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 [http://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
[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
[https://lemmy.ml/modlog] of the instance looks like:
[https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/6886b092-43d3-408b-ab57-2fa686f8a6c7.png]
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 [http://lemmy.ml] that I had ever
participated in. Proof:
[https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/9c52e470-645f-46ba-ac1d-0b7d8be17af3.png] 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 [http://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]
[/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 [http://lemmy.ml] hosted communities in favor of
communities on more reasonable instances.
Ah yes… So much criticism there… Totally allowing outside viewpoints! No overzealous modding happening here! the entire comments of the linked thread is all pro-china going, with many outright claiming that tiananmen square didn’t happen or were a creation of western media.
The other thread named the same thing (cross-post) completely deleted. Notice that “delete” or “removed” isn’t in the modlog. Exactly as OP has stated that admins are doing on some instances.
This is the primary reason I have my own instance. Power tripping mods and admins cannot remove content from my server. I can view all the comments I like WITHOUT the interference of those people. Make my own choices rather than having them made for me.
And yet, I’ve been banned from lemmy.ml for saying, verbatim
“Because being critical of a Russian company = racism. At least according to lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml users.” in response to someone else asking why “how is not liking Kaspersky, in and of itself, racist or xenophobic?”. So much “Xenophobia” packed into my answer right? Considering that ban was handed out by dessalines himself. I’m going to have to agree with your “Many times you will find Tankies” statement, and that’s because nearly the whole of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml are all tankies.
So you painted all if lemmy.ml as a tankie fest and got banned. Just like I stated.
Be glad that it’s not for criticizing israel like /news and /politics on .world does. And if you point it out on those instances your comment also gets removed and you get banned.
And as I said. You will have tankies with insane takes. Those usually come from Lemmygrad or Hexbear. .ml is mostly lefties and just a few tankies in the mix. But the people I see getting banned from .ml are not banned for content but the presentation of said content.
I was literally followed around by a moderator of lemmy.ml who was screaming at me tankie shit. There’s nothing nuanced there. I noticed you ignored the fact that the thread got locked and deleted though. Not sure how you can continue to defend it when shown that your own example is actually a counterexample.
[email protected] Here’s a moderator on lemmy.ml on a couple large communities. Scroll through and you’ll find ACTUALLY xenophobic remarks. You’ll find hate speech, you’ll find ALL of it. But because it’s pro-china, it’s okay. When you endorse moderators like this on your instance, you’re a tankie instance.
I’ll criticize Israel too if it’s warranted in the conversation. I’ve yet to be banned from any other instance other than lemmy.ml
Lemmy.World sounds like another conversation worth having. Feel free to assemble your references and post that as well - probably somewhere other than Lemmy.World:-). I for one don’t know enough about it.
Also, the linked OP wasn’t merely about sth along the lines of “Lemmy.ml being tankies” (anyone at all who is on the Fediverse is surely a tankie according to some, like conservatives on Truth Social:-P), it was rather more about abusive moderation practices. It sounds like you think you have a strong case to make against Lemmy.World similarly, but definitely find as solid proof as you can to prove it to others who will refuse to spend anywhere close to as much time on it as you have & will.
Still further, the linked OP wasn’t even just about abusive practices, but by ones that look deceptive, by virtue of hiding (not necessarily intentionally, fwiw) them in the database edits, and being done by instance admins rather than just mods of the communities. If your case against Lemmy.World is rather about the latter, that greatly reduces its overall applicability to the Fediverse, though in that case you would want to appeal to the admins to remove those mods? (unless they are the same people?)
Worst of all, this issue with Lemmy.ml was eminently solvable: there are other instances that people can shift over to, which instantly solves it for them. But finding mods of such a high-profile and contentious community among our still fairly small user community base… may prove difficult. Especially when those people may receive literal death threats. So I am saying: you might not get as strong a response as you hope, having little to do with the content, and more to do with the psychology of people not wanting to put in actual effort to solve problems. Even so, your conscience will rest easy b/c you told people. And you may need to tell them again months later.
Lastly, I hope it is obvious that Lemmy.World doing bad things in no way shape or form excuses Lemmy.ml from doing far worse things. Especially if you didn’t even get banned, but merely censored. Not that that makes it alright, just that the vehemence of the linked OP made the situation much more noticeably obvious, whereas a more subtle pattern of discrimination may be harder to prove?