this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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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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[–] psycho_driver@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think any censorship heavy instance doesn't deserve attention in the fediverse.

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[–] Rhoeri@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

If more people would just block that instance and it’s childish admins/mods, this wouldn’t be a problem. If people think it’s exaggerating to call out the clowns at .ml, I’d definitely urge you to look into the posts/comments the remove and their reasoning.

Most are violations of Rule 1 where there is clearly no violation.

Others are removed simply for being “liberal” or “blue MAGA” which neither are violations of any rule, and the latter is just a childish nonsensical insult. Which IS against the rules.

Having said this- it’s their instance and their community to do with as they please. If the freedom to disagree violates their emotional safe-space and hurts their feelings- then they don’t deserve your traffic and interaction. They have no intention to help grow lemmy, because it’s easy to see by their example that choir preaching only appeals to the choir.

Just block them and forget they exist.

[–] ThePyroPython@lemmy.world 14 points 5 months ago

And thus the inherent dichotomy of a decentralised social network is revealed: social networks require the network effect for good senses of communities which means one instance will end up hosting most of the bigger communities, therefore true decentralisation can't occur on Lemmy but it's a step in the right direction.

[–] poopsmith@lemmy.world 14 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Tbh this is one of the reasons why I'm looking forward toward Sublinks

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[–] MolochAlter@lemmy.world 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

I fucking hate tankies, but.

The problem i have, every time this conversation happens, is that cutting them out doesn't solve anything, and that I don't want to be coddled.

The 2 main issues we have, as lemmy at large, is that there are some wildly uneven standards enforced across instances and that we have no say about that. There was that hugbox instance that would ban people for being rude and yeeted itself into the void, there was hexbear that got de-federated for its mods actively encouraging being subversive (despite its users receiving intolerable psychic damage after 5 minutes in any lib space where people are free to call them names, or was that lemmygrad?) and now we're talking about removing lemmy.ml for the fact that its mods are somehow sentient pieces of actual shit.

And while I agree to all of those reasons, I don't think defederating is the answer.

Every time we fragment the fediverse we make it overall worse.

Average users don't even understand what they're looking at when it comes to decentralized networks, let alone can they understand that there's politicking between instances and such. If I were told "you can make an account on instance x or y, but they don't talk to eachother so if you want to see stuff on instance y you can't make an account on instance x" as a rando, I would go back to reddit, the only reason I didn't is that i really hate the app and I am tech/net savvy enough to handle this.


I am a tad more radical when it comes to speech than most, and I accept that, but I do believe that these people have no power so long as they can't abuse moderation, so the answer to the question "how do we handle open propagandists", to me, is to create perhaps a "moderation neutrality charter" and making it very clear which instances subscribe to it, having each instance's moderation team maybe be required to weigh in on appeals to bans from other instances to ensure a certain amount of balance.

That would take care of that real quick. They can subscribe to the charter and start abiding by neutral moderation standards agreed to across the board by some democratic standard, or they can defederate themselves.

That's actually something twitter does right with the idea of community notes, that for the note to be published it needs to be agreed on by multiple parties that don't usually agree in those votes, to ensure there is a bipartisan agreement.

I know this is perhaps too lofty for a ragtag group of essentially microblogging self-hosters, but a man can dream.

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