Asking as there has been a few comments mentioning this with the new !stardewvalley@lemm.ee taking over !stardewvalley@lemmy.ml
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com for additional context on those recent events if you are interested
Also, an older post for more context on how lemmy.ml is managed: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
Curious to hear other thoughts about this, as I’m trying to keep !simracing@lemmy.ml active, but might suggest to move it elsewhere if a lot of people prefer not to interact with lemmy.ml communities
I definitely try to avoid it. Whenever there’s an (active) alternative community available, I prefer that.
I see more content complaining about .ml than I see content on .ml worth complaining about.
I generally don’t block instances, communities, or users, either. I just know I am capable of recognizing a shit take on politics anywhere and can move on without existential or social crisis.
That’s bc you are an established user who knows their way around how to use Lemmy. Perhaps you even use Arch btw? (/s, but only partway, bc those of who enjoy the customizability of Linux really are a breed apart from the mainstream, in terms of our value judgements in particular)
However new users to Lemmy find it very off-putting. Also, people in the USA are touchy, watching our democracy crumble before our very eyes - there is something like a 50% chance that it won’t survive even though the next year, regardless of who wins, but if it does, then we’ll simply repeat all of this again in the next one, and so on. So for those of us who watched e.g. Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook, to now see those identical patterns of behaviors on display (by “tankies” or whoever), is more than a little disconcerting.
And tbf, the likes of lemmy.ml is nothing at all on the scale of Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net. So if you want to remain federated with some or all of those, then power to you and I am very glad that you can enjoy your time on the Fediverse.
However, not all of us are in the same boat and some of us would rather only see the half of the conversation that we don’t have to mentally parse and decode what it means before we throw it away. Without having to block hundreds of individual trolls I mean. Ofc we are prevented from doing so since user level defederation does not exist, and the only instance I’ve ever even so much as heard of that blocks all of the big 3 is Lemmy.cafe. So rather than wait for Sublinks/PieFed/Mbin to improve, perhaps I should move there?
Maybe this is all intellectual laziness? I dunno, I truly don’t, but also I don’t see the harm in allowing people to have their preferences met?
some of us would rather only see the half of the conversation
Well I guess the only thing I could possibly say to that woul–
Hehe, way to be a part of the chang–
I only block communities. I don’t want to see half of conversations, and haven’t encountered a whole server where they refuse to admin properly.
I just know I am capable of recognizing a shit take on politics anywhere
Not when the “shit take” in question is the arbitrary, capricious, unjustified removal of thoughtful, insightful, accurate, reasonable posts and comments. You (generally) can’t recognize the “shit take” of removing good content unless you spend all day reading the mod logs.
No, but I can almost always check the modlog when a user complains about how their thoughtful, insightful, accurate, and reasonable post or comment was arbitrarily, capriciously, and unjustly removed.
And that comparison rarely disappoints.
No, but I can almost always check the modlog
whenif a user complainsFTFY.
The authors of thoughtful, insightful, accurate, and reasonable posts and comments tend to be the kind of people who choose their battles, and quietly walk away from communities led by power-tripping dipshits.
Very well articulated!:-)
Yep. Even if it’s larger, I’ll post in a smaller, non-ml. I don’t mind reading their stuff and them existing but with the seemingly random moderation shenanigans, I avoid it.
The path to inner peace.
Why midwest.social? I definitely agree with the rest though.
Similar “moderation” practices as done on lemmy.ml, but unlike the latter, the users of Midwest.social themselves seem mostly well-behaved rather than toxic edgelords. Note that not all of the Lemmy.ml users are that way, and I might even believe that most are not, but conversely whenever I see the most batshit insane comments, it is always from one of the big 3: lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and to a lesser but still extremely notable degree, Lemmy.ml.
https://lemmy.world/post/18414833
https://lemmy.world/post/19849559
etc.
Usual tankie nonsense masquerading as progressivism.
Call out their bullshit, get a ban.
I haven’t seen that on midwest.social yet, but I’m definitely gonna continue to observe this and then decide if it’s worth blocking them
What’s wrong with lemmy.ml?
As someone on .ml I really don’t think it’s that bad. Definitely left, and generally pro-China, but not too extreme imo. Hexbear is pretty bad. I’m a socialist and I disagree with a lot of the stuff there. But .ml is very much not a true “tankie” instance, in my opinion.
A lot of the issues people have with .ml are the practices of the admins.
