2mo ago

For the crime of making a joke about Russia's technology in the 90s, lemmy.ml admin hands down a 1 week ban across 20 communities.

Modlog, which includes a site ban—something only admins can do.

The community bans also include communities that aren't moderated by any instance admins, and some that are only moderated by a single person who likely isn't aware of actions taken under their community's name.

43 comments

Tankies want to talk a bunch of big shit. Then when you shut them down with a single comment they cry like babies and run for the mod buttons.
- This post is bait guys. Are we really just going to let this be our community.
  brigading ensues

Getting banned by tankies is a badge of honor
Wear it proudly
- It's more like a participation trophy IMO.

The community bans also include communities that aren’t moderated by any instance admins, and some that are only moderated by a single person who likely isn’t aware of actions taken under their community’s name.
FYI, any site bans will also automatically generate community bans for all local communities that user has ever interacted with.
It's simply the current behavior for site bans and not an admin going through communities to ban that user.
That doesn't mean the site ban is legitimate, just that the community-bans are inherent to any site-bans.
- Yeah this is becoming a real problem with tech communities being hosted on .ml which is way to sensitive about anything remotely close to common sense. I'm very careful not to post anything political on .ml and I'm 100% threading on a knifes edge if I ever say or post anything regarding news or politics there. I will get site banned for sure.
  instances apart from national ones should be more specialized to avoid this.
  
  I've just blocked them at this point, not worth my time
- That's kind of a weird way of doing it, but good to know thanks!
- Honestly it's not really a good way of doing it in my opinion, seems like it could potentially spam a lot of ban messages if a user interacted with a lot of communities. Would be better if they worked on federating site bans with every community, and also federating the message in the global modlog instead of mod banned user do mod banned user from lemmy.domain.tld or whatever the instance domain is. That way information is still communicated and you don't get problems with them being able to interact in communities on a server they were banned from. All while not spamming the modlog.
  
  Yea I'm not saying it's a great way to do this, but that's the lemmy way right now.
  I think it is meant as a workaround, maybe someone implements something better eventually.

This was not a common item in 1996 Russia, I think. In the 1990s, TV-based games weren't catching on in the East nearly as much because it was too difficult to create SECAM color video as opposed to NTSC or PAL. (This is part of why most of the East calls them "computer games", along with the rarity of non-computer consoles à la Pong or Magnavox Odyssey. The only ones I know to have been called "video games" were imported arcade cabinets in trailers that would travel from town to town. Known as "videoherna" (video game room) in Czech, they were rare and loved by "weirdos". I imagine they were quite lucrative for the handful of people skilled at smuggling and repairing monitors without original parts.) Lucky kids would play on IBM-compatible PCs or Game Boys, less lucky ones on Atari 8-bit computers, ZX Spectrum clones or this:

This game is Nu pogodi from the Elektronika IM series, a legendary toy in the Eastern Bloc. Manufactured in 1986-1993, it used a chip design stolen from the 1981 Game & Watch Egg game. They didn't even update the clock to 24 hours, the preferred format in Eastern countries.
In the US, the state will find you for illegally copying Nintendo games.
In Soviet Russia, you'll find that the state has been illegally copying Nintendo games all along!
- In the 1990s, TV-based games weren’t catching on in the East nearly as much because it was too difficult to create SECAM color video as opposed to NTSC or PAL.
  I'm really glad that the digital video era ended the standard fragmentation around the world.
  
  Now if only codec patents could fuck all the way off.
  
