Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem - Lemmy.World
lemmy.world
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.

https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

Lemmy.ml, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, has consistently been accused of improper Federation practices and many instances have decided to ban one or both of the latter by default, with many individual users having already gone further to block the former as well. However, many individual users on lemmy.ml seem unaware of the accusations of the practices of their admins, and some people go so far as to see lemmy.ml as a sort of default instance on the Fediverse.

This discussion promotes wider knowledge of the situation and what might be done about it in the future, in order to e.g. not turn away new potential Federation members (Fedizens?:-) that could otherwise associate what happens on that instance as something relating to the Fediverse as a whole.

  • Blaze@reddthat.comEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago
    • lemm.ee is the second most active instance and avoids joining Lemmy.world which is already too big
    • reddthat.com is cool if you don’t want downvotes
    • sh.itjust.works works, if you don’t mind the name
    • if you are based in Europe, discuss.tchncs.de is very well managed (they have other services at https://tchncs.de/)
    • if you are based in North America, lemmy.ca is nice

    That’s pretty much it.

    For the transfer of communities, there is a tab in the user settings to export your settings (including subscriptions) to a JSON file. You can then import it to your new account.

      • Blaze@reddthat.comEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        Dbzer0 is great, but I always assume people interesting in it will find it out. The list above is about “general instances”

    • OpenStars@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      For people that want an instance-level block for the Big 3 Axis powers - hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and Lemmy.ml - are you aware of anything that could be recommended?

      I also went through all the top ones at https://lemmyverse.net/ and very few to nothing is defederated from lemmy.ml (though yffit is defederated by Lemmy.ml…:-P).

      Kbin.social might have been, but I’m not certain and it’s been down for several days. Possibly an Mbin one could be but that also has enormous implications for apps chosen and the interface in general.

      So what I’m trying to think of is a Lemmy instance to recommend to people, even irl to consider joining the Fediverse, bc otherwise I’m hesitant to recommend us at this point, given all the absolute shit that I would be exposing them too by default, until they learn how to block stuff. It’s similar to Linux then in that unless I walk them through setting up an account and curating their experience, it’s too overwhelming and they will just give up. For whatever reason, we collectively have decided that we are okay with this really terrible situation that heavy curation is mandatory… even as we also claim that we want the Fediverse to grow.