Though also when hexbear.net was defederated from so many instances, a lot of those users switched to using their Lemmy.ml alts - many are quite open about this fact - and just continued posting as they had done previously, despite that style being the very reason why hexbear.net had been defederated from.
And when more instances - like lemmy.cafe - start defederating from Lemmy.ml, then those users will surely switch to alts on something like lemmy.world or Lemm.ee that are generally considered too large to be defederated from.
A lot of innocent users get caught up in the cross hairs of this fight between tankies vs. anti-tankies. People using your instance as a platform to attack (e.g. brigade and otherwise spew forth toxicity) other instances, yet possibly behaving normally else wise inside the instance itself.
Also, whether something is “extreme” or not depends on someone’s background context, and I would definitely say that the content on lemmy.ml is considered somewhat extreme for someone on America. Even/especially those who even consider themselves as “liberal”, not realizing yet what little that means on the international stage. The content is nowhere close to being as extreme as that from lemmygrad.ml or hexbear.net, but far more so than e.g. Reddit or Mastodon.
So I hope I have adequately conveyed that it’s not your fault in any way, you also expanding to mean all the other innocent users on lemmy.ml, but I wanted to convey that yes, I would defederate myself from your instance in a heartbeat if given half the chance. Possibly you won’t even mind:-), but you seemed interested, so I hope I helped by writing all this out.
Also, whether something is “extreme” or not depends on someone’s background context, and I would definitely say that the content on lemmy.ml is considered somewhat extreme for someone on America.
Weirdly, I find a lot of the content on America-centric sources (not just in Lemmy) to be pretty damned extreme myself. Like the casual assumption that guns are the right way to deal with all problems. (Slightly exaggerated, yes, but sadly only slightly.)
Sigh… yup. Much of that has been traced back and shown to not have originated from inside the USA, but it does not matter how it started bc it’s endemic now. And regardless of the rhetoric the news itself is pretty violent, with all the reporting of mass shootings - you know, bc they actually happened, except most of the time the for-profit news media doesn’t bother anymore, and instead prefers to sell something sexier than all the needless deaths of children.
But you can’t wake someone up if they refuse to come into the door in the first place - that is what I meant about labeling content to make it more acceptable to a mainstream audience, so as to boost subscriber counts and thereby increase the overall health of the Fediverse. Being okay with stagnation seems unwise to me, bc it predicates a fall.
Oh yeah, and it makes total sense. The brigading, insofar as it happens, really shouldn’t. But also, as someone who espouses left wing views, I always want to give critical support to left spaces - even if they’re imperfect. And .ml and even hexbear have a lot of valuable discourse - I comment on hexbear threads regularly with less radical points of view than their users often have, and I get good responses and engagement usually because I’m good faith.
I thought I was left-wing myself, then realized that I may as well be a right-wing nut compared to global standards!:-D
But it takes time for people to learn and change. Mainstream people in the USA may still have valuable contributions to make here, like funny cartoons for us all to laugh at, and thus I decry how they are pushed away due to the extremist content on the Fediverse.
After watching Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook, I just cannot listen to hexbears anymore. Those attempts to bully people in just about every conversation with “tactics” other than relying on the logical truths of the issues themselves just really turns me away.
Be careful - your circumstances surely differ from mine, with like your family and job and such - but I note that they are far more likely to change you than the reverse. It’s just how that works.
deleted by creator
US Democrat members get upset that the instance with 1600 users doesn’t agree with their opinions
This is literally it. I hear so much hate towards .ml that I find it hard dtobelieve they are fanatics lol
I found this in like 30 seconds yesterday: https://lemmy.ml/post/21605430.
Not that the content isn’t true, mind you, but it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to constantly make fun of capitalism and the USA, then wonder why people in capitalist nations and especially the USA don’t want to come hang out there. (Hey, only we can say the bad stuff about ourselves, ya’know!?:-P)
I never pay attention to, or care about where a community is hosted
No. I think .ml is becoming some kind of bogey man. At the end of the day I think any instance is gonna have its own slant and bias; which isn’t a problem for me, personally.
I block politics subs and have never had an issue with lemmy.ml. All the issues I see are related to politics.
I prefer to support smaller instances, but don’t have a problem with lemmy.ml specifically (whereas I do sometimes go out of my way to avoid lemmy.world)
No, there are no instances whose communities I refuse to participate on. I have never blocked a community, user, or instance here.