  PAL and SECAM could be converted from one to the other pretty much losslessly with a small (but appropriately expensive) piece of industrial-grade equipment, the difference is just the encoding of color into composite (and broadcasters would internally use RGB anyway).
  PAL/SECAM and NTSC were way more tricky as the number of lines (576/625 or 480/525) and refresh rate (25 or 29.97) differed. I think they first had to use film to skip/duplicate every 6th/5th frame and blur the lines; since the 1980s expensive and giant 2MB RAM frame buffers were available with logic that would dispatch missing/duplicate lines and fields accordingly. Today, every phone routinely scales and framebuffers video without batting an eye. Neither method is lossless though.
  Czechoslovakia's public TV switched from SECAM to PAL in circa 1991. Most old color TVs could have conversion kits installed; post-1985 ones like my family's Tesla Color 462 were already made future-proof by including rudimentary (non-phase-correcting) PAL decoders. Between cca 1995-2010, virtually all TVs had SCART inputs that fully supported RGBA, bidirectional (TV<->VCR) stereo audio and composite PAL, SECAM or NTSC video, as well as control signals such as aspect ratio. (Yes, late 1990s European CRT TVs don't need RGB or NTSC mods, they have it all! Just the cable and connector is bulky and falls out often because we hadn't figured out twisted differential pairs in the 1970s.)
  Still, TV here is broadcast at 25 f/s and 576i if in SD because of all the old content in that format. I'm furious YouTube never allowed 576i, scaling everything down to 480p with awful combing. But yeah, I'm glad we've settled on 1080p for modern content; frame rate conversion is less disruptive than scaling.
- I loved games like those as a kid.
- I had the original one!! Everyone dreamed of the Donkey Kong foldable one...
  Super boring BTW.
  
  My father had the Soviet clone, and it's still in the attic in a beat-up original box. It no longer works, the chip was killed presumably by static electricity when someone touched the battery contacts... Early CMOS was super fragile, even low-frequency circuits like this.
  Super boring BTW.
  This was probably the best affordable electronic toy in the USSR. They could have beaten this if they released a Tetris handheld but they didn't have enough R&D time before the regime crumbled; it would likely never get approved either.

Well, the community's rule is specifically not to make political jokes in the https://lemmy.ml/c/nonpolitical_memes subreddit.
So removing the comment seems acceptable. Banning like this is certainly ridiculous. On the other hand the modlog shows this user "Dasus" to be a serial troll, who got himself banned on many communities.

But noooo lemmy.ml is not a problem.....
- Blocking that instance improved my Lemmy experience dramatically.

Socialism to authoritarianism in 3… 2… 1…
- It's so quick and easy when you start at the authoritarianism part already

So does anyone know good leftist instances that aren't predominantly cantankerous tankies? Besides slrpnk, those guys seem cool.
- dbzer0 is a pretty good instance. Sadly, there are no good leftist instances other than slrpnk and dbzer0.
  
  Yeah I generally have decent experience with them as well.
- Slrpnk thinks that the only way forward is communism. I'd side step them too.
  
  It's my impression of solarpunk, as a general movement moreso than slrpnk specifically, is that the focus is more on local community mutualism than Soviet style central planning. I also think the only way forward is communism, I just think there are many intermediate steps necessary to get to stable communism on a national scale. Strong unions to worker co-ops to market socialism, and so on.
  My main ideological gripe with the tankie instances is the impatient insistence on skipping all those steps that build informed consent through a gradual raising of class consciousness in the proletariat, and going straight to a national scale revolution.

Painfully on brand

Man... I really wish Kbin was the one who took off instead. I know lots of people turned off by the fact that Lemmy has lots of suspicious folks like this.
- I really liked Kbin, it just kept breaking.
- Does it have mobile clients?
  Also they would just move to kbin
- Use mbin? It's the server I'm on.

Is the admin Spez by any chance?
- That would actually be funny

Lemmystan.

They seem to be banning anything anti Russia just based on your modlog, buy you also have a hard time following their rule2: be nice. So I can kinda see where they are comming from as well.
- Oh, I wasn't the one who was banned. I'm here to call out questionable use of moderation powers by the lemmy.ml admins. If the admin felt that the user violated instance rules, the recourse was to issue a site ban—which they did. Throwing in 20 community bans after that for the same time frame is petty and unnecessary.
  
  My bad. Iäm not saying that lemmy.ml is acting in bad faith, their Rule 2 looks very much like a catch-all for anything they do not like. But the user in question could have used better wording.
  20 community bans is indeed not warranted.
- Tbf, "Rule" 2 has an unwritten clause at the end, it's actually "Be nice, unless you're a tankie shill then you have the power of the mods/admins enabling you being a giant fistula to ~~liberals~~ anyone who disagrees with you in any thread."
  
  Yes, Rule2 look very much like a "agree or be banned"-rule.

43 comments