re saying is that there’s a difference between a mistake/a hot-headed take and a pattern of abuse.
Patterns of abuse need to be taken seriously and no amount of “we’re all human” will mend that, until they themselves choose reform. Plain and simple.
People who choose not to agree to the social contract of tolerance, do not need to be treated with tolerance. Period
I've seen a few posts and comments made by 'tankies' (I had to look up this term, as I've never seen it outside of Lemmy) and I don't think there should be such a moral panic about them. It implies that everyone is so impressionable that they can't be exposed to a minority fringe political opinion without being instantly turned into a rabid and dangerous extremist.
See something you don't agree with? Ignore it. Downvote it. Block it if you really want to. So many people seem to come here just looking for a fight with other users or to get some general outrage out of their system, whether it's 'tankies' or 'anti-tankies'. Just relax. Lemmy is diverse and ever-expanding; there's loads of fun, interesting and positive stuff to see and talk about here.
I will mention that smaller, niche communities have way more harmonious and interesting discussions. This suggests to me that the majority of aggro comes from people who are just logging in and scrolling down the 'front page' for something to do. It's worth putting in a bit of effort to find specific topics you're interested in and then looking at the feed of your subscriptions. It's a much better experience for everyone.
Edited for bad grammarring.
Glad I don’t know wtf this is about.
I take issue with both the authoritarian left and authoritarian right: being an apologist for Soviet Russia as well as being an apologist for the USA is not OK in my opinion.
I find it futile to take a position on which is worse because that just gives space to be an apologist for one that's "less bad". I see this happening in this thread right now.
Should I defederate from both lemmy.world and lemmy.ml? Of course not. In fact, I find both to be more tolerable and cooperative than reddit today.
Yes please do tell me more how you're censored by Lemmy devs in a post on the top of Lemmy crybaby.
To me it is weird that every day on lemmy I see new posts complaining about all tankies... but I never actually see any of the content they are complaining about. And outside of lemmy, I never see or hear the word 'tankies' used at all. I've asked a couple of people I know in real life if they ever seen discussions about it in their parts of the internet, and none of them people I've asked have ever heard the word before.
So... like I said, I find it weird. It's like some kind of lemmy boogieman.
Mods are tankies? Waow
Good thing I'm on sh.itjust.works
Maybe I should swap to an Mbin instance instead though... Eh, I like it here and I'm kinda lazy.
Who cares. This is pointless drama.
Maybe political repression and the mass killing of protestors and the internment of ethnic minorities has very little to do with a countries mode of production. Maybe you guys can advocate for an alternative mode of production without defending genocide and using the military to crack down on protests? And maybe liberals can do the same when Western Capitalist Countries do it?
please... :(
This whole endless debate always just feels like three Dean Brownings in a trench coat.
I mean... What is your point here? This is the internet no?
My lemmy client is able to locally block anything I do not want to see. And I do not want to live in a bubble, so I didn't block .ml. There are many quality post and comments so I would advise against a premature defederation.
But what do I know
Even if we all disagree with him politically, what, is anybody going to form the lemmy repo on GH and make a better version?
We can't just oust them from developing sadly but we can spread the news that they are not a good person
We can’t just oust them from developing
Well you could fork and run your own blackjack and hooker emporium.
...and?
FYI, the second main dev, Nutomic, although he doesn't write as much, is in the same ideology, his avatar is Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.
During their AMA, 10 months ago, I directly asked them:
Since you’re very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?Thanks for your work, it’s projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive. https://lemmy.ml/post/2920188/2385128
They intentionally ignored my questions and answered to other later questions with fewer points.
Eventually, 10 months later, my personal observation is that it seems that they keep their ideology tendencies to their home instance, which is fair enough since people are free to leave and block. And they don't seem to be developing some centralized International political oppression feature into Lemmy, like their role models may have, so far.
Don't forget that you can block an instance personally now.
Here's an idea, block .ml and SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY.