*Besides the ones your instance has defederated from
Me too but clearly Lemmy.ml doesn’t like me xD
This is something that that bothers me… I joined lemmy.ml around 3 years ago as one of the pirate subs on reddit made a backup community there in case they were banned.
Fast forward to the api debacle, I started to use lemmy as a permanent alternative, and made 3 of my favourite art communities- abstract photography, collage and printmaking
It’s always been in the back (and sometimes the front of my mind) whether to move them elsewhere, partly because people commenting on their ‘blanket ban’ of lemmy.ml, and the fact that I sometimes feel that I’m on one of the ‘pariah’ instances.
It’s interesting reading the comments here, especially considering the art communities are laid back, without politics, and haven’t had any issues (so far)…
Moving communities is always an option.
We moved !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee a while ago, it worked fine, it’s even more active now that it used to be as there is no delay due to LW size
Yep, it’s something that has occurred to me, I’ve got an idea of which instance and all that, but I’d probably need to speak with the admins. I don’t know whether communities can migrate over posts/comments etc and part of me is reluctant to leave all that behind… BUT, I’ve done it once from scratch, so it’s not impossible
For me it was a blanket ban that finally caused me to unsubscribe from every ml community. If it wasn’t for that then it might be OK to keep hosting a non-political sub but the censorship over there is so aggressive and widespread that it’s very difficult to avoid.
I would say think about migration because if anything the problem is getting worse over time.
If the conversation is civil I’ll comment occasionally, but i don’t think I’d care if my instance defederated from them. They’re where a lot of tech related conversations are, sadly.
Tbh the bigger instances need to bite the bullet and defederate from .ml. There are alternatives to all the good comms on .ml, they just aren’t as active. Defederating would move a lot of users onto the alternatives and get some control back from the terrible .ml mods and admins.
Banning people from multiple completely unrelated comms for something that happened in one comm is bullshit and they abuse the hell out of that. I generally try not to participate in any .ml comm because of that.
But a lot of users on a lot of instances do not want to defederate, and thereby lose their communities that they want to receive content from, e.g. Firefox@lemmy.ml. First such communities need to be migrated, or at least new alternatives made, and then the barrier to walking away will be lower. Progress is being made though, even if only slowly:-).
Well, I’m here and I don’t know what you all are talking about. And this is sincere, truly don’t understand what’s the issue, could you point me to some of these controversial situations/discussions/measures?
I have a feeling that, if you ask for any specific instance, you’ll get people complaining and blocking that instance for their own reasons. So, I’d let my users decide whether they block or not a user or a whole instance. For example, I don’t like some of the communities in lemmy.world and I complain about it because it just feels the same as being in reddit, but having access to a different point of view is very valuable to me, so I don’t block them.
I also have to add that I use lemmy with the voting system completely disabled. I hate the voting system because it shapes people’s opinions to fit in some specific communities. This is why I think blocking instances should only be used as a last resort against things like blatant spam, boycotting, CP, hate speech and the likes.
.ml is kind of Hexbear or Lemmygrad-lite. On occasion when they notice, they’ll ban you for criticising places like North Korea. I got it once for saying Dengism isn’t socialist.
I still use it, because it’s mostly normal, and “we’re secretly the bad guys” isn’t a very dangerous conspiracy theory.
https://lemmy.ml/post/21552785?scrollToComments=true
As mentioned in the OP: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
Ah, I see. Well, I had a discussion in that thread too and it felt off at some point. I replied about a similar crime backed by the CIA and some people accused me of whataboutism, while the other guy assumed I was denying the Tiananmen Square massacre. That was not the case.
I used to participate in a subreddit where a permanent set of people, including moderators, would downvote you to oblivion as soon as they read a divergent opinion, though, the subreddit wasn’t about a specific ideology. It wasn’t about arguments, it was systemic. They would eventually ban you if you insisted on your points of view. Both things are shitty, in my opinion, and while one is more permanent than the other, the banning felt at least more straightforward to me.
What I find excessive is the instance ban.
Not all instances should defederate from lemmy.ml. However, it is an issue that everyone commenting on every post across every community on that whole entire instance must essentially conform to all of their ideals - or else be banned from all of those communities, not merely the one with the “offensive” statement. You cannot say anything truthful about Russia, China, Ukraine, Uyghurs, Taiwan, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, etc.
