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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.

Gamers_Mate ,

Its about time people bring up the .ml tankie problem. Lemmygrad was defederated but .ml was ignored due to basically being their PR instance.
This is the main reason I have stuck to kbin social despite it having a lot of spam and errors and why I am now on Mbin.

spez_ ,

Don’t go on the instance

taipan ,
@taipan@lemmy.world avatar

.ml = Marxism-Leninism

This wasn’t obvious to me because ML could also mean the country of Mali or machine learning, but based on their content and moderation patterns, it’s unmistakable that the “.ml” in Lemmy instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml stands for Marxism-Leninism.

Hope that clears things up.

uis ,

Two-character TLDs are country codes

taipan ,
@taipan@lemmy.world avatar

I know that and that’s why I said .ml could stand for the country of Mali. However, the .ml in lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml clearly stands for Marxism-Leninism, not Mali, the same way the .tv domain suffix often stands for television, not Tuvalu.

TopRamenBinLaden ,

.ml top level domains are very cheap, as well, so I think it was a happy coincidence for them to choose the .ml TLD.

They most definitely didn’t mind that .ml can stand for Marxist-Leninism, but I don’t think that was the only reason it was chosen.

uis ,

Oh, right. .tk, .ml and others

Gork ,

I say Twitch dot Tuvalu and people give me weird looks for doing so.

intensely_human ,

gesundheit

LibertyLizard ,

I agree with the facts here but have a slightly different conclusion. This is a problem that exists on many similar platforms like Reddit, etc. If you give mods or admins unlimited power over their users, it is an almost foregone conclusion that it will be abused in some circumstances. While Lemmy.ml is perhaps the perfect storm of a bad example, I’ve seen examples of abuses of mod power from almost every community on both Lemmy and Reddit.

So how do we fix it? Migrating to different communities or instances can sometimes help, but the potential for abuse remains. Having more options for active communities and making migration easier is a step in the right direction. Despite its flaws, Lemmy is an improvement in this respect because its federated nature allows more choice in who has power over you, but the problem remains.

In my view the internet has always worked best when problems are solved democratically rather than autocratically. Content aggregators already allow for this to some extent in what content is presented, but moderation remains quite undemocratic. I think it may be that a new platform with new innovations to make moderation decisions more driven by community consensus instead of owners or founders of communities will be needed. Exactly what this will look like, I don’t know, but some brainstorming might be in order for the next evolution in social media.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

We have decades of proof of chuds brigading and building up hate speech hellfests in these “just let capitalism decide” laissez-faire models.

Moderation free environments just turn places into kiwi farms.

LibertyLizard ,

I obviously didn’t explain myself clearly if that’s what you took from this. I’m saying the community should be in control of moderation, not that there should be no moderation.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

It’s a cute idea but in practice, very, very few users want to deal with content moderation. The far majority of users just want to consume good, moderated content without worrying about removing bad content. Getting people to volunteer as mods is already hard enough. Making it democratic will not help I think.

Also, mob rule is not always the best. It is not uncommon for totally reasonable takes to be down voted - sometimes just because it started getting down voted and then others went on the bandwagon.

The way to achieve democracy in communities is not by making moderation democratic, but to make community switching easy. So if you don’t like your community mods, you can easily go elsewhere. That is also a kind of democracy I would say.

Maybe a middle ground could be moderator elections. At least then it’s a representative democracy and it would largely work as it already did. But again, very few people volunteer as mod so I believe you’ll find that the mods you could vote for would be very, very few mods (potentially just 1).

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

All moderator elections would do is let chuds stack the ballot. Look up shit like the sad puppies debacle.

The answer is that a site needs to decide what its rules are and then moderators need to enforce those rules, regardless of how the community feels. Which, ironically, is what ml is doing (even if they don’t publicize those rules). And if the community dislikes the rules, you disassociate with them.

The issue with the fediverse is that you need to defederate or else you are tacitly approving of their bullshit.

Dogyote ,

Kiwi farms?

