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Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem

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 “archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://…/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:

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 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, 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] 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.

SkyezOpen ,

No, we want EVERYONE to feel welcome.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f875b0d5-b30e-470f-8a7d-3b665bdf7418.jpeg

pyre , (edited )

wait, so if someone is a Nazi, you want us to be respectful of them too? you’re falling into the tolerance paradox again. “EVERYONE” here shouldn’t really include the intolerant. if the intolerant feel welcome in a space, that space quickly becomes inhospitable to anyone who isn’t.

edit: yeah i misread the image and the intent of the comment. apologies.

SkyezOpen ,

I feel like you’re not understanding the image

Aux ,

Tankies are modding many communities here as well. The solution is to fight them tooth and nail.

Mastengwe ,

Oh they are all over the politics communities. Both as mods and as trolls.

Katana314 ,

I am one of the removed comments and just found out about it here. Does the Lemmy standard really not send direct messages to users when one of their messages was removed? If it was an actual Rule 1 violation (which of course, it wasn’t) I’d like to know.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

There is no “lemmy standard”. There is ActivityPub though. Lemmy could maybe implement something to send an ActivityPub message when something is removed but this has not been done yet. I think there is an issue for it on GitHub though?

Microw ,

Yes there is an open issue on Github for moderation notifications (Get notified when you’ve been banned, your post has been removed, etc): https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4572

fine_sandy_bottom ,

Mods will never tell you that you’ve been moderated.

Mods are generally fieflords exercising their mediocre powers for kicks. It wouldn’t be much fun if they had to have a discussion with all of the poors about why they’ve been censored.

Katana314 ,

Might be time to pull a “body cam policy” and take the fun out of moderating.

fine_sandy_bottom ,

meh. I don’t think anyone is that interested.

SorteKanin , (edited )
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Not all mods are like that, for the record. I’d even say it’s the minority of mods that are like that (at least on the Fediverse - on reddit, I’m not so sure).

fine_sandy_bottom ,

Disagree.

In my experience ist the vast majority of mods on any platform. Lemmy has some of the worst in my experience.

Zeroxxx ,

Yep. When the power shifts to user (as opposed to Reddit’s corp power) it gives more freedom for abuse since there’s no longer centralized control

Power trip is one of the biggest issue – ‘THIS IS MY INSTANCE NOW BEGONE YOU INFIDELS!’

Kecessa ,

And that’s an issue with the instance system, losing access to tons of communities you have no problem in because you happened to piss off the instance’s admin in a community they frequent? That’s completely ridiculous.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Saying anything negative about China is a violation of rule 1 on lemmy.ml from the admins perspective. They classify anything critical that gains any attention as Sinophobia and file it under bigotry.

Lianodel ,

It honestly reminds me of fascists saying that harsh criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. It’s a dishonest rhetorical game.

Churbleyimyam ,

If their community mods ban enough people, won’t they eventually no longer have the biggest communities?

laughterlaughter ,

In theory, yes. In practice, not necessarily.

Churbleyimyam ,

Pourquoi?

laughterlaughter , (edited )

No, come to think of it, you’re right. I was thinking of communities that ban people in droves, but they still have a lot of members.

But the keyword in your comment is “enough.” So, yup, again in theory, if they ban 99% of the whole Fediverse, they won’t be the biggest community in it.

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

Tankies gonna tank. Just block their shit instance and move on with your life.

wahming ,

The issue at hand is there are way too many neutral / unrelated communities which are resident on .ml, and it’d be nice if we could manage to move some of them off.

TachyonTele ,

You can. Create a new community and tell the most active people in the original about it. Once everyone posts in the new comm you’re done.

It’s not like it hasn’t been done before.

wahming ,

Well yes, that’s what this entire post is about. My comment is just replying to OP that it’s a little bit more than ‘block and move on’.

AmosBurton_ThatGuy ,
@AmosBurton_ThatGuy@lemmy.ca avatar

Ten forward is a good example, the big posters in c/risa got fed up with the mods and made ten forward on Lemmy.world. Now I almost never see risa anymore but ten forward is always on the front page.

TachyonTele ,

That was exactly the comm I had in mind!

GreatDong3000 ,

This is the fediverse and that is their instance. You just move to another instance and mute them if you are desatisfied with them.

Buddahriffic ,

Or post about it and build a case for defederating from them or more users to block them individually.

figaro ,

Exactly. Why are we federated with people who deny genocides? Fuck all of that

LunarSpaceDani ,

Exactly, not only did I block LML over this but I vote for defederating with them from my home instance.

figaro ,

I’m all for defederating from tankie instances. They suck.

vga ,

Yes, we should all recognize that Lemmy.ml is a tankie instance.

yamanii ,
@yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

Reread OP

mightyfoolish ,

There’s no need to defederate from Lemmy.ml. I rarely see their content on the front page of Lemmy.world. The other day someone complained that Lemmy.ml users were brigading a different thread. I counted three users with a ml domain…

We have different admins and mods, everything is working as intended. The issue is people bringing up tankies, communists, and China every three posts. Yes, we get it, the benevolent people who wrote us this software are communists. They allow us to have different mods and admins, there is no problem here.

