There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

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.

MrSpArkle ,

The mods of the non-political subs need to move elsewhere, eventually after that the content will just be tankie bullshit and everyone can just defederate them.

Wrench ,

We can defederate them now. Content will move as it reaches fewer eyes.

Crowfiend ,

Even the non political .ml communities are full of power-tripping, ban-happy, thread-nuking tyrants in my experience.

Kyle_The_G ,

I’ve had this happen to me, I was chatting in a thread with some guy about IP theft and plagiarism at universities- a legitimate discussion about a current topic- and all my comments were suddenly deleted for “xenophobia”. I let it go but its still really jarring and annoying.