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.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    Did that months ago; defederated completely when they turned into Lemmygrad-lite. At first I missed some more active FOSS communities, but since then, others on different instances have become more active. programming.dev has a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on .ml so maybe check out what they’ve got.

    If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else, nurture it, and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably won’t be the last.

    Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.

    Edit: Oh yeah. Didn’t recognize your username at first, but I was looking at the modlog the other day from my LW account, and saw a bunch of individual community bans from Dessalines and wondered what was up. Figured it was something exactly like this, and it was. Thanks for sharing.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.

      I had actually considered Lemmy before The Great Reddit Exodus. Lemmy.ml turned me off from that.

      Now we have Kbin (you can make it, my love!) and Lemmy.world, and I feel much better.

  • kbal@fedia.io
    0·
    1 year ago

    Rule 1: Crushing people with tanks is fine so long as it’s our side doing it.

    Literal fucking tankies. I wonder if they will ever come to their senses. Oh well, it’s not as if there aren’t Nazi instances somewhere on fedi as well.

    • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      A hexbear in that thread is literally claiming that “the soldiers did everything they could to avoid hurting him” when there’s a photo of him lying dead on the street after the tanks have gone through. They don’t think it’s fine, they’re saying it didn’t happen (curious)

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Was it actually him? I was under the impression that history did not relate what happened to him afterwards, nor who he was. That’s not to say the CCP did not murder a couple of thousand people during the crackdown regardless, because they did, but I have never seen a verifiable claim that a picture of any particular corpse actually was the Tank Man. There are numerous theories I’ve seen floated over the years alleging what may have happened to him afterwards ranging from him being caught and imprisoned, executed, living anonymously in China, or fleeing to Taiwan. All of them are unverified and, of course, mutually exclusive.

        The tank operators absolutely did attempt to (and succeeded at) avoid running him over. That much is plainly visible in the video. Whatever happened after the video ended is undocumented and pure conjecture. Plenty of well documented atrocities actually were committed that day, before and after that moment, so there’s not much sense in inventing new ones and bickering over details we haven’t actually got.

  • Socsa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    People are naive if they think the .ml admins and devs don’t intend to keep their thumb on the Lemmy scale. More instances need to take this threat seriously and defederate from .ml, and possibly even fork the Lemmy repos for when the devs inevitably decide they want to start building quiet exploits into the code. There are serious cyber security implications here that people are sleeping on

    • Skepticpunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Yep. Something needs to change if we want Lemmy to be something besides a place for Soviet simps to hide from criticism. Authoritarianism cannot be tolerated.

      • rah@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        if we want Lemmy to be something besides a place for Soviet simps to hide from criticism

        There is definitely a place for Soviet simps in the Fediverse, it’s just in a corner all by itself. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.

  • wahming@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      I got a ban for pointing out the nuclear strikes on Japan killed less than the conventional firebombing runs leading up to it, and if nukes wouldn’t have been used a shit ton more people would have died.

      Like, no opinion on if what was morally right or not, just what the numbers worked out.

      It’s all trolls over there, when a rational person makes a community, the admins start drama there and troll the mods till they leave or get kicked out for stupid shit.

      I just blocked the whole instance. I never see any of their posts now, and as an unintended bonus I don’t even get notifications when their users reply to my comments.

      Like, it would be best if we defederated from them and that hilariouschaos troll instance.

      But I can just block them, works the same.

      • Pili@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        the nuclear strikes on Japan killed less than the conventional firebombing runs leading up to it, and if nukes wouldn’t have been used a shit ton more people would have died.

        That’s an absolutely disgusting thing to say. Japan was already surrendering, they were only nuked as a show of strength.

        I’m not sure what you imply when you say that “a shit ton more people would have died”, but if you’re saying that the US should have napalm bombed an entire surrendering country just to make an example, I don’t think it makes your argument valid. It’s not ok to do something horrible, just because you could have done something even worse if you had wanted to.

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          Whether that alone is something to be banned over is probably context dependent, and I don’t have any faith that that instance had a good reason for it. Nevertheless that person holding up their great take about the nuclear bombs being good actually does not paint a great picture of them as a person. It makes them look like a reactionary US nationalist who wants to believe anything that makes their side the “good guys”. They can pretend it was morally neutral all they want, but morality is the only reason anybody argues something like that because it’s so nebulous the only way you get there is with motivated reasoning.

          At any rate I wouldn’t put that on the pile of reasons to hate on the .ml instances, not when there are so many good reasons.