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.

  • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    815·
    5 months ago

    The solution is… to abandon the notion that there’s some special utopia where we might reside.

    There’s an idea that we all need to find or build some special platform which is going to be a home for all our communities and be transparent and balanced and free from corporate influence and perpetually shiny and awesome. It’s not only unachievable but probably not desirable either.

    Instead, embrace the reality that the communities we want to engage with will be in different places on different platforms and each will have different issues.

    There’s some niche communities on reddit, and yes that platform is run by a corporation but that doesn’t bother me when I’m only there to find a new recipe for snack that matches my diet requirements. I despise facebook but I do use their marketplace to sell junk my wife buys online. I’m aware of the privacy issues with telegram but that’s where I have a family chat group with my sisters. I recently discovered an XMPP channel about DIY bike maintenance which has been amazingly helpful, but I don’t like the XMPP clients I’ve tried. The forum on a torrent tracker I use is a great place to find new books to read but I need to use a VPN to access it.

    My point is, the best part of the modern web is the disparate platforms we have available. Every platform has it’s own character, and caveats to be mindful of.

    The kind of censorship you’re talking about is obviously repugnant, but the reality is that it’s just something to keep in mind when participating in lemmy.ml communities. You can refuse to participate there if you wish, but a mass-exodus on that basis just isn’t how things should work in 2024.

    • wahming@lemmy.worldEnglish
      131·
      5 months ago

      mass-exodus on that basis just isn’t how things should work in 2024.

      Why not? You’ve made an assertion without any reason backing it up.

      Nobody’s suggesting a mass exodus to a single lemmy server, but rather just a dispersal from .ml to the rest of the fediverse. There’s no reason it can’t or shouldn’t happen.

        • wahming@lemmy.worldEnglish
          91·
          5 months ago

          I’ve read it multiple times. None of it quite addresses why we can’t just move communities away from .ml en masse. From the votes I’m not the only one having trouble discerning your point.

          • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            410·
            5 months ago

            Good lord. If you think lemmy votes are an indicator of solid reasoning I don’t know what to tell you.

            Communities aren’t going to move away from lemmy.ml because no one cares enough about this issue.

            You can dream that that’s how communities ought to work but they just don’t.

            • wahming@lemmy.worldEnglish
              4·
              5 months ago

              So your wall of text boiled down to ‘we can, but we won’t because nobody cares’. That’s pretty different from ‘that’s not how things should work in 2024’.

              You can dream that that’s how communities ought to work but they just don’t.

              Ironically, that’s how most of us ended up here on lemmy, we as a community decided to move off reddit.