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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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.devhas a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on.mlso 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
mlbeing 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 !fedigrow@lemm.ee 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
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.
programming.devhas a lot of communitiesIs 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.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.
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.
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.
Ah, gotcha. Without doing the math, I assumed it was basing it on UTC or something.
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 😅
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.
Imo, when tankies get that bad, they might as well be nazis.
Crushing people with tanks
Just a heads up, while it is established that the CCCP killed tons of people on that day, the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia and mostly considered inaccurate news reporting.
The famous “tank man” photo shows a guy standing in front of a tank in order to prevent them from moving tanks to another part where the protesters had gone. We have no evidence that he was driven over by that tank.
Those “academics” are wrong.
We know this because there are photos of bodies and bicycles smeared into a paste [Source. Warning Blood/Gore].
And because people who were there literally said that’s what happened:
"The shooting was going on and people were still running to try and block the tanks, which were travelling at high speed, some positioning buses in the road. But the tanks crushed the buses and people, they didn’t care. People’s bodies were merged, moulded to their bicycles. They were flat.” [Source: Shao Jiang to The Mirror]
The CCP has desperately tried to cleanse the most brutal images and interviews of the massacre from the Internet, but even 30 years on they can’t completely scrub it clean. There’s a reason The Pillar of Shame monument is designed as it is.
the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia
There are photos of people clearly crushed by tanks?
No but the red paste is most likely explained by the tanks that were verifiably there. They could have crushed people with other machinery but they had tanks.
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.
I don’t think any of this is even real to them. The same way that a majority of the white-nationalist 4-channers are just roleplaying and losing themselves in the storylines, as a species we tend to do that, we just get lost in a narrative because it explains how we feel.
The tankies are doing the same exact thing. They’re not impacting policy, they’re not marching for anything, they’re not taken seriously and it’s just another in-club that has its own language and imagery and secret handshakes and a unifying message to rally behind (America bad!) and instead of turning that criticism into actionable plans for changing representation and making anything better, they put on WW2 Russian Tanker helmets and have erotic fantasies about a communist uprising that will never happen.
Children.
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.
More people were killed in the firebombing.
The theory that more people would have died of the nukes weren’t dropped is FAR from settled fact. The Japanese were already looking to surrender and it’s not likely the bomb played a big part in that decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki?wprov=sfla1
Regardless it’s nothing to get banned over, that’s for sure.
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.
I honestly disagree that blocking works the same. Social media relies on a network effect, and if they keep being allowed to operate popular communities then they will have that network effect in their favour, and new users that don’t know any better will keep joining.
Defederation is an important tool to turn certain instances into pariahs for bad behaviour, and individual blocks don’t achieve that.
This is a lot of the problem with gen z, especially among the left. Everyone is quick to smash the block button, which in aggregate just makes everything worse for everyone else.
It’s not a generational problem, it’s a platform problem. It’s a disempowered person problem. Generations are mostly made up anyway.
Hitting the block button is fine to deal with harrassment, it just doesn’t solve the wider issue.
I think zoomers are far more prone to refusing to engage with things that make them uncomfortable than previous generations.
And just because something isn’t clear cut doesn’t make it imaginary. It’s a useful but fuzzy categorization.
Well I’d be fascinated to see how you arrive at that conclusion but until then I’m going to have to disagree on the basic principle that the generalisations people make about generations are usually pretty useless.
If you truly don’t see any difference between Boomers, Gen X, and Millenials then I think our views of reality are so wildly different we might not be able to have any sort of communication.
Explain?
When you block someone you cede the conversation to them. When lots of people block someone, fewer people push back against their bullshit. Because the people most able to push back against it no longer see it.
So you make them invisible to yourself, but not to others.
Like, no opinion on if what was morally right or not, just what the numbers worked out.
I don’t want to get in the merit of the comment, but unless you see the future, this statement is simply not true. Your argument is simply based on accepting certain assumptions as true.
Coincidentally this argument is routinely used by people supporting american atrocities, who consider nuking hundreds of thousands of people the humanitarian solution to WWII.
To be clear, I don’t agree with that line of moderation, I don’t agree with most of the views that seem to characterize .ml, but it’s a year that people make posts like this one, you can’t tell me you don’t understand the ban based on the above.