It feels like 30% of all Lemmy use is capitalists whining that they don't have a central anti leftist authority to block everyone they don't like, by linking the same two fucking posts from over at least 1 year ago or posts where they "argue" by shouting "fuck you Tankie" and it didn't go their way.
If you don't like how its run, leave. THATS THE WHOLE POINT. If you want a central authority thats gonna be strongly pro-capital, go back to Reddit. Either way:
SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.
Wtf based??????
Your apparent antagonism towards the lead Lemmy developer is sensationalist and non-constructive. If you dislike their moderation then the solution is simple: leave their instances and communities. If your user does not reside on their instances then its admins cannot silence you. If you do not participate in their communities, then their moderators cannot silence you. If you do not wish to see their users then block their instances (though, I would still advise against this). Your argument is founded upon the premise that you don't like their opinions, so just don't listen. Don't taint the Lemmyverse's image with your false alarmism. Be the change that you wish to see. Start an instance with administrative rules that you think are better. Start a community with moderation rules that you think are better. If one finds that they are needing to resort to ad-homenim to gather support, then I would advise one to critically analyze their position and arguments.
EDIT (2024-06-07T19:25Z): From your other comments in this thread I see that you are advocating for the creation of new communities and for people to individually distance themselves from lemmy.ml, rather than defederation. I agree with this. I still disagree, however, with the approach and tone that you used in your post. I think the same end can and should be achieved without ad-homenim attacks.
I don't know why the lemmy.ml admins don't just defederate from everyone but lemmygrad and hexbear. It's clear that only their extreme views are allowed and they must spend a lot of time banning "libs".
It would do everyone a favour really. We'd have less instance politics and hopefully more content, and make it the fediverse more attractive to the average person.
Judging from other threads on the matter, a lot of people don't even know what "tankie" means.
So here's a pro tip: replace "tankie" with "dipshit" and the meaning remains the same.
YSK: lemmy.ml is managed by dipshits, and lead lemmy developer is a dipshit
No problem, fuckingkangaroos.
Edit: the first time I tried Sync it replied to the top level post instead of what I actually replied to.
Well this is news to me. The whole thing; created by Marxists, etc, etc.
Wtf?
"Look at the prisoners per capita," lol China has mobile execution vans, my guy.
US for-profit prisons and slavery are still fucked up, don't get me wrong.
China has mobile execution vans
Not heard about this, got a source?
There's a lot of [Citation needed] tags on a lot of those claims. I'm not denying they exist but it's also a bit of a flimsy source.
The main source for this is Amnesty International page 76. The relevant text:
In an effort to improve cost-efficiency, Chinese provincial authorities are introducing mobile execution vans in which convicts are given a lethal injection, replacing the traditional execution method of firing squads. Eighteen mobile executions vans, converted 24-seater buses, were distributed to all intermediate courts and one high court in Yunnan province in 2003. In December of the same year, the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing urged all provinces to acquire execution vans “that can put to death convicted criminals immediately after sentencing”. The windowless execution chamber at the back contains a metal bed on which the prisoner is strapped down. Once the needle is attached by a technician, a police officer presses a button and an automatic syringe injects the lethal drug into the prisoner’s vein. The execution can be watched on a video monitor next to the driver’s seat and can be recorded if required.
And I think barsquid's point is that China is keeping their imprisoned-per-capita low through executions. Even if that's incorrect, China does use execution more liberally than the U.S. And execution is evil.
In the US we call government vehicles that come kill you "police cars"
I've seen the label "tankie" be thrown around to describe so many different things to the point that it has lost all meaning to me. I've seen it used to describe fascists, I've seen it used as a way to discredit someone's argument without engaging with it, I've seen it used used to invalidate arguments because they were to the left of the person throwing the label.
The definition presented uses the word "authoritarian" which, in my eyes, falls on a similar category of "used on so many things it lost all meaning". (Example)
Using the words authoritarian and communist simultaneously doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me: As far as I am aware, a communist society is a stateless society. However, Wikipedia defines "authoritarian" as
"Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of democracy and political plurality. It involves the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting."
