Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this.
Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this.
cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531
I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ...
As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.
I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.
This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:
Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say?
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance."
The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there's nobody to discuss anything with.
I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
Just to weigh in here with a bit of political nuance — "tankies" are certainly defined by their leftist politics, but moreso by their apologist defense of regimes that more or less transparently use socialist or communist maxims as a cover for state capitalism or straight out autocracy.
Tankies may be the loudest voices to claim themselves Marxist or socialist, but please don't mistake them as actually representing those ideologies truthfully or completely. Personally, I see tankies as more indebted to a cold war-style school of Soviet dogma transplanted to current autocracies. Marx and Trotsky would have rolled their eyes at either.
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Note, that just means you were sitebanned. This is how the software displays this.
Don't use lemmy.ml then?
“So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”
Dismissal of this type of criticism by just telling people to use another instance or saying "fediverse is decentralized" is unproductive, and honestly should be called out as harmful because it ignores the fact that instances when they become large enough and centralized enough, carry weight and can be extremely problematic like shown here.
A big part of dealing with these types of problems is to make people aware of them, another one is to deal with it at the instance level by defederating the problematic instances and cutting off the communities so that network effect doesn't continue to rear its ugly head. Just creating new communities isn't enough, if it was this wouldn't be the problem that it is. When people tell others to stop complaining and dismiss the criticism because the fediverse is decentralized it seems like they either don't understand the issue, or they would just rather it not be addressed.
So while many people would prefer we just leave well enough alone, that's not condusive to these problems being dealt with, people need to talk about them, and action needs to be taken.
One of the mods over there is a Russian who refuses to answer whether he's pro-Russian or not, says Russian propaganda doesn't exist, pretends to be American while intensely engaging in American threads, denies Uighur genocide, etc etc etc.
https://lemmy.world/u/davel@lemmy.ml
He has some older account where there was Russian being used but I think he may have deleted it or I just can't be arsed to look enough rn.
Anyway, one of the clearest pro-Russian trolls I've seen. Lemmy.ml is full of them, I don't know why lemmy.world federates with them.
Frankly, who cares? If you don't want to see or participate in tankie propoganda, then don't. People point out that lemmy.ml is the hub for a lot of communities, so it isn't reasonable to switch to another instance. And then they bring up communities like !Linux@lemmy.ml Guess what, Linux isn't meant to be a hub for political discourse, and for the most part, it isn't. Use lemmy.ml how you want to use it, and if you want to participate in other political leanings, go to a different instance. No one is really stopping you, and that's the whole idea of the fediverse. And there really isn't any value lost, because this isn't a "choose one and only one" situation. You've got all of the fediverse at your fingertips
<EDIT> So this came off a bit abrasive. But the point I want to convey is that if you want to have deep/heated political discourse, either do that on a community (and instance) suitable for it, or use an account specifically for political discussion. I think it helps everyone. The mods can referee communities with more clear boundaries, the lurkers/users don't need to worry about political debates when looking up tech support or whatever, and you (the reader/political dissident) can still enjoy your discussions with less worry about being randomly banned. </EDIT>
As the dev's flagship instance, there is only so much that can be done. There is also only so much that should be done, since they should have the right to run their own instance however they see fit. They did put the work in to create the service, after all.
I think the most reasonable solution around this is to simply push mbin a little harder. Since .ml will always garner a certain degree of attention as the dev's instance, simply pivoting more attention to a lemmy-related service may be the best option to make us more appealing to less politically-interested people overall.
All instances, except for the lightly moderated ones, have censorship issues from time to time. You can say one thing on one thread, and that same thing can get you banned in another thread on the same instance. This is an issue with the great degree of political polarization on Lemmy.
My point is that Lemmy is multipolar. It’s divided between the right-leaning instances like Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, the left-leaning instances like Lemmy.ml, slrpnk.net, blahaj.zone, and dbzer0, and the leftist instances like Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. Mods and admins on each instance are guilty of maintaining the “instance line.”
