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.
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Thanks for calling this out. I will stop posting content to lemmy.ml. What is the next best alternative to lemmy.world? I have nothing against lemmy.world, but would like to spread out content to different sites.
Sad to see. Feels like Lemmy has no bright future with people in charge of it thinking russia’s and China’s government is good and ban difference of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs.
I’ve been banned from .ml for being a ‘racist’ for being anti-Xi, despite the fact that I am Chinese, and pointed out my ethnicity as such in the discussion. I guess antisemitic Jews aren’t the only weird accusation getting thrown about nowadays.
Hmmm… I just got here so I haven’t seen it in action, but if true, far left mods abusing their power to censor and ban people they disagree with? Where have I Redd it before?
That’s a con and a pro of decentralized net: if you don’t like the owner, pick another instance or create your own and be the king. Bad news is, every instance is controlled by couple regular folks who’re not responsible financially so they can imply their own rules and post and ban whatever they want.
Like the jungle: you gotta learn to survive and avoid the monkeys with rabies.
Sorry you stumbled into the wrong instance. Fortunately, other instances already offer alternative communities that are more active and moderated differently.
This could have been avoided if the UI included a warning about communities with problems. Like how PieFed does: https://piefed.social/post/89659
As you say OP, the solution here is to use the fediverse model as intended and use different instances/communities. It sucks because it fragments the community, but that’s the way it is. I’ve long held the opinion that I’m grateful to the lemmy developers for building this whole thing that we all get to enjoy, but their approach to administering an instance is reprehensible and actively damaging to the relatively free and open exchange of ideas that should happen on the fediverse.
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You don’t see even a bit of hypocrisy in that? Holy shit…
I have exactly the same complaint about lemmy.world - it’s censuring everything that doesn’t align with leftist views (and on the other hand, when I post on lemmy.ml it’s usually not deleted).
Oh I know, I know, let me guess, they are censoring people because they are evil and authoritarian and are bad people, but you are censuring people because you are all democratic and for freedom and so on and anyway the ones that get censored are tankies and fascists and russian bots/propagandists?..
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2355607-our-blessed-homeland-their-barbarous-wastesYou just made me realize that I have been banned from some of the communities over there while never having posted on them, mods are reading conversations in other communities and preemptively banning people…
Chinese honey pot
Happened to me with an even bigger instance because of an asshole admin making shit up. A solution might be to divide up the host of the user comments versus the moderator agents versus receiver of the comments. If your host bans you, that’s it, but if the receiver bans you, that only affects their users, and if a moderator agent group bans you, that only bans you from their distribution group of moderator agents but could be read by other groups.
If a community / group-of-moderator-agents-under-a-community-tag-for-a-particular-host bans you, you’d have to find another groups of moderator agents or accept all that are allowed by your host. Accepting all allowed by your host could only realistically exclude the worst offenders - spammers, doxxers, etc - so you’d really be incentivized to find a better block of moderator agents if you want to avoid certain types of comments, and people who want to live in a bubble could live in a bubble but people who want to prioritize the greatest participation would try to find the most lenient host and the most lenient moderation agents at least to their particular sensitivities.
It would be a truer federated model, but this is not lemmy as it is.
I think all instances need to defederate. This is totally inexcusable. We shouldn’t be attached and well connected to a CCP-controlled (influenced or directly) community. This is propaganda, pure and simple.
It’s not a problem to have dissenting opinions to widely held beliefs, but it is a problem to have those injected constantly into our streams while all opposition is silently erased and curated to artifically support state-sponsored CCP propaganda.
Lemmy.world heavily censors criticism of israel over at /politics and /news
.ml is far less tankie than .world.
Everyone should defederate from .ml, and most have already got rid of hexbear and lemmygrad.
It’s an absolute shit show of an instance, and the rest of us don’t want to be subject to their nonsense.
I just wish the instance block prevented me from seeing their users as well.