Honestly, I wouldn’t post to /c/[email protected] even though I’m happy with how pro-Palestine those people are. The only community I look at Lemmy.ml is /c/[email protected]. It’s not their fault no one posts to the Lemmy.world instance.

I think it’s time to start banning users who troll other instances and cross pollinate the fediverse with drama.

taipan ,
@taipan@lemmy.world avatar

It is lemmy.ml’s fault that their moderators have been blocking users who criticize China or Russia from unrelated communities like the Linux one. A user’s ability to participate in a Linux community should not depend on them refraining from posting criticism about China or Russia. Defederation protects lemmy.world users from having to self-censor themselves politically to participate in general interest communities.

mightyfoolish ,

A user’s ability to participate in a Linux community should not depend on them refraining from posting criticism about China or Russia.

I agree 100% with this statement. That’s not enough of a reason to defederate in my opinion. We need a better /c/Linux on our instance. It’s just that Lemmy.ml has more FOSS lovers.

figaro ,

Defederating sends a message that the world doesn’t like tankie bullshit

mightyfoolish ,

Hating their opinion is not a reason to defederate. Legitimate reasons are general harrasment (stalking specific individuals), racism, bigotry, CP, derailing entire threads (not just disagreement on a comment), etc.

figaro ,

Is genocide denial not racism?

mightyfoolish ,

Yes, it is. Which genocide are they denying? Is it the Uyghurs?

cloudless ,

For people who want to avoid all content from lemmy.ml, including posts and comments:

I use lemmy.cafe now because it has defederated with lemmy.ml.

As a lemmy.cafe user, I don’t see any post/comment from lemmy.ml users at all.

Communities on lemmy.cafe are invisible to lemmy.ml users, so I would recommend creating more communities there.

mal3oon ,

I’m half retarded, any videos explaining the structure of Lemmy? No idea the difference between .ml and .cafe, is it supposed to be different subreddits? Or different websites?

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

Hello,

Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.cafe are like Gmail and Outlook, different services that can still send email to each other in a normal configuration.

Except here Lemmy.cafe decided to block Lemmy.ml. Using Lemmy.cafe you can still interact with for instance lemmy.world communities and users for instance

cloudless ,

Not video, but I will try to explain it in a simple way:

Lemmy instances are individual websites that run the Lemmy software. These instances are operated by different people or organizations and can have their own unique topics, rules, and communities.

Lemmy instances federate using the ActivityPub protocol. This protocol allows different servers, or instances, to communicate and share data such as posts, comments, and community interactions.

Different instances use the same software, but are managed by different admins.

For more detail about the admin of lemmy.ml, please refer to this post: lemmy.world/post/16239454

Schadrach ,

The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to email.

You know how you might have a gmail address, your friend might have a protonmail address and your parents might still have their old aol email address? But you can all still freely talk to each other anyways?

Lemmy is like doing that, but for something like Reddit. If you notice, usernames have an @servername on the end and just like an email address that’s the server that person is connecting through. For example, I’m [email protected].

Which means I log in to lemmy.sdf.org and use their servers to read Lemmy, but I can read, post and comment on communities on any other Lemmy server that is federated with lemmy.sdf.org just like they’re on lemmy.sdf.org just like you can send an email to someone using a different email service and it makes no difference on your end.

Communities work the same way - so for example [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] are all different communities hosted on different servers with their own separate posts, subscribers, mods etc. And users on any Lemmy server federated with the server that community is on can read, comment, post, etc (mod action notwithstanding).

This federation thing I keep mentioning is just which servers are willing to talk to which other servers - again you can compare to email. Sometimes email servers pop up to send massive amounts of spam, and when they do mail providers blacklist them and simply ignore all messages from that source. Defederating is the same idea. You use lemmy.world according to your username, so if lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml then you will no longer be able to see any communities @lemmy.ml or read any posts or comments posted by someone @lemmy.ml - to you it will be like lemmy.ml just doesn’t exist.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link labeled “Instances”, which will give you a list of which servers lemmy.world talks to and which ones they’ve specifically blocked. Lemmy.world has a pretty long list of blocked instances.

One of the reasons I picked SDF’s lemmy instance was because they don’t block **any **instances - as far as SDF is concerned it’s up to the end user what they want to see. Also SDF is kinda a cool entity - they’re a non-profit best known for maintaining public access unix servers and a bunch of retrocomputing stuff (like dial up internet and a gopher server) that has been around since 1987 (the name is literally an old anime reference because they started out as an anime BBS).

pyre ,

do you mean i have to make a new account? or is there a way to “move” basically?

