Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem - Lemmy.World
lemmy.world
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 [http://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 [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 [https://lemmy.ml/modlog] of the instance looks like: [https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/6886b092-43d3-408b-ab57-2fa686f8a6c7.png] 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 [http://lemmy.ml] that I had ever participated in. Proof: [https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/9c52e470-645f-46ba-ac1d-0b7d8be17af3.png] 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 [http://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/[email protected] [/c/[email protected]] 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 [http://lemmy.ml] hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

Lemmy.ml, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, has consistently been accused of improper Federation practices and many instances have decided to ban one or both of the latter by default, with many individual users having already gone further to block the former as well. However, many individual users on lemmy.ml seem unaware of the accusations of the practices of their admins, and some people go so far as to see lemmy.ml as a sort of default instance on the Fediverse.

This discussion promotes wider knowledge of the situation and what might be done about it in the future, in order to e.g. not turn away new potential Federation members (Fedizens?:-) that could otherwise associate what happens on that instance as something relating to the Fediverse as a whole.

  • OpenStars@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    Lemmy.World sounds like another conversation worth having. Feel free to assemble your references and post that as well - probably somewhere other than Lemmy.World:-). I for one don’t know enough about it.

    Also, the linked OP wasn’t merely about sth along the lines of “Lemmy.ml being tankies” (anyone at all who is on the Fediverse is surely a tankie according to some, like conservatives on Truth Social:-P), it was rather more about abusive moderation practices. It sounds like you think you have a strong case to make against Lemmy.World similarly, but definitely find as solid proof as you can to prove it to others who will refuse to spend anywhere close to as much time on it as you have & will.

    Still further, the linked OP wasn’t even just about abusive practices, but by ones that look deceptive, by virtue of hiding (not necessarily intentionally, fwiw) them in the database edits, and being done by instance admins rather than just mods of the communities. If your case against Lemmy.World is rather about the latter, that greatly reduces its overall applicability to the Fediverse, though in that case you would want to appeal to the admins to remove those mods? (unless they are the same people?)

    Worst of all, this issue with Lemmy.ml was eminently solvable: there are other instances that people can shift over to, which instantly solves it for them. But finding mods of such a high-profile and contentious community among our still fairly small user community base… may prove difficult. Especially when those people may receive literal death threats. So I am saying: you might not get as strong a response as you hope, having little to do with the content, and more to do with the psychology of people not wanting to put in actual effort to solve problems. Even so, your conscience will rest easy b/c you told people. And you may need to tell them again months later.

    Lastly, I hope it is obvious that Lemmy.World doing bad things in no way shape or form excuses Lemmy.ml from doing far worse things. Especially if you didn’t even get banned, but merely censored. Not that that makes it alright, just that the vehemence of the linked OP made the situation much more noticeably obvious, whereas a more subtle pattern of discrimination may be harder to prove?