Jakeroxs ,

wired.com/…/keffals-kiwifarms-cloudflare-blocked-…

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

Nobody is saying that there should be no moderation at all. What we are saying is that lemmy.ml moderators tend to remove users and content that are seen as even mildly critical of China, Russia, or Marxism-Leninism, and then sometimes hide the evidence of the removals from the modlog. That’s not acceptable to many people, including me.

WanderingVentra ,

The problem is that someone has to host the data. That will always be true. Even in the cloud, someone has to own the servers that the data are on. The only solution I can see is something basically like what we have the fediverse, only where other instances are sharing copies of the same community and the posts on it, kind of preventing one place from having ownership of it. But then if the instance goes down or gets defederated, I suppose you’d still have different versions of it floating around, plus the problem of someone posting CSAM and it getting pushed to all the instances and stuff.

Still, I agree that I think the closest solution is going to be something like the fediverse we’re seeing now. I just don’t know how to solve the problem of overzealous mods still, because we need mods. Having some democratic control over modding seems dangerous, too. Imagine a place gets brigaded by The Donald at 3am and everyone wakes up to their community being totally different. Or sometimes people are just wrong, like we have the problem of pre October 7th where 99% of the US believed Israel was a golden angel thanks to propaganda and dismissed all criticism. Same thing with socialism in the 50’s, or racism. Democratic modding at the time would lead to MLK getting banned lol.

It’s definitely an issue, because the ml mod and mods like them are way too trigger happy on the bans, but it’ll probably take some time to think of good solutions, and lots of experimenting with new forms of social media, like the fediverse.

LibertyLizard ,

Regarding server ownership, yes that is a thorny problem. One could dream up some kind of communally owned server system but that might be far fetched. However, I think the issue of mod power is distinct and might be easier to address.

As for the flaws of democratic systems, yes, they are real but most of these flaws apply to more autocratic systems as well. And we see from numerous examples that more democratic systems tend to abuse their power less often and severely than autocratic ones do. It’s a higher bar to get the whole community together to ban MLK than just one racist mod. Carefully thought out governance structures can also help. You certainly don’t want 51% of the community to be able to ban 49% whenever they want to, but the ideal would be to enable easy involvement with a structure that guides users towards making the right decisions.

The structure and culture to make this work could be difficult to build, so I’m not saying it’s an easy answer but it does seem like something to consider and maybe experiment with.

rufus ,

My first idea would be to have users report posts and ping a random sample of like 20 active and currently online users of the community and have them decide (democratically). That way prevents brigading and groups collectively mobbing or harassing other users. It’d be somewhat similar to a jury in court. And we obviously can’t ask everyone because that takes too much time, and sometimes content needs to be moderated asap.

Nelots ,

But then if you report something nobody should see, say CP for example, you’re suddenly subjecting 20 random people into seeing it.

Excrubulent , (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Right but you could have filters to opt out of mod requests or certain types of mod requests. It could even be opt-in, with some trust level requirement before you’re included.

Also “CSAM” is a better term, because putting “porn” in the name focuses on the intended use by abusers, whereas the term “CSAM” focuses on the victims.

Nelots ,

Also “CSAM” is a better term

I see. I had noticed people using that term instead, but I never knew why. Thanks for the info.

Klear ,

Also “CSAM” is a better term, because putting “porn” in the name focuses on the intended use by abusers, whereas the term “CSAM” focuses on the victims.

Why is that at all important?

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Because calling it ‘porn’ makes it sound appealling to people who associate porn with sexy things. It makes it sound like something they might want to seek out. It also demeans the victim by rhetorically placing them as the subject of pornography which can contribute to the damage.

Calling it “child sexual abuse material” centres the victim and puts distance between this material and pornography that was made consensually and ethically.

In a similar vein, “revenge porn” should be called sexual abuse material as well. And in fact a lot of technically legal “porn” would fall into the category of sexual abuse material if the full circumstances of its production was made known, but in the case of children the distinction is unambiguous.

commandar ,

This comment is kind of fascinating because it’s essentially reinventing Slashdot’s metamoderation system 25 years later.