ProdigalFrog ,

You will need to create a new account, but it is possible to export all of your subscriptions to a new account. There should be a thing you can click for that in your settings menu to download the export file, which you would then import into your new account.

Your old comments will not transfer, however.

ryathal ,

I think some mobile apps have functionality to essentially move your subscription list.

hellofriend ,

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, …

So what you’re essentially saying is that these moderators are effectively propagandists/state actors for China, Russia, and so on. I left Reddit to get away from psychic attacks like that, so I’m perfectly happy to defed from the instance. Glad I have the option, too.

barsquid ,

Defederation is a good step but I think it blocks only posts and leaves you still able to see user comments on other instances.

cloudless ,

My account is on lemmy.cafe which has defederated from lemmy.ml

I never see any comment from lemmy.ml users.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@startrek.website avatar

You are talking about user-level blocking, whereas iirc defederation is an instance-level blocking that also stops user comments too, as well as votes.

Crashumbc ,

Side question, how do you retrieve or see “removed” comments? I get some removed and I’m not sure what they were…

barsquid ,

lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=1082…

SpaceCadet OP ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

Yeah the modlog is where you can normally see them. Mind you they seem to selectively purge the modlog too, presumably to hide their obvious censorship bias.

Crashumbc ,

Yeah, that’s one thing reddit did right, ban/removal notifications included a copy of the comment.

SpaceCadet OP ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

No they don’t. I received a two week ban in the wake of the API protests, never got an explanation why or what comment triggered it.

Crashumbc ,

Shrug, my notifications always included it. Maybe the mod just banged you directly or something.

mightyfoolish ,

selectively purge the modlog

Now this would be a good reason to defederate from an instance. Modlog is what keeps mods consistent (right now I don’t like the Lemmy.ml mods rulebrick but at least they were open about what they don’t like).

flango ,

How about something like elections? A community could vote to change its “base instance” to another instance. Example, ask lemmy community vote to change from .ml to .world. It’s possible to do this by just not posting in the “old community”, so maybe community cloning and community hopping could be the solution.

fine_sandy_bottom ,

This just wouldn’t work.

Most mods wouldn’t willingly hold an election that potentially saw their fief moved away from their control.

Also most communities just aren’t that organised. Like if today everyone decided to move, tomorrow everyone would still visit and participate in the old community.

The “election” is perpetual. People will vote with their participation.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@startrek.website avatar

The “election” is perpetual. People will vote with their participation.

As it should always be.

JimSamtanko , (edited )

The old cowardly “rule 1” violation. Why not just filter their garbage from your feed and be done with it?

asret ,

Perhaps I don’t really understand - looking at the world news community on lemmy.ml rule 1 seems to be about only posting links to news articles. None of the things on the mod log screenshot look like news articles. Isn’t this the mods doing their jobs correctly?

The OP’s situation seems completely different to this and it’s definitely a problem - what am I missing about the rule 1 stuff though?

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Rule 1 probably refers to lemmy.ml site-wide rule 1, not the community rules.

wahming ,

It’s not the community mods abusing their power, it’s the admins of .ml. Their rule #1 is ‘no bigotry’, which sounds nice but gets interpreted in very… creative ways.

asret ,

Thanks!

I missed the site wide rules.

Yeah, that sort of rule requires a lot of faith in the moderators. Seems like they’re probably violating it themselves with their moderation.

JimSamtanko ,

“Rule 1” is a vague rule that allows them to delete anything they want. It’s a well-known thing they do there. They don’t even deny it.

ZombiFrancis ,

Over the past year on Lemmy I have witnessed a constant fight between people on hexbear, lemmygrad, and ml and people on communuties like tankiejerk, meanwhileongrad, and the like.

Both appear to constantly brigade and overmoderate their respective areas of control. Since my instance: sh.itjustworks, is some combination of defederated to hexbear and lemmygrad, I mostly just see threads like these complaining about tankies. I only assume the effort is being matched by those instances I don’t see to warrant this problem being so persistent.

So to me there’s so much active bad faith behavior between the camps I assume they all just have a paranoid view of the fediverse and are mostly just perpetuating a cycle of bad faith. Maybe that relationship is terminal if just people can’t handle each other.

Gullible ,

One side argues “maybe we should be authoritarian buttholes and quietly silence dissent on our website of 10,000” and the other side replies “don’t be an authoritarian butthole or we’ll make fun of you in our community of 200.” I’m not impartial in this, but historical revisionism and whataboutism serving the cause of spreading propaganda is generally not the right direction. Looking at the result of both actions is a decent method for determining what you’d like to support or stifle.

