Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
It’s a tankie shitshow that I’ve personally blocked because you can’t have unbiased discussions.
Their users are overwhelmingly shitposters or actually believe what they say, which is downright scary. Of all the users I’ve blocked, half of them are from there (the rest about 50:50 between lemmygrad and hexbear).
No pressure, but can you speak to some examples? Are we talking just intense “eat the rich” stuff, or “the gulags didn’t exist, and if they did they were a good thing” level.
Edit: And in your experience was it just individual discussions with users, or getting stuff removed by mods for obvious ideological reasons - and if so was it community-agnostic?
All of it, the “eat the rich” comments are a general leftist-trope that you find on all instances. It was really more like “Russia and China are doing everything right” comments that got a lot of negative feedback that the mods removed and stuff like this, and all across communities.
Often the discussions started rather harmlessly on something broadly political, then you’d have a bunch of people of the “fuck corporates” movement chiming in, and then it derailed real quick into an outright “blame the west for everything” bashing.