”Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. " - Karl Popper

We have tried to keep the intolerance of lemmy.ml in check through rational argument and public opinion. We have failed and we muat act to ensure lemmy remains a tolerant place.

They whole discussion came from someone getting banned from every single lemmy.ml community for posting a picture of tank man on the anniversary of Tiananmen square massacre on a relevant community. He then posted about this on .world where is was discovered that .ml is selectively federating rhe modlog.

I would classify the selective federation. Of the modlog as malicious as it means that .ml is performing moderation actions on posts and comments across the fediverse without federating it this is malicious and i would argue abuse of a bug (concerning considering that the bug or unintended behaviour is usefull for the people who wrote the code).

At this point the only way we can ensure security and prosperity across the fediverse is through the defederation of lemmy.ml by all major instances.

I was super into the idea of lemmy.ml and actually had some extensive conversations with them and with lemmygrad when I first joined Lemmy. I didn’t agree with them on practically anything, but whatever, it is fine. Then, lemmy.ml mods started deleting my comments when they decided that I was expressing the incorrect viewpoint and that viewpoint needed to be deleted to clear the way for the correct viewpoint. That’s kind of a red line for me in terms of whether or not I feel like fuckin with a particular instance, and I pretty much turned my back on it.

First of all, the complaints are not without substance. Some of their admin decisions are highly questionable and obviously politically motivated. However I think the idea of defederation is a huge overreaction.

What do people think about lemmy.ml?

They have always been left-aligned, despite officially being privacy/FOSS focused. This is largely due to the history of Lemmy, which was created by leftist developers and existed in relative obscurity for a couple of years prior to the reddit API exodus a year ago. They have received a good number of relatively apolitical users since the API exodus due to their branding, but many of those users eventually chose to leave to other servers.

Right now they are sitting right around 2.5k MAUs, same as us.

Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically?

I don’t believe it creates problems for Lemmy users, but I can see the argument for why it does. I think there’s a misconception that lemmy.ml is still the flagship instance or new users are being drawn to them, but I just don’t think that’s the case. People dont really recommend lemmy.ml to new users, because it’s already common knowledge about their political leanings. And they’ve never prioritized promotion of that instance on join-lemmy.org or anywhere else that I’m aware of. This is borne out by the data I just shared, which shows their share of the Lemmy userbase has steadily declined over time.

For sh.itjust.works specifically, I don’t agree that it’s creating problems for our users. Our server has literally grown in the garden planted by lemmy.ml users. We are less dependent on lemmy.ml today than ever before, and now is when people decide they want to defederate? That seems really lame and somehow duplicitous.

I think to the extent that there are problems with the lemmy.ml userbase, they have come more recently after hexbear got defederated from most of the fediverse. I think some long time users on hexbear and lemmygrad who got a taste of the wider fediverse decided to move over to lemmy.ml so they could keep pushing their ideology. That’s not ideal but I don’t think defederation of the whole server is a proper response to a handful of hexbear trolls up to their old tricks.

For me personally as an admin, I can confidently say that I don’t feel like lemmy.ml users have been disproportionately involved in bad behavior or trolling. I’ve removed my fair share of hostile comments in political arguments, but no more offensive or combative than stuff I see from our own users, lemmy.world, lemm.ee, or any big server. I haven’t seen them brigading communities or threads, aside from the ones located on their own server, which is obviously fine.

In terms of their admins, I have to acknowledge that they sometimes make mistakes with moderation. But moderation on Lemmy is also a really difficult task. One important factor is that they host a disproportionate number of communities and especially political communities. Here on SJW, our most active communities tend to be fairly non-controversial. I cannot imagine the moderation burden for active political communities such as those hosted on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, and I’m thankful they’re doing it instead of us.

TLDR Lemmy.ml is basically alright with me, aside from some minor annoyances. I think it’s kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them. But that’s just my personal opinion, I will of course abide by the wishes of my fellow sh.it.heads.

It’s a tankie shitshow that I’ve personally blocked because you can’t have unbiased discussions.

Their users are overwhelmingly shitposters or actually believe what they say, which is downright scary. Of all the users I’ve blocked, half of them are from there (the rest about 50:50 between lemmygrad and hexbear).

Hexbear is a instance run by tankies that spread their shit ideology and quash any dissent where they have the power to do so. Lemmy.ml is the exact same, except it’s much bigger and run by the Lemmy devs. I don’t think they should get a pass, and I think that Lemmy will become tankie Voat if this is allowed to continue indefinitely.

I came here because Reddit was being run by corporate scum that only cared about profits, and they crossed too many lines. I thought I could get a new start away from all the mod/admin abuse. I’m starting to realize that basically every instance’s and community’s admins abuse their powers to push their agenda, whether it’s political or trying to maximize membership, to the detriment of their larger userbase.

I don’t think this is a winning fight, even if LML is effectively quarantined, but I’d like to buy time by mass-defederating them.