Will the actions of the .ml admins, course unaltered, produce an environment that you’re willing to post and interact with? For me, the answer is a big no.

ZombiFrancis ,

The fundamental source of conflict is that developers of Lemmy, who are also admins of .ml, describe themselves as marxist-leninist. Their very allowed existence is a conundrum for some, regardless of what they do.

So there is absolutely interest in the elimination of instances like .ml from the Fediverse, especially as things like Meta’s Threads moves in to centralize communities and standardize discussioms so everything can start aligning with thr valuation of their investment.

taipan ,
@taipan@lemmy.world avatar

Your conspiracy theory accusing Meta of being responsible for lemmy.world users wanting to defederate from lemmy.ml is ridiculous. Nobody forced lemmy.ml moderators to block people who criticize China, Russia, or Marxism-Leninism from all of their communities.

These lemmy.ml moderators made these bad choices all by themselves without Meta’s help, and lemmy.world has the right to exclude those communities through defederation so that no lemmy.world user has to worry about whether their comment to a front page post goes against a lemmy.ml moderator’s political ideology.

Twelve20two ,

I don’t think they were trying to propagate a conspiracy, just provide an example of a possible outcome with respect to, “mainstream social media”

ZombiFrancis ,

I was more responding to the person from threads with that line. But I was more identifying a convenient alignment than a conspiracy to act.

I mean there are Lemmy communities with discord servers dedicated to brigading tankies and falsifying interactions on places like .ml. One of those communities is on my instance and comes up on my feed constantly. But I will admit that I have not seen that effort from Threads.

But nonetheless, since it is a fair assumption any thread with the word ‘tankie’ in it is going to go off the rails: I am not suggesting .ml admins and their mods aren’t overblowing their interactions or bringing a lot of this onto themselves. They’re just as mired in bad faith as the next poorly run community or instance. I am just saying I am not surprised by it.

Gullible ,

Who’s from threads?

ZombiFrancis ,

:|

Gullible ,

You’ve misread the situation entirely. The most active community admin on our instance has described themselves as being staunchly pro-communism and it hasn’t evolved into a slap fight because they’ve been gently pursuing the goal of proliferating their views. Kind person, no clue how they tolerate the internet.

On the other hand, I’ve been hearing the same complaints about the Lemmy devs for like 4 years, long before META came around and before I had even tried lemmy. In this case, I firmly believe people simply dislike clandestine political chicanery and its intended goal.

ZombiFrancis ,

So you say uou’ve heard complaints about Lemmy devs, who run the instance in question here, for four years.

That is a direct illustration of what I mean: from the start of Lemmy there’s been complaints of the devs.

As the Fediverse becomes bigger, this type of stuff isn’t going to be wanted by any entity especially not ones owned by Meta.

Gullible ,

If you have any evidence of meta going after lemmy, I’d be keen on seeing it. Conspiracies really don’t appeal to me but I chug sauce like an Italian sex worker.

AncientMariner ,

Use communities on lemm.ee which will have both left and right wing folk. Or if you want to avoid left altogether, Lemmy.world communities, and there are lots of them.

Lemm.ee is something we need to nurture. Great admins that try to avoid their personal biases.

ssm , (edited )
@ssm@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Sorry, I can’t stand tankies, but tankies are still a lot more rational than the average US conservative these days. Conservative opinions should be censored and don’t need a voice on this platform. “Everyone should have a voice, no matter how destructive and irrational” is its own extreme opinion.

pyre ,

tankies are not “left”. they’re basically fascists with a leftist paint job. they use some left-related words to propagate right-wing views.

Kaboom ,

Left wing doesnt mean good. It just means left wing. Mao and Stalin were left wing.

Right wing doesnt mean bad. It just means right wing. Your average blue collar worker is right wing.

ShitOnABrick , (edited )
@ShitOnABrick@lemmy.world avatar

No tankies are authotarian left to be exact the term tankie is refering to those who believe in authotarian socialism (communism) they advocate for authotarian left wing policy’s . And conservative views such as family values rule of law property rights populism (caring about the wants and needs of the every day man) aren’t fascist opinions.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie?wprov=sfla1

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism?wprov=sfla1

www.dictionary.com/browse/populism

Noun British

a political strategy based on a calculated appeal to the interests or prejudices of ordinary people

pyre ,

first of all i didn’t talk about conservatism so that part is irrelevant… second of all, it doesn’t matter what anyone calls it, but “authoritarian socialism/communism” is an oxymoron; which is fitting because tankie ideology is nonsensical just like fascism.

when it comes down to it, the left wing is against social hierarchy and right wing is for it. “authoritarian left” doesn’t make sense; it’s just a way to refer to nonsense like tankie ideology… right wing ideology wrapped in leftist language.

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