I suggest you learn about history before you form opinions on what happened
History is about what happened. “Otherwise it would” is speculation.
And even after the nuclear bombs, there was an attempted coup to stop surrender.
Prior to the bombs, there was no chance of surrender.
That is history.
And where is the count of deaths in the different timeline?
Look, my point is simple: human history is not deterministic and we simply can’t know what happens tomorrow like if we were predicting the laws of phisics. Maybe there were other 100 different course of actions leading to as many outcomes.
You can analyze what happened, but it’s foolish to say “this was better because the alternative would have led to”. You can only analyze and discuss what happened, otherwise anything can be justified with “it wouldn’t have been worse”.
“this genocide was good, because without it the oppressed population would have led to civil war and many more deaths”.
You think the nuclear bombs were a genocide?
Seriously, who “taught” you this stuff?
I am genuinely curious where people presented all of this stuff you’re saying as history.
Like, it’s almost like the only thing you know about civilian deaths in WW2 was American dropped nukes.
There’s sooooo much that you’re missing. But unless you dropped out of school at a very young age, I can’t be the first person that tries to explain this to you
So where are your opinions coming from?
Is this a thing where you learned everything you know about a subject from YouTube videos?
If so…
Why?
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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.
And I’ve been censored (not yet banned, but I guess it won’t take long till that as well) on lemmy.world (and beehaw) for spreading “misinformation” about Ukraine, despite being a Ukrainian and actually reading (and sharing) the local news of what’s actually happening there, contrary to the government propaganda.
You claim Zelensky is illegitimate and authoritarian for not holding elections in the middle of a fight for the country’s survival. The logic there is hilariously bad. Setting aside the absolute waste of resources, the last thing any country needs in such a scenario is for their leaders to start campaigning over who’s going to take control. It’s not the time and place for it. If you want to blame anybody, blame Russia
Right, so basically it’s okay for countries to be authoritarian, it’s okay to slaughter thousands of people and making everybody else live in constant fear, as long as the government aligns itself with the west.
Why would I blame Russia? It’s not Russia, it’s not Putin who is kidnapping people of the streets in Ukraine and sends them to die. It’s Zelensky’s regime.Very cool and humanitarian and obviously I don’t agree with that. But out of curiosity - can you please explain to me why is North Korea different?
It is also officially still in a state of a war with South Korea. Does it mean Kim Jong Un is suddenly also a hero that leads his country against the enemy? It doesn’t matter that people are trapped there, it doesn’t matter that people may not support him, all the atrocities committed by him do not matter as well, because they are in a war, am I right?Because South Korea is not actively trying to wipe out NK from existence, but actually the opposite is trying to reach out to NK and stabilise relations. ‘War’ is a hilarious way to describe their status. Way to strawman the argument.
but actually the opposite is trying to reach out to NK and stabilise relations
That’s just super fucking ironic, considering that Russia never stopped saying that they are open to negotiations (and the very first peace deal was actually they they go back to before-2022-invasion borders) and it is Zelensky who always refuses to negotiate and instead sends more Ukrainians to die.
Oh you mean the deal where they tried to make their seizure of Crimea legitimate?
Ok, this is reaching russian troll levels of disinformation. I think it’s clear enough to any 3rd parties just why you’re getting your comments deleted.
Oh you mean the deal where they tried to make their seizure of Crimea legitimate?
This has already happened, and is going to stay that way, whether you or I or anybody else likes it or not…
So it woudn’t have changed anything, except, you know, such a tiny little details as hundreds of thousands of lives.
Who kills the Ukranians that are being send to die?
Russia.
Now, I answered your question, would you please be so kind to answer mine now, which is also quite simple?
If there are two men, man A is simply operating a meat grinder while man B kidnaps people from the streets (soon he will start breaking into people’s homes as well), forcefully pushes them into the meat grinder, and watches to make sure they can’t get out of it, he also makes sure nobody leaves the city so that he can continue his game, who do you blame more for deaths of people in the meat grinder?
The man who operates the meat grinder? The man who started the business of shoving people into a grinder??? An everadvancing grinder? Jesus. At least get your metaphor right
The man who operates the meat grinder? The man who started the business of shoving people into a grinder???
Those are two different people though.
As a marxist, I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism. And I don’t even understand how people can stay with “Stalin was not so bad”, knowing that he never planned to apply the last state of the Communist theory, and even if it did, massacre are not acceptable (sounds obvious), same applying with China and their open market.