It was good then. No reason it wouldn’t work again today.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Basic sortition method, I think that has a lot of merit.

archpope ,

Hmmm… I just got here so I haven’t seen it in action, but if true, far left mods abusing their power to censor and ban people they disagree with? Where have I Redd it before?

ID411 ,

I’m sure you meant to say “thank you for pioneering an alternative to Reddit so people had a home when Reddit sharted “

Chozo ,

Both can be true.

palordrolap ,

Yep. When I was migrating, I saw some advice to avoid Lemmy on account of its provenance, which is how I ended up on Kbin instead.

Unfortunately, it's not going well on the original instance (getting in before "how's that working out for you"), but for reasons very different to lemmy.ml.

Still don't have a lemmy account, but I am, for my sins, subscribed to communities there. Like this one.

ArcaneSlime ,

And hitler made the trains run on time, but fuck both him and desalinator.

boredtortoise ,

Time for them to move on to a new hobby then, surely there are more sane people to take over the development

Zeroxxx ,

rather extremist and onesided political views…

Sounds like far left and far right are the issue.

FiniteBanjo , (edited )

I wouldn’t refer to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin as far left, tbh.

Zeroxxx ,

Yes, they’re far right.

FiniteBanjo ,

Lemmy ML, Hexbear, and Lemmygrad users would try to tell you otherwise. My perspective might just be warped, I consider people who post Tiananmen square pictures as a pretty universally accepted stance outside of the CCP.

TheObviousSolution , (edited )

Happened to me with an even bigger instance because of an asshole admin making shit up. A solution might be to divide up the host of the user comments versus the moderator agents versus receiver of the comments. If your host bans you, that’s it, but if the receiver bans you, that only affects their users, and if a moderator agent group bans you, that only bans you from their distribution group of moderator agents but could be read by other groups.

If a community / group-of-moderator-agents-under-a-community-tag-for-a-particular-host bans you, you’d have to find another groups of moderator agents or accept all that are allowed by your host. Accepting all allowed by your host could only realistically exclude the worst offenders - spammers, doxxers, etc - so you’d really be incentivized to find a better block of moderator agents if you want to avoid certain types of comments. People who want to live in a bubble could live in a bubble but people who want to prioritize the greatest participation would try to find the most lenient host and the most lenient moderation agents, at least to their particular sensitivities.

It would be a truer federated model, but this is not lemmy as it is.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Best thing to do is to personally ask your instance admin to defederate, as well as other users and admins of other popular instances.

fuckingkangaroos ,

Yes, DEFEDERATE LEMMY.ML

it_depends_man ,

So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”

Yes.

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.

To whom?

If people agree with you, they will move and block and defederate. And if they don’t they don’t.

Sounds like a “you” problem.

Their server, their rules. If they want to run a political censorship social platform, they can and it’s totally ok if they un-invite you.

SpaceCadet OP ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

Network effect is a thing.

rufus ,

You’re 100% right OP. Don’t let the people tell you it’s a you problem and you should leave. It’s exactly like you said (in my opinion.) If at all, it’s the bad people who should leave. Not the nice ones and the ones calling out the bullshit.

Nothing changes if the just people keep silent and let bigotry or whatever just happen. It just makes the whole place become worse. And I’d say it’s warranted to speak up or do something. And as far as I heard you’re not the only one complaining.

therealjcdenton ,

Chinese honey pot

ahornsirup ,
@ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz avatar

Ironically, .ml seems to be blocked in China.

Daxtron2 ,

Pretty much any popular site they can’t censor is like that.

ahornsirup ,
@ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz avatar

Oh, for sure. I just think it’s funny.

Daxtron2 ,

Definitely lol

downpunxx ,

try posting any pro jewish and/or pro israeli, anywhere on lemmy or kbin instances (watch the votes for this comment, lol)

Makhno ,

Yeah cause most people on here don’t like ethnocentric genocidal states. Sorry to burst your little bubble ¯_(ツ)_/¯

toasteecup ,

Holy fuck.

Zionism (the political policy supporting the genocide) is not Judaism. How would I know? I’m a Jew and I abhore the Palestinian genocide. Nothing in the Jewish religion supports what is going on nor does anything in our religion say “go be ZIONISTS and kill people”.