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
While I won't repeat what got me banned, this is what got me banned from Political Memes on Lemmy.world, this isn't just a Lemmy.ml thing. This is also when one of the moderators claimed they weren't censoring anyone and were incredibly fair on a comment chain calling out their censorship, and refused to elaborate. They would not even tell me how I could edit my comments to comply with their rules.
What does this all mean?
Honestly, I think close to everyone knows that Marxists dominate Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad.ml, Hexbear.net, etc. I think close to everyone knows Liberals dominate Lemmy.world. I think everyone knows that anarchists dominate dbzer0, slrpnk.net, Hexbear.net, etc.
If your call to action is to defederate Lemmy.ml, then that's just contributing to this polarization effect, as people would jump ship from .world and .ml to the other if it fits their views better. If your call to action is that people should move communities from Lemmy.ml to other instances, this has already happened a bit, this thread gets reposted very frequently. All it really seems to me is that you're spreading drama.
What do I recommend?
Rather than trying to consolidate communities across instances, replicate communities as needed. Communities on Lemmy are more like hashtags for an instance, and instances are more like subreddits of old. Instances have their own cultures and values, so a Gaming thread on Hexbear, for example, is going to be different from a Lemmy.world Gaming thread, and that's a good thing. All sorting can still let you see other instances, there's no need to risk moderator dominance over communities by trying to consolidate on a single instance. Heck, this community is an example of that very process.
I feel like I've been saying it from the beginning, but for all of the problems Reddit has that Lemmy ostensibly solves, it opens the door for far worse moderation problems than Reddit had.
We can shit talk Reddit admins all night and day, but their long-standing and often problematic insistence on neutrality was nevertheless beneficial for the site's growth.
And I think one of the fundamental problems with Lemmy is that too many of the people in charge of various instances don't have a similar philosophy. They want to choke the place, and curate it to their exact specifications, for their own individual reasons.
Which would be fine in a vacuum. But in a federated space, what is done on one instance can have a wide ranging effect on the visibility of content outside of that instance. And as op rightfully points out, because communities are locked to an individual instance, the nature of federation doesn't help users escape overbearing moderation when the only true sizable communities for a thing happen to be on a specific instance.
(1) shoutout to the community at !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca for helping guide people into things like how to make a functioning link to communities and users, and I posted something there myself mentioning a variety of ways to curate someone's experiences, e.g. to block extremist content. I would share a link to that here... except links to posts are not fully functional on the Fediverse, since they take you off of your home instance and require jumping through hoops to avoid that. Also, if that community does not show up for you, like if visiting that link it looks empty, then subscribe to it and wait about a day. The Fediverse is not so easy to use as people keep saying it is...
Though ironically, as you said, what's the point when nobody even knows of that community's existence. Worse yet, a lot of "guides" pointed to in the sidebar of a large number of instances either have next to no information, or at most only a single years-old post with a ton of comments like "thanks" and "^THIS" that you cannot easily get past b/c of how the Lemmy web UI makes you load only a portion before making you go to the bottom and load another, and another, and another, and another... almost none of which have anything useful to add, and yet the instance admins (which people like Blaze and I have specifically told) choose not to point to a "community", and instead leave those years-old links to posts. Speaking of, and funny enough, in the case of lemmy.ml go to the sidebar and click the "What is Lemmy.ml" - the result is hilariously on-brand!:-P
(2) measuring community engagement stats can be tricky - for one thing, the numbers when viewed from an external instance are often wrong, but going to the home instance and looking in the sidebar iirc offers the true values. Also, "subscribed" means next to nothing, and instead active users per month (AMU) is where it's at. With that in mind then:
- linux@lemmy.ml has 2.23k AMUs
- linux@lemmy.world has 1.39k AMUs
- after that it drops precipitously, e.g. linux@sh.itjust.works has just 36 AMUs
Still, linux@lemmy.world is not nothing, with 39% of these users - a lower-bound estimate since many people are likely subscribed to both.