Hello,

Any reason to not include the thread that started it all, and has documented abuse from lemmy.ml admins? https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058

Also, if people want to avoid lemmy.ml communities, here is a thread that discusses alternatives: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20431762

At minimum the .ml admins have shown a desire and willingness to keep their finger on the scale of the broader fediverse, which makes them a clear existential threat and possibly even a cyber security risk. In addition, they protect hexbear and lemmygrad, which openly state that their intention is to wage information warfare on the fediverse. We also see some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them some special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content. This alone is extremely concerning. The idea that we can individually block their instance does nothing to mitigate the ideological or security concerns I have.

My personal experience is that they protect propagandists and do not enforce their own rules evenly at all. My bans have been for me extremely petty things, and even for thing I have said on other instances. Meanwhile I have been called names, told that my family deserves to be tortured and that my country deserves to be nuked by .ml users (or hexbear proxies). I also find their defense of Russian and Chinese autocracy personally offensive, as I have family who have been directly impacted by both. It would be one thing if this was happening in a forum where these issues could be debated, or defenses mounted against misinformation and historical revisionism, but that is simply not the case. Even the most modest pushback against these ideas results in quick bans. This is not something we should associate with.

I definitely think the problems lie with a certain set of individuals within the base, as opposed to the instance as a whole, but it’s a pretty sizable amount. It mostly comes off as a moderate annoyance to me, and not enough to warrant blocking the whole instance, much less defederation.

I will say, however, that the problems seem to be becoming more prevalent. It’s a really annoying situation, as .ml has some of the more popular communities, including the largest meme community, and it would suck to lose those. But at the same time, I’m starting to get really tired of the auth-left bootlicking and one-sided moderation.

It’s no hexbear, not by a long-shot, but it’s definitely becoming an issue.

Personally, I blocked .ml already. Yes, they are a large instance with a lot of legitimate content, but theres such a disproportionate amount of extremism, hate and discrimination, and toxicity that I didn’t find it worth being connected to.

The one hand, it’s important to explore the conversational landscape in order to enrich one’s perspective. I am always interested in calm, composed, respectful discussion of even controversial topics.

On the other hand, echo chambers aren’t really valuable to that end, and lemmy.ml is edging up past that threshold. I feel as if engagement with lemmy.ml users is, more frequently than not, typified by emotional antagonism out of the gate, and only becomes more accusatory and divisive as time goes on.

I had hoped, after all the hexbear nastiness, that lemmy.ml might emerge as the more rational and respectful leftist space. I consider myself a leftist, and I enjoy engaging in polite and nuanced leftist political discussions. But the prevailing sentiment that I personally encounter is the sort of strawman nonsense you’d expect from bad faith actors trying to fracture leftists.

I’m no mod, certainly no admin. I just like having interesting conversations with people on the Internet. I can’t speak directly to censorship or specific logistical problems with Lemmy as a whole, or sh.itjust.works specifically.

All I can say is that I find conversations with lemmy.ml users to be petty and exhausting more often than not, and the writing is on the wall in multiple other instances. This seems like a band-aid rip moment on lemmy at large.

Learning the ml is a shitty place for news and politics is a right of passage for using lemmy. Defederation isn’t the answer, at least not until they do something more than ban people who disagree with them.

I don’t believe that defederation is necessary nor wise. The complaints about Lemmy.ml that I’ve seen have generally revolved around how they moderate their instance and how communities they host are moderated. If one doesn’t like how they moderate their communities, then one should be the change that they wish to see — start a replacement community, nurture it, and try to make it better than what was seen on lemmy.ml. This is the beauty of the fediverse — you aren’t forced to utilize anything on any other instance. And if one really dislikes seeing lemmy.ml users, then they can even block the instance themself. Lemmy.ml provides a steady, and considerable amount of traffic and content to the Lemmyverse. While that isn’t an argument for continuing to use their communities, it is an argument for why it would be unwise to fragment the network by defederating from them.

The only time that an instance should consider defederating from another, imo, is if it finds that users from other instances are violating the local rules at a rate higher than what is possible, or economically viable to handle via administrative action. It shouldn’t be a simple matter of passive difference in opinion.

This was my only meaningful personal interaction with lemmy.ml that stands out. It was not a good experience. It became very clear, very fast that I would simply have no meaningful discussion with these people. So I left some downvotes on the awful comments promoting violence and stopped engaging.

I haven’t blocked the instance or any users. But i am considering it.

Just chiming in to say a lot of communities I participate in are hosted on ml, I’d be pretty bummed losing access to those. For that reason I’m against wholesale defederarion. I do think the communities need to explicitly diversify away from the instance though, ml admins seem demonstrably untrustworthy.

First of all, lemmy.world admins do have history of overreacting (e.g. with piracy & shroom) . So I don’t think we should base our decision on theirs.

I have heard of lemmy.ml users being an issue at some point in the past, but it seem to have settled.

I personally don’t have any issue with lemmy.ml; maybe in the past, but I cannot seem to recall any. What I do know is there are active communities there (Linux comes in mind) and we’d lose all that if we defederate.