EleventhHour ,
@EleventhHour@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t think that person was saying that it was

toasteecup ,

That’s possible, the statement is a bit ambiguous as to which part they are "whomp whomp"ing to.

Microw ,

How exactly can a political policy support anything? It’s the people who call themselves after an ideology who support it. Not an abstract ideology that a guy invented over 100 years ago.

toasteecup ,

That’s a fair question.

In consideration, take the Jim Crow laws from the USA. These laws enforced racial segregation and allowed for abject racism and abhorrent conditions/treatment of black people. In short, they supported racism.

Now one could say “but the people were the ones to carry it out” which sure, but then we might as well start asking ourselves how much government really matters and other philosophical questions. I don’t think the people are innocent, but to focus on your question, that’s an example of how political policy and laws can support things. The laws enable the legal environment, the people then carry it out.

mozz ,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

Watch this!

I think Jewish people are great.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

Upvoted!

toasteecup ,

Thanks I think you’re pretty nifty too. You’re welcome over for latkas anytime

NoIWontPickAName ,

Hopefully yours are better than mine

toasteecup ,

People are happy and enjoy eating them so I guess I’m doing it right. How are you making yours?

NoIWontPickAName ,

Poorly. I don’t remember anything but that.

I tried twice, and have just decided that I would rather have hash browns anyway. (I can actually cook them)

boredtortoise ,

I have so much support for jewish people, and especially those who are against Netanyahu’s atrocities

flamingos ,
@flamingos@feddit.uk avatar

What do you mean by “pro Jewish”? I doubt a comment like “Jewish people are human beings that deserve respect” would get you downvoted.

toasteecup ,

That one no, but there are plenty of leftists in the fediverse that can’t understand the concept of “Zionism is not Judaism.” And saying such gets you down voted because lol.

flamingos ,
@flamingos@feddit.uk avatar

I haven’t seen that myself, but I’m sure some of them exist and they’re dumb for thinking that. The person I’m replying to, though, is clearly taking the position that anti-Zionism = antisemitism.

toasteecup ,

Not sure if you mean me by “person you’re replying to” or someone else. I believe it’s someone else but it’s a little bit of a confusing sentence.

Either way, it’s been a fun couple of months since this bullshit started. With all kinds of dumb takes and arguments. It’s enough to make someone say “oyvey”

flamingos ,
@flamingos@feddit.uk avatar

I meant downpunxx.

toasteecup ,

Gotcha gotcha

imPastaSyndrome ,

If people disagree with me and downvote my irrelevant lie they actually hate Jews fucking gottem

stormesp ,

First, its obvious that anything pro israeli is going to be met with backslash when they are doing a freaking genocide. Second, downvoting is not censoring, is just people saying they disagree with you or your comment is just stupid/non helpful

dezmd ,
@dezmd@lemmy.world avatar

I’ll argue that crocodile tears deserve downvotes, as do bullies.

Im pro jewish, Im pro Israeli, but im so anti-injustice that I’m willing to stand up to anyone pushing for or acting as a pro-war Israel supporter, or jewish as an Israeli identity when it comes to being prowarfare, when they still support what has quickly evolved into a politically strategic genocide against palestinians. Hamas deserved what it got in the immediate aftermath of October 7, but after 2 weeks then 3 weeks then a month then 2 months it showed that despite all of Israels’ military and civilian efforts of having an experienced security apparatus steeped in information warfare and threat containment, they didnt have the effective strategic competence to actually wipe out Hamas without having to constantly murder civilians.

But they went ahead and kept on fucking killing.

So now, they keep moving goal posts for any chance of peace. Its not a new strategy, but it has far more violent consequences and only further spreads fervor for more violence. Peace begets peace. One side doesn’t get to play that against the other like a ping pong match and expect objective obervers to fall for either side’s propaganda.

This is all revenge without justice now.

Take your foot off the throttle.