In my country (France), Stalinism isn’t a thing, all communists are against what happend in USSR, and most are anti-china.As others have said, the only option available currently is to leave the instance and re-create your beloved communities elsewhere. The Lemmy.ml Admins also happen to be the ones actively developing the Lemmy code base, and they’re not gonna change because they feel entitled to do whatever they want, and technically, they can because they run the instance.
My best advice is to move on from the instance.
If you want to get away from the Lemmy codebase entirely I can vouch that mBin works quite nicely. I’ve been on fedia.io for months now and only once or twice hit some kind of technical problem, which was resolved quickly.
MBIN FTW. KBIN has been “We are working on resolving the issues” for some days now. I hope Ernest is ok.
I have a login for lemmy.ml, as I have several from when I was switching over from Reddit. I’m thinking from what I’m reading here, that it’s not an instance I want to associate with.
Yeah, nothing against Ernest but developing and running kbin is just too big to be a one-man show.
Dude’s a superhero, and needn’t be a ‘lone ranger’. Agreed. As the Fediverse expands, it will be the work of many; it just has to be that way.
Are there mobile apps yet? Because if no that’s one huge advantage Lemmy still has over Kbin/Mbin, and it’s why I switched to Lemmy when Artemis started having issues (it went down completely since) instead of going back to Kbin.
Oh, cool. That one flew completely under my radar. I’ll have to check it out when I have time.
Don’t forget about piefed it’s amazing and lets you subscribe to posts and/or comments. Theres someone who contributed Lemmy API compatibility to use some Lemmy apps with Piefed instances. Its still very early but so far its extremely promising and the codebase is in python and the main developer is focused on ensuring it wasy to contribute. Check it out: https://piefed.social
Code is on codeberg which is great too https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi
Agree and just to add to this: the official list of mbin instances
Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.
Lemmy.ml also has the funny quirk that it doesnt have a proper legal imprint or team list afaik. So we don’t have actual transparent information on who is on that instances admin team and who is not. Iirc only one of dessalines and nutomic is on that admin team anymore.
This Dessalines?
Creeping the admin logs to find out who dared down vote him.
Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.
I hardly see what that would accomplish if we could.
I guess some mod actions could be considered accidents or mistakes instead of bad actors. A transparent system would have a flow to allow the user to contact and get such a mistake rectified, or report a wrongful mod action to an admin.
But if the admin is a problem, then that needs more figuring out how to get one removed.
the only one who can remove an admin is a more senior admin, and they can already see behind the “mod” alias.
your point seems moot
People keep bringing up that because of the devs history with that instance, “surely it is the Lemmy devs themselves who are doing this”. Which hurts Lemmy’s reputation overall.
Actions have consequences
Thanks for spreading the word. We get these complaints every few weeks. More people need to be educated and move away from these instances to make the Threadiverse a better place.
What the fuck is the threadiverse. This is the Fediverse. Threads has added nothing and has no place here.
Threadiverse is just a general term to refer to the parts of the Fediverse that behaves like forums (cause forums have threads). It has nothing to do with threads.net.
thread as in threaded posts as opposed to other parts of the fediverse with another layout. it’s not about the instance Threads, but the type of fediverse service allowing a lemmy/kbin type of conversation.
They speak like a bot. Zuckerberg sending miles to infiltrate?
Are you referring to me or BigFig? I’m neither a mile (I’m European, so we use the metric system), nor a mole. If you make me choose an animal, I’d like to be an alpaca. And I’d be willing to do a captcha to prove to you that I’m not a bot.
Are you new here? “Threadiverse” has been used to refer to thread-based fediverse technologies that use threaded comments since before Zuck’s “threads” was even announced!
I’ve only really heard Fediverse. I don’t really get into the meta discussions on here though. I’m also getting hyper sensitive to chatters that sound like bots. They mentioned “we”, but it doesn’t look like they’re a mod or admin, so I thought it was a bot using some PR speak from the dataset.
Thanks for shedding light on this! I will do my part and no longer post in communities tied to lemmy.ml!
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.