Notice the words "strong central power". Isn't that a contradiction of what communism is? Please do correct me if I'm wrong.
I've seen in the comments people saying that de-federation is not an option because of .ml's large communities, but, in my eyes, that doesn't make much sense. .world is a big instance, just recreate the communities from .ml that you don't want to miss out on. Everyone on .world will be forced to use them, since they can't post on the .ml version any more. If .ml is as awful as people make it out to be, everyone will de-federate and move to the .world alternatives.
Who gives a fuck
Then don't sign up for an account there? I don't see your problem
As long as the developers don't force their political views on people using the software I really don't see an issue.
You could argue they aren't doing it today but what about tomorrow?
Well I would say everything is open source. If something does change that you don't agree with you can just take the code and build your own. (Obviously with blackjack and hookers)
And a good thing it is, too - if you liberals were managing it lemmy would have been sold off to Meta or Google a long time ago.
And? I'm not a tankie and not a marxist. Hell, I'm not even a socialist. Hell, I identify as a leftist, but I bet lots of folks would tell me I'm nothing of the sort. But I'd rather be on an instance with folks to the left of me than to the right (to the very, very minimal degree that I care about who else is on my instance). I don't remember why I didn't sign up for .world, but at the end of the day does it really matter?
The only impact I've seen are smear posts like this one, and folks who dismiss opinions if they see a user is from .ml. shrug If that's as far as folks can look, I'm not interested in talking with them anyway.
I have hexbear blocked in my own settings; if folks want to block .ml that's no skin off my nose. Ain't respecting user freedoms great?
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev,
So I see you are on a Lemmy instance. If we're going to smear instances based on the politics of their devs, I'd think you wouldn't want to use ANY Lemmy instance.
Nothing wrong with holding a political stance, but they routinely ban people for specious reasons. With some of the biggest communities on .ml this is a problem for the growth of Lemmy.
Nothing wrong with holding a political stance, but they routinely ban people for specious reasons.
OP should have left the politics and personal smears out of it then and opened a discussion about moderation practices. And as OP points out, the person he's primarily smearing is the main Lemmy dev. What's the endgame there? Trying to get the main dev thrown off his own project?
OP should have left the politics and personal smears out of it then and opened a discussion about moderation practices
That's... exactly what OP did, though. Did you even read the post?
What does it lead with? A comment about moderation or a comment about the devs politics and opinions?
(Edit: and the subject line says nothing about moderation)
To brand the lemmy.ml as the censorship hell that it is.
Subject line: Nothing about moderation or censorship, it's about smearing the target's views.
First two sentences: Nothing about moderation or censorship, it's about smearing the target's views.
Third sentence: Links to archive.org link that fails to load. (I think they are still under DoS attack) May or may not be about moderation, but nothing OP wrote in the leadup to the link leads me to believe it's about more than smearing the target's views.
Then a couple links that sound like they are about discussing moderation.
Then another para smearing the target's opinions and politics some more.
Yep, OP was really about moderation and censorship, not about a personal attack. /s
Please don't conflate tankies with leftist thought. They are not leftists. They are fascists with strong ties toward fascist regimes that are "known" to actively usurp elections around the globe.
A good metric is: a very hardline Communist might have an argument for why effectively slavery is ethical because social and economic planning requires people to engage in jobs they actively do not want to do. I personally consider that the reason that Communism can never work at scale but that is a discussion that needs to be had.
A tankie will just justify anything that China or Russia do. Usually with an attempt to deflect by pointing out something the US or, increasingly, certain EU countries did.
But, regardless: There is another issue with your "just let everyone taolk it out" nonsense. Because the ml moderation team(s) and admin staff have increasingly been using mass bans and false claims of xenophiobia to shut down anything that is not tankie bullshit. So there is no discussion. Just one sided propaganda in some of the largest communities on lemmy.