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

There's going to be bubbles everywhere. I've been called a troll and downvoted heavily in various communities because I don't hate Microsoft or AI in general, for example.

bolexforsoup ,

Kbin.social has been down for like 3 days now so you can’t do this experiment there :/

SpaceCadet OP ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

Getting downvoted is one thing. There is definitely a certain bias in the wider fediverse community on this topic, so it’s normal that your comments aren’t received well. It isn’t manipulative and probably an accurate reflection of what the community thinks.

What lemmy.ml is doing is more insidious though. They are manipulating the discussion by actively muzzling users with dissenting opinions.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

Hello,

A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml.

Are they? Most of the communities are rather on LW: lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active

!collapse is moving to !collapse

Is there any community you need that doesn’t have a LW or another equivalent on another instance?

Gullible ,

So long as any active communities on .ml end up on the front page, they will inevitably draw attention away from less censored spaces. An interesting one is !comics which tends to rise and fall in popularity in inverse proportion to !comicstrips.

I agree that other communities have popped up to fill the same niches, so that’s step 1 and 2 done. Completely moving away from them, as OP intends, doesn’t seem like a plausible solution.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

I’m sure it’s still doable.

Ironically, I’ve been trying to move a few communities away from LW (to avoid hyper-centralization), and it worked, for instance with !map_enthusiasts (compared to the previous !mapporn ), same with !casualconversation which replaced !casualconversation

Maybe we should bring attention to people about the lemmy.ml kind of moderation (and I guess this post does this quite well) so that they will avoid to post there in the future

Gullible ,

It’s difficult to bring attention to censorship by way of active censorship of the censorship. I occasionally wonder whether folks on .ml understand that they’re being fed a very particularly catered experience. At least .ml isn’t the largest instance anymore, otherwise getting the word out would be nigh impossible.

And it was a nice bit of foresight to spread the load!

misk ,
@misk@sopuli.xyz avatar

I was among reddit refugees a year ago and it took me a moment to notice what was going on ml and their communities were more significant in comparison to what we have today.

One of the reasons I’m on sopuli.xyz now is that it was one of the first reasonably big instances to defederate hexbear outright. Hesitance and outright hostility to defederate it from some instance admins was also worrying.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

Sopuli is cool

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

World grew MASSIVELY around the time of the reddit mod strike.

In the time since? A lot of those communities are basically full of people who can’t stop talking about their ex while constantly re-posting everything they see there. And… the lemmy world admins made a few controversial decisions and their method of removing problem/“problem” users made a lot of us uncomfortable. Piss off an admin and your entire comment history is wiped in an instant and your ban reason is unverifiable.

Whereas ml already had communities that existed to talk about the topic of the community rather than what reddit was talking about.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

who can’t stop talking about their ex

Is it still the case? I found most the Reddit discussions happening on !reddit nowadays

uhN0id ,

I’m not new to Lemmy but only just recently started being really active. Can you explain to this OOTL user (and perhaps others like me) that don’t know what went down with hexbear?

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

Welcome back!

Hexbear are known to be quite argumentative about politics, leading to most people blocking the instance overall at the user level.

That’s basically it, if you want more details you can have a look at the instance itself, you should get what I mean quite fast.

uhN0id ,

I regret looking haha but it was enlightening. Almost literally every single comment was someone angry about someone they’ve never met. It was like they were manifesting their ideal enemy in their comments to be angry at them.

Whew. Definitely avoiding that.

GregorGizeh ,

If you are familiar with the term tankie, hexbear is the china-fan tankie instance and lemmygrad is for those lusting after Stalin and the soviet union.

Lemmy.ml is a bit more low key about it, but equally authoritarian communist when it comes down to it, as evidenced by the op.

Especially the hexbear users have an extremely argumentative instance culture and will even brigade comment sections critical of the great leader, so most users and even instances block them outright.

OpenStars , (edited )
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

Best to read it in their own words. That post really makes it clear how (in their own POV) other places should be linked to from hexbear solely for the purpose of making fun of them, and possibly to increase their engagement stats e.g. upvoting b/c otherwise it gets lonely just being on hexbear.net all by themselves. The only time they acknowledge the effects that THEY, the users on hexbear, have on OTHER communities is to state how fun it is to “[have the opportunity to] dunk on these lost [ones]”.