Not only do they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology, they often do it in such a way that it is untraceable by other mods. I’m not sure how they accomplish that, nor is the admin who messaged me letting me know that it was happening and he couldn’t figure out how. Anyways, my solution has been to completely block that instance, and delete my account there. If they want to exist in a little untruthful echo chamber, then so be it, but I don’t need to be a part of it. I recommend you do the same thing.
I’m not sure how they accomplish that
If they have database access, which they would have being the admins, they can do anything.
Their mod actions usually do federate out, but their outgoing federation is a bit borked right now with some instances, perhaps due to the recent upgrade to Lemmy 0.19.4-rc.6. I believe they are at least aware of it now, though they have been basically non-responsive to the issue so far.
So it seems they do indeed clean up the modlog… my bans are still in there, but all mod actions where they removed China critical comments are no longer there.
they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology
That is EXACTLY what is done on lemmy.world.
Nice, didn’t know there was a possibility to see deleted comments, thanks :) (not every deleted comment is there though, but enough to show the total hypocrisy of lemmy.world)
https://beehaw.org/modlog?page=1&userId=4130334
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&userId=1782109
It gets difficult to find them sometimes, depending on who removed it and from where. If a moderator, from the community, removed it then the removal reason could have originated from where the community is located at, whereas if an administrator of an instance removed it then it would be elsewhere.
For all that the lemmy.ml admins enjoy going on sprees of mass-removals, it sure would be nice if they would add to the code a way to see the reasons for removal linked to directly from the comment itself.
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Oh yeah, that’s the other one, thx!
I did not even get a notification for that comment why it was deleted, but now I see, and sure enough - it’s misinformation (despite providing 5 or 6 links to sources in a comment below, including reputable western (!!) media and tens/hundreds of footages…). 🤷♂️
Whenever this topic comes up, I find myself wondering what these folks do all day. Not in a Boomer “don’t these people have jobs?!?” way, but more … what is it like to be them? Do they just sit in front of the computer looking for conversations to disrupt? What is their daily existence? Because I find their volume and dedication to what they do fascinating. Cancerous and absurd, but also fascinating.
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’m all for defederating from tankie instances. They suck.
Unfortunately, lemmy.ml is run by lemmy’s actual developers and will likely remain one of the most popular instances. Best thing to do is block the instance and host new communities on other instances.
That kind of makes me a bit more skeptical of Lemmy as a whole if I’m being honest. Not necessarily the instance owners, but the system as a whole.
LW is already much more active than lemmy.ml (18k monthly active users vs 2.5k: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), so the system is working, people have left for a less politically biased instance
Good. Is development of Lemmy still controlled by tankies?
Yep
They were openly discouraging people to sign up on .ml already a year ago (I remember a banner to register elsewhere). I don’t think “anything” in particular is working. The devs seem not to care less for having the biggest instance, or communities there etc. They had the instance long before most of Lemmy users joined, after all.
less politically biased
There’s no such thing as “less politically biased”, it’s just that you don’t perceive the things that align with the center of the overton window as political.
We all have to wrestle with those ethics ourselves, but fwiw most of us have come down to the idea that writing code is one thing whereas administering an instance is something else altogether. People are working on other implementations of the ActivityPub protocol e.g. Kbin, its community fork Mbin, and things like sublinks that doesn’t fully exist yet.
Yeah, I’ve been eyeing kbin/mbin for a bit, which can actually federate with lemmy.
👌
I’m staring at the front page of lemmy.ml and I’m trying to find what’s got people so worked up. It seems fairly simple to not go into a prolonged rant about how much you hate China when the content is just silly imgr memes.
I mean, by all means, block it if you don’t like the content. But why are you obsessed with the modlogs of an instance you blocked?
Lemmy.ml is a cancer on the Fediverse. If we want it to survive, we need to cut it off.
On your Lemmy instance, go to Settings -> Blocks and just block the entire instance. That’s what I did.
Doesn’t block their users though, only their communities.
I’m honestly fine with that, because outside of their home server, they cannot rely on their mods to protect them from arguments they don’t want to hear.
You’re fine with a murderous authoritarian government spreading disinformation where you socialize?
I’m fine with it as long as I don’t have to debate them on THEIR terms.
Go ahead and “debate” the CCP, enjoy.
Like I said, fine with me as long as it’s on neutral ground and they can’t just have an admin delete some of my arguments because they don’t like them.
Tankies warming up to call you and Lemmy.World fascists in 3, 2, 1…