To expand on the moderation strategy a bit. A LOT of people who aren't increasingly of one nationality and ethnicity have a lot of problems with ResetEra's moderation strategy. The mods and admins are known for using a heavy hand and outright mockery against anyone who they disagree with and the remaining community stumble over each other to be part of the "cool crowd".
But you can also very easily see why the vast majority of leftists and PC gamers and... Asian people left. Because they have a policy to only edit user posts when they contain actively dangerous/illegal statements. So you can see when someone catches a permaban because they dsiagreed with an admin or joked about the corporate interests behind brexit. And you can see the discussion of the remaining users on why that was so fucked... up until the thread gets permanently locked.
With the model ml (and certain other more "world"ly instances...) use... you don't. You just see comment branches disappear the moment anyone pushes back on some propaganda. And if a user pisses off the admins, they get banned straight up. Often with some comment about how they are racist or xenophobic in the modlog with all of their comments removed but NOT in the modlog. And that is a problem because, unless you were actively following along with that discussion, you never see anything other than MAYBE "wow, a lot of really racist people disagree with this very smart discussion on why Chinese Taipei was always a part of China and is totally not a sovereign-ish nation called Taiwan"
Hey thank you for this, I will read it again in more detail, but appreciate the perspective, both broadly and with regard to this specific post.
This is the only reply I received which has caused me to second guess my stance in the slightest. 🙂
Edit: If I'm going to care about such things at all, is there a left leaning instance you'd recommend? I considered blahaj, but not sure if they welcome allies there or only the queer community.
This often comes up in these threads, but the point of using the term tankie is for its association with leftism.
The traditional term people otherwise use when referring to such abuse by mods and admin is 'fascist' or 'nazi', hyperbolic or not as you demonstrated. The conflation is the point.
I'm more of a libertarian communist, communist economic theory I think is excellent. That doesn't mean that communist regimes of the past make any sense, because of their authoritarian bend.
Turns out political opinions arent black and white.
It sounds like you are a Democratic Socialist from this tidbit.
I kind of feel the same way. I think the economic theory behind communism/socialism sounds much more beneficial towards our progress as a species and towards a more sustainable existence. I just don't agree with the authoritarian methods of implementation. I think that if socialism is going to succeed, it will need to come about in a gradual democratic way.
No, I'm a communist. I don't believe in monitary commerce. But I'm absolutely with you, with communism also only being able to succeed if it's democratic.
YSK: There are countless posts by "concerned" users shrieking about tankies. What is the point of these "informational" posts? Looking to stamp out opinions you don't like so you can turn the fediverse into astroturfed-to-hell-and-back reddit 2.0?
Dang if you like free speech so much, why not federate with hexbear about it?
Don't lemmy.worlders like to defed for slight disagreements? Just do it and save us from your brainworms.
The FUD spreaders continuing to spread FUD. You know what's great for Lemmy, this platform you're using that was developed by that Dev you're coming for? Inter instance drama, surely.
Cold War 2 bullshit.
YSK: you will never see more pathetic whining than people on Lemmy constantly complaining about "tankies". Full disclosure: I have been called a tankie one time in two years on Lemmy. I commented on a post that was basically jerking off to the idea that Japan would repeat its atrocities against China in the event that there was a war over Taiwan. I expressed doubt that it would go very smoothly, for which I was banned and labeled a tankie.
Another astounding revelation from Reddit.world 😲
Lemmy was built by those tankies you disagree with. Numerous accounts have discredited the official US bullshit about Tiananmen Square and the fake Uyghur Genocide.
I'm glad to have devs with principals. Go back to reddit lib.
Winnie the Pooh
Isn't this racist?
Also, remind me about Kent State. Or Ferguson. Or the extermination of Native Americans. Or concentration camps in the Philippines.
If by "principals" you mean "banning anybody who falls outside of the groupthink", then sure, more power to ya.
You say that like world or others instances don't do that
1, that's whataboutism, form a better argument. 2, that's still a weak "principal" to have and defending it as though it's a good thing is pretty cringe.