They are aware, and are even happy with how they are, and not only do they not mind being defederated, but they preemptively are defederating themselves from other places, as they said “As an admin team we have never wanted to prioritize growth”. They are an instance by and for people who enjoy making fun of others.

But don’t stop there: the comment section is where the real fun is at, and/or you can do the maths yourself too:-). e.g., they point out how the admins went to all the trouble to collect those votes, then threw them in the garbage and did the precise opposite of what the votes wanted and instead defederated anyway. Look at lemm.ee for instance at 41:4, that’s 91.1% for remaining federated and only 4 total votes, 8.9%, for defederation. aussie.zone was likewise 27 for vs. only 19 against, and programming.dev 27 for vs. 19 against - but they defederated from them all, despite how the (quite noticeable) majority of voters in each case indicated that they wanted them to remain federated.

In contrast, those other instances like programming.dev defederated from hexbear.net too, but only for purely technical reasons to avoid confusion by users not knowing the intricacies of how federation works - in their own words: “Weve added them to our blocklist as well so theres no one way conversations”.

TLDR: hexbear.net is not a “nice” place to visit - go there if you want, but like 4chan it’s not generally considered something that you want to stumble upon by accident, and it’s definitely not something that most people on the Fediverse want. I almost quit the Fediverse myself entirely after making the mistake of posting (edit: commenting) there, but fortunately for me v0.19.3 came out and I could instead simply block hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml and now I enjoy being here:-).

uhN0id ,

This is all so strange. I really appreciate the breakdown.

It sounds like they got the tyrannical administration they lust over in the politics related comments I’ve seen there so far, though! So, good for them!

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

Exactly - I’m 💯% okay with them living their best life, probably I shouldn’t be but I just am, so long as they don’t spill out and then infect others with their BS antics (which inevitably seems will happen when they are allowed to incubate like that, self- reinforcing that that behavior is “okay”).

But I am also concerned about new potential Fedizens - like is this a place that I can keep recommending to other human beings, or will they see that and just nope out? As I almost did myself bc all of it - lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and apparently the admins at least of lemmy.ml - it’s just so fucking much for a new person to take. Someone who is versed enough in Federation matters can deal with it, but for those who cannot yet distinguish between what makes us great and those sources of toxicity horrible, it all will blend together into a big grey bucket of suck.

As ironically the comments to that post on hexbear I linked said too - they (the ones who weren’t outright leaving as a result of that decision) were calling for stricter moderation practices bc they were aware that the lack of that was giving hexbear a bad name. And now here we are too, saying similarly at the next higher level up of the Fediverse itself as a whole.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

Great list! One thing I notice is wrong though: lemmy.ml is not merely not appearing among the top, most active ones (communities or instances), but I also don’t see it anywhere, even in the list of all instances when clicking Show All? So its true popularity is unknown to that list.

Edit: I see both hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, it is only lemmy.ml that does not show up there.

SpaceCadet OP ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

Maybe your instance has defederated from it?

Also I think the activity level is measured as activity from your instance, not globally.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

No, my instance (discuss.online) has defederated from lemmygrad.ml but not hexbear.net or lemmy.ml and yet I see the former two but not the latter, so it definitely is something special wrt just it alone.

Also with the URL being to lemmyverse.net, I don’t see how it would even know which instance is “mine”? e.g. I have an alt on startrek.website, which does not block any of those three instances, and another old one on Kbin, but how would it pick?

I suspect rather that there was a network hiccup or other problem obtaining the activity data. But in any case, it’s not like “activity of lemmy.world > activity of lemmy.ml”, and rather more that the latter is unknown to that website.

Btw I nominated your discussion to the BestOf community at lemmy.world/post/16213730 - since you cannot do that yourself, someone else needs to nominate it for you. I hope that helps spread the word some more bc this is a very valuable discussion that needs to happen imho. Thank you for your efforts to improve things for many people in the Fediverse:-).