Imagine if we were on Reddit and could not say “fuck spez”, or we were on Linux but for some reason were still forbidden to say “I prefer not to use Windows today, so thank you but no thanks”. Those communities on Lemmy.ml are held hostage to people if not agreeing then at least going along with whatever party line BS that the admins want to uphold. Moreover, at any time they could add whatever their wanted to that list.
Perhaps there will come out a fantastic Linux distro that would revolutionize Linux accessibility - but if they say no, then nobody can access any of the communities there unless they (at the very least tacitly) agree to not so much as mention its name, or that it exists, or anything else about it. This is a hypothetical but I hope you also see the connection to irl: it doesn’t matter what those admins are banning people for, it matters that they have set themselves up as the arbiters of “truth(iness)”, and decide what can or cannot be discussed in their platform. Regardless of which community it is in.
Most of us came here to get away from such, only to find that it is here as well.
Do as you please, but I hope this helps explain just some (and this probably isn’t even fully half of it yet!?!?) of why people are judging the instance. Over time, more and more communities will move off of the instance - the main reason it hasn’t happened yet I think is that version 0.19.3 (iirc?) promised to allow user blocking, which people see now how weak it is plus with 0.19.4-5 it actively got even weaker. Only defederation is left to even consider. Which won’t happen quickly, but e.g. dubvee.org and lemmy.cafe both have already done so, and I imagine others will follow suit before too awfully long, with the amount of vehemence people feel about the situation.
This was pretty informative, thank you. As I said, these instance-bans are just too much, so I mostly agree with your point of view. Would like to read what these admins have to say about the situation.
They have said things like they ban “agitators” and “misinformation”. They do not provide a listing of what those things are. I recall one story from someone who has actual Uyghur family members living with them and they were describing the genocidal practices that they escaped from - BAM, banned.
Facts are political these days, I suppose. Most people don’t get to choose which set of facts they have to live out, day by day.
But obviously the admins are not insane - from their POV, they are doing the rational thing, of protecting their userbase from “misinformation”. Well, keep your ears open I suppose, and you’ll learn more. Hopefully you don’t get banned yourself as a result, but you may want to have a backup plan just in case.
Curious to hear other thoughts about this, as I’m trying to keep !simracing@lemmy.ml active, but might suggest to move it elsewhere if a lot of people prefer not to interact with lemmy.ml communities
I would vote for moving it elsewhere. Maybe lemmy.zip would be a good instance that’s focused around tech and gaming. Or discuss.tchncs.de because !trucksim@discuss.tchncs.de and !diysimulators@discuss.tchncs.de are already hosted there.
You are a very active poster here, so moving it to that instance would also be convenient in case you need to mod
Also, that instance is very well managed, always impressed with the other services they offer.
Based on the comments, it seems like we should definitely suggest this. Would you like to make a meta post or do I do it?
I’m busy this weekend. Feel free to go ahead with the post.
Done!
I’ve blocked the instance entirely. I never see posts from their communities, though I am surprised to still see users from it. I thought it would block everything.
Pasting from another comment in this thread:
The only way I know how to ditch the users, besides blocking each one individually, would be to make a new account on either dubvee.org or Lemmy.cafe where all 3 of the big 3 are completely defederated. Think of those instances as troll-blockers, working hard to keep the Fediverse pleasant to converse in:-).
lol
Dubvee is even worse than .ml for the censorship stuff. The admin banned a ton of people that never even knew of its existence until we all got spammed by his automod bot duplicating the instance wide ban to each and every individual community.
What!? How is that even possible…? Are you sure this was dubvee.org and not the Santabot, or are you saying this is the guy that did that? Bc I remember the Santabot and railed hard against it, but I think the Admiral Patrick guy just preemptively defederated from lemmy.ml, which wouldn’t send out a notification (I would hope) to literally everyone on that instance? That would be… shit, no bueno.
Another place that spams people with modlog entries is lemmy.ml itself - the admins there ban someone from every single community across the entire instance, even ones that they have never heard of.
Hey, can you send me a message to read more about the dubvee.org situation? I was just starting to seriously consider joining it, and over the last hour have recommended it to several people since it is one of only two total instances that has dared to defederate entirely from lemmy.ml. If the situation is insane then I should not do that, but what you are describing sounds awfully familiar, twice over even, yet with different causes, so I wonder if one of those is the explanation. At least, I am quite interested to learn more!?:-)