.world is a zionist and CIA-affiliated shillstorm. It's just the US version of .ml
Both are equally bad because the US and China are equally bad. Don't believe me? Check out the death toll of Native American genocide, transatlantic slavery, Latin american imperialism, CIA coups during the Cold War, police repression today, and current prison populations.
Given that I have no idea why anyone would defend the United States. Unless you're brainwashed or working for the CIA
i'm open to the possibility that you're right, but my experience is that criticism of the cia or zionism is tolerated to a much greater degree on .world than criticism of china or soviet russia is tolerated on .ml.
can you point to specific instance-wide bannings for talking shit on us foreign policy or zionism?
It's tolerated in different ways. Ostracization and orchestrated mass downvotes are used rather than bans. .world utilizes methods of control that are more subtle than .ml. Which is consistent with how the CIA/West exerts control compared to China.
Our propaganda techniques and mechanisms of control are more multifaceted and less brutish and obvious - which isn't a good thing. It means that we create a veil and drape it over the eyes of our people so that they don't even realize that they are being controlled. This is the ideological state apparatus of the West that is drastically more effective than anything a socialist state has managed to create. Of course, we both have repressive state apparatuses as well, and our police are arguably more brutal than theirs (especially if you aren't white and female), but there is less need to use that when you are able to brainwash your public so effectively with subtle acts of ideological correction. And convincing them that hundreds of strangers are mad at them is a good way to minimize dissent from being articulated in the first place, as well as distractions such as typical liberal rage bait and "red team bad" distractions
i think this is pretty hard to draw a direct comparison. first, a few mods/admins deciding to ban is not the same as hundreds of individuals voting. even if half of them are bots (no one games lemmy votes, though, do they?), that's still a far cry from someone stepping in and actually silencing a user.
second, while i think you're right about the nature of western societal control, i don't think there is any conspiracy to enact that on .world. maybe i'm naive though.
I don’t think I will
Imagine trying to insult someone by calling them a liberal lmfao.
Who remembers when China was doing live organ farming on people?
Pepperidge farm fucking remembers.
Just FYI, the organ farming thing comes from Falun Gong, who are a weird cult that have been (perhaps overly) oppressed by the Chinese government. They have quite a strong media presence and some weird beliefs about organs.
who are a weird cult that have been (perhaps overly) oppressed by the Chinese government. They have quite a strong media presence and some weird beliefs about organs.
This logic doesn't make sense. The government with a great firewall isn't controlling media to restrict this one particular groups views? Even though they have no trouble with every other group?
They're international, their HQ is in Deerpark, NY.
This video (and its second part) give a good overview of Falun Gong and their media presence.
Really? Because I remember reading from the UN that this was taking place in the uyghur camps?
Edit: actually it’s both. So…
I think it's worth considering that your evidence comes directly from a country that considers China an adversary, and they seem to take the Falun Gong organ harvesting as fact.
True, however that doesn’t necessarily constitute falsehood in what they’re claiming.
The UN also did work on this, as did Canada and some investigative reporters in Europe.
China has lots of adversaries. Mainly anybody in the west, and they dominate any of their other Allies which makes them a de facto leader and would make criticism from anyone else pretty tough.
Edit: oh and in 2015 China announced that they wouldn’t do forced organ transplants on prisoners anymore - so they were most definitely participating in this disgusting practice.
True, however that doesn’t necessarily constitute falsehood in what they’re claiming.
I appreciate that, I just think it was worth pointing out that its worth being sceptical about a source like that, as you would be about one coming from the Chinese government.
100%
I’m critical of every ruling body, regardless of where I reside. There’s something to be said about having power over millions of people and how humans deal with that.
I’m especially critical of governments that are known to run PsyOps, disinformation campaigns, and known histories of abuse (US, China, Russia, Israel, Iran, North Korea, etc). Ultimately, the devil you know is better than the others, but we’re still working with devils
Don’t forget the Uyghurs! Your name calling has no effect against me and is frankly childish when you could’ve taken the opportunity to properly educate.
Instead you chose to call names. lol. Very telling.
There is no war in ba sing se ig