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

Hm, good point, I never noticed. I’m pretty sure they were around a few weeks ago, probably a network hiccup indeed.

EleventhHour ,
@EleventhHour@lemmy.world avatar

As others have said, the only option available currently is to leave the instance and re-create your beloved communities elsewhere. The Lemmy.ml Admins also happen to be the ones actively developing the Lemmy code base, and they’re not gonna change because they feel entitled to do whatever they want, and technically, they can because they run the instance.

My best advice is to move on from the instance.

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

If you want to get away from the Lemmy codebase entirely I can vouch that mBin works quite nicely. I've been on fedia.io for months now and only once or twice hit some kind of technical problem, which was resolved quickly.

Atelopus-zeteki ,
@Atelopus-zeteki@kbin.run avatar

MBIN FTW. KBIN has been "We are working on resolving the issues" for some days now. I hope Ernest is ok.

I have a login for lemmy.ml, as I have several from when I was switching over from Reddit. I'm thinking from what I'm reading here, that it's not an instance I want to associate with.

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

Yeah, nothing against Ernest but developing and running kbin is just too big to be a one-man show.

Atelopus-zeteki ,
@Atelopus-zeteki@kbin.run avatar

Dude's a superhero, and needn't be a 'lone ranger'. Agreed. As the Fediverse expands, it will be the work of many; it just has to be that way.

PugJesus ,

I do hope he eventually finds a balance that works both for him and for us. I greatly prefer Kbin, when it’s, y’know, up.

Atelopus-zeteki ,
@Atelopus-zeteki@kbin.run avatar

Agreed! And yeah, still down, I just checked.

ahornsirup ,
@ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz avatar

Are there mobile apps yet? Because if no that’s one huge advantage Lemmy still has over Kbin/Mbin, and it’s why I switched to Lemmy when Artemis started having issues (it went down completely since) instead of going back to Kbin.

debounced ,
@debounced@kbin.run avatar

https://github.com/jwr1/interstellar

ahornsirup ,
@ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz avatar

Oh, cool. That one flew completely under my radar. I’ll have to check it out when I have time.

xnx ,

Don’t forget about piefed it’s amazing and lets you subscribe to posts and/or comments. Theres someone who contributed Lemmy API compatibility to use some Lemmy apps with Piefed instances. Its still very early but so far its extremely promising and the codebase is in python and the main developer is focused on ensuring it wasy to contribute. Check it out: piefed.social

Code is on codeberg which is great too codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi

bacon_saber ,

Agree and just to add to this: the official list of mbin instances

Microw ,

Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.

Lemmy.ml also has the funny quirk that it doesnt have a proper legal imprint or team list afaik. So we don’t have actual transparent information on who is on that instances admin team and who is not. Iirc only one of dessalines and nutomic is on that admin team anymore.

EleventhHour ,
@EleventhHour@lemmy.world avatar

Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.

I hardly see what that would accomplish if we could.

goferking0 ,

Nothing good or productive would come out of showing mod names in mod logs. Would just have people doing witch hunts on user level instead of instances like they do now

Microw ,

People keep bringing up that because of the devs history with that instance, “surely it is the Lemmy devs themselves who are doing this”. Which hurts Lemmy’s reputation overall.

EleventhHour ,
@EleventhHour@lemmy.world avatar

Actions have consequences

boredtortoise ,

I guess some mod actions could be considered accidents or mistakes instead of bad actors. A transparent system would have a flow to allow the user to contact and get such a mistake rectified, or report a wrongful mod action to an admin.

But if the admin is a problem, then that needs more figuring out how to get one removed.

EleventhHour ,
@EleventhHour@lemmy.world avatar

the only one who can remove an admin is a more senior admin, and they can already see behind the “mod” alias.

your point seems moot

Eldritch ,

This Dessalines?

1000001794

Creeping the admin logs to find out who dared down vote him.

Speculater ,
@Speculater@lemmy.world avatar

They’re also hyper sensitive and generally toxic with their reflex delete/ban/block. They’ll see what they want to see in the most mundane comments and nuke an entire thread. Best to just block them and ignore.

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