(3) And Linux@lemmy.ml is the #3 community on that instance. The large majority of the other communities - asklemmy, memes, news, privacy, technology, etc. - all have counterparts on other instances.
One counterexample that is pretty bad is firefox, with lemmy.ml vs. lemmy.world having 3.82k vs. 0.72 AMUs, respectively.
So, do whatever you want, but it is what it is. Personally I've user-blocked lemmy.ml b/c... well, you can see it yourself from the replies to your post here, it's just not worth the hassle of having to receive such in my feed (though sadly, user-blocking seems to make extraordinarily little difference compared to not doing such). All I can suggest is that while it may not be "easy", we can each of us be a part of the change that we want to see in the world. Find, subscribe to, and POST on communities that you would like to see grow.
These are just my thoughts based on what I've read so far. Do what you will with it. This is just my general advice.
If you like a community on an instance, make friends on it. If you network with enough individuals that feel the same way about a community that you do, fork that community onto a new instance and carry on. I see others weighing in on too much control, not enough control, defederate, remove moderator or admin control from individuals that censor, ban, on lean one direction over another. You'll find these power dynamics are more prevalent or less prevalent depending on the instance you're on or communities your partipate in. If you feel strongly enough about it, be the change you want to see and determine what best course of action you should take that is within your power. Whatever you choose I hope you find or potentially create a community or instance that works best for you.
I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
It depends on what exactly do you consider the problem to be, but my understanding is that solutions to the more general problem of "what server a community is in" are already in the works (multicommunities and stuff).
As for a more local kind of change... Be the change you want to see. Start up, and maintain, those alt communities that would serve as counterweights to the ones that are in .ml. Also, understand why they are in .ml in the first place yet still manage to function.
I agree with you that this conflict needs a resolution, it's possible lemmy.ml has done some things wrong, that's why I support a two state solution that guarantees lemmy.mls security.
Brand new account making smear post against lemmy.ml as if they are veterans.
Totally not sus.
i created !de_ml@lemmy.blahaj.zone to help people leave lemmy.ml
"turn this place into an echo chamber" motherfucker Lemmy world has 10 times the users, and the only "echo chamber" shit I see is insistent Kamala Harris cope and seethe whenever someone mentions Israel or Palestine.
Meanwhile Lemmy . world mods change the TOS to spite individual communities, ban discussion of piracy despite it being perfectly legal and present on a different instance! Grow up.
If all you want to see are opinions and memes that fit within the political confines of the New York Times, then .ml probably isn't for you. Lemmy.world has taken a very brave (and rare!) stance of being a champion of neoliberal politics. The mods and users here will do everything they can to make sure you aren't exposed to any political philosophy to the left of Henry Kissinger.
Man, I just wished I couldn't have to worry about political ideologies and extremism, it surely feels like Twitter, except the extremism comes from the left. The worst thing is that Lemmy's developers support these stuff…
I knew it was bloody and thousands had been slaughtered, but I'm so surprised they fought back. I never learned they actually had the chance to. So many survivors and observers too. That's reassuring.
It means that the Chinese know their government is not omnipotent. That's why all legal communication is unencrypted and monitored. If citizens were allowed to communicate as they do in the West, they'd be able to organize and overthrow the CCP.
That's what they are afraid of. The people aren't afraid of the mechanized power the PLA has, and as demonstrated in 1989, the power is in numbers. If the CCP doesn't wipe out all memory of Tiannemen Square, they are doomed. But the CCP can't. Unless they cut China off from the rest of the world entirely, the knowledge will remain. The CCP can only get stricter and harsher, speeding up the time for a pressure cooker to explode. They know this. The people know this.
At some point in the future, they will go too far, and the people will end it.
🙄
Even outside of the Tankie instances the Fediverse is filled to the brim with literal terrorist simps, both within the general user base as well as the various community mods. You literally get comments removed or even banned for having nuanced middle ground positions that aren't propaganda for one side.