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.
Best to read it in their own words. That post really makes it clear how (in their own POV) other places should be linked to from hexbear solely for the purpose of making fun of them, and possibly to increase their engagement stats e.g. upvoting b/c otherwise it gets lonely just being on hexbear.net all by themselves. The only time they acknowledge the effects that THEY, the users on hexbear, have on OTHER communities is to state how fun it is to “[have the opportunity to] dunk on these lost [ones]”.
They are aware, and are even happy with how they are, and not only do they not mind being defederated, but they preemptively are defederating themselves from other places, as they said “As an admin team we have never wanted to prioritize growth”. They are an instance by and for people who enjoy making fun of others.
But don’t stop there: the comment section is where the real fun is at, and/or you can do the maths yourself too:-). e.g., they point out how the admins went to all the trouble to collect those votes, then threw them in the garbage and did the precise opposite of what the votes wanted and instead defederated anyway. Look at lemm.ee for instance at 41:4, that’s 91.1% for remaining federated and only 4 total votes, 8.9%, for defederation. aussie.zone was likewise 27 for vs. only 19 against, and programming.dev 27 for vs. 19 against - but they defederated from them all, despite how the (quite noticeable) majority of voters in each case indicated that they wanted them to remain federated.
In contrast, those other instances like programming.dev defederated from hexbear.net too, but only for purely technical reasons to avoid confusion by users not knowing the intricacies of how federation works - in their own words: “Weve added them to our blocklist as well so theres no one way conversations”.
TLDR: hexbear.net is not a “nice” place to visit - go there if you want, but like 4chan it’s not generally considered something that you want to stumble upon by accident, and it’s definitely not something that most people on the Fediverse want. I almost quit the Fediverse myself entirely after making the mistake of posting there, but fortunately for me v0.19.3 came out and I could instead simply block hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml and now I enjoy being here:-).
This is all so strange. I really appreciate the breakdown.
It sounds like they got the tyrannical administration they lust over in the politics related comments I’ve seen there so far, though! So, good for them!
Exactly - I’m 💯% okay with them living their best life, probably I shouldn’t be but I just am, so long as they don’t spill out and then infect others with their BS antics (which inevitably seems will happen when they are allowed to incubate like that, self- reinforcing that that behavior is “okay”).
But I am also concerned about new potential Fedizens - like is this a place that I can keep recommending to other human beings, or will they see that and just nope out? As I almost did myself bc all of it - lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and apparently the admins at least of lemmy.ml - it’s just so fucking much for a new person to take. Someone who is versed enough in Federation matters can deal with it, but for those who cannot yet distinguish between what makes us great and those sources of toxicity horrible, it all will blend together into a big grey bucket of suck.
As ironically the comments to that post on hexbear I linked said too - they (the ones who weren’t outright leaving as a result of that decision) were calling for stricter moderation practices bc they were aware that the lack of that was giving hexbear a bad name. And now here we are too, saying similarly at the next higher level up of the Fediverse itself as a whole.