Fediverse @lemmy.world DefederateLemmyMl @feddit.nl 6mo ago

Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem

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/[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 hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

803

You're viewing a single thread.

803 comments

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.
- If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably wont’ be the last.
  
  Maybe we should open a thread on [email protected] about this
  
  TIL that community existed. thanks!
  
  What? I thought I pinged you there a while ago! Anyway, have a look, there should be some topics you might find interesting
  
  May have been my LW account? I mostly use it for my mod role, but I'll switch to it sometimes and browse all there to look for new communities I might like. Perhaps it was that account and I only interacted from there? (My memory is terrible these days 😆)
  
  I don't remember, you'll see a post with a lot of pings, one of your accounts should be there 😄
  
  Did you ping in the post body or comments? I learned a month or two ago from someone that mentions only generate a notification if they're in the comments.
  
  I made sure to ping in the comment for this reason. Actually now I'm curious, let me have a look
  
  I got the one you just sent, but it was after I had resolved the community locally (and subscribed). Perhaps the mentions don't work if they're to a community the other person's instance doesn't know about?
  
  To be honest I might have forgotten to ping you actually (maybe because you were less active for a bit and I basically mentioned people when I saw their posts in All?) but at least now it is solved!
- 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.
  
  I... don't think Kbin.social is going to make it. Even if it comes back, too much trust has been lost. Ernst should have stuck to just working on his coding project, not also administering his own instance, b/c that carries with it a certain level of "always-on" responsibility - e.g. I have unfortunately had to block Kbin.social lately, b/c nearly all (>>99%) of the spam that I currently see on the Fediverse was coming from the communities on it. Since I blocked it, I think I've seen like 1 single spam post for the past month.
  
  So Kbin.social is turning people away too, for different reasons.
  
  Mbin seems healthy though?:-)
  
  I want to use Mbin, but all Mbin instances are federated with tankie instances, including hexbear.
  
  And Mbin doesn't make it easy to see user/community instance.
  
  I gave up on the Kbin/Mbin style entirely - it sounds nice to Federate with both Lemmy and Mastodon, but I don't like the interface.
  
  Can you not do personal user instance blocks like you can in Lemmy as of v0.19.3 half a year ago? That would be an absolute deal breaker for me too. On Kbin.social though it was not an issue bc they were defederated at the instance level.
  
  Kbin, please come back to me
  
  I really want Kbin to succeed, but Ernest seems to see the project as something he checks on once every few months and then ignores, but he still seems to want to be the only one who gets to make decisions. I get that he has stuff going on in his life, but the solution to all these problem starts with communicating and working with the community, not disappearing for months at a time and refusing to work with the people who try to help him. You just can't have a successful project with an approach like that.
  
  That's why things have largely continued with mbin. Ernest couldn't do it, so someone else who could has taken over for him.
- Is it possible to see who is behind a mod action? I've figured something like world news on ml has some compromised fascist actors as mods but if it's the main creator doing this then that's crazy
  
  There's an instance level setting to hide moderator names from unauthenticated and/or non-mod users. They probably have that enabled. Those actions federate, though, so the mod names won't be hidden if viewed from an instance that doesn't hide the mod names.
- It should be noted that the (visibility of) community bans are a result of better enforcement of site bans in 0.19.4, which for now is implemented by sending out community bans for local communities when a user gets instance banned: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4464
  
  Prior to this, when a user got instance banned from .ml, they were also implicitly banned from .ml communities, but this was only known to the instance they were banned on. As a result, users were still able to post, comment, and vote on those communities, but it would be visible only on that user's instance, not federated anywhere else. Visibility of this ban was exclusively on the banning instance's modlog.
  
  fyi @[email protected]
- programming.dev has a lot of communities
  
  Is there a way to search for/browse communities on a single instance?
  
  I use https://lemmyverse.net/
  You can search for all communities of all instances, or click in a specific instance.
  
  https://lemmyverse.net/instance/programming.dev/communities
  
  You can in Tesseract, but AFAIK, that's the only UI that lets you browse remote instances. Otherwise, you gotta go to it directly, browse communities, and copy/paste the URL into your instance and search for it.
- Happy cakeday.
  
  Shit, so it is (depending on tiemzone) lol Thanks!
  
  It is actually tomorrow but there's a bug that causes the cake symbol to appear a day early in the default UI, because 2024 is a leap year.
  
  Haha thank you for the info, I have been quite confused about this. At first I thought it was because it was already tomorrow in Australia, but then I checked a world clock and it wasn't even close 😅
  
  Ah, gotcha. Without doing the math, I assumed it was basing it on UTC or something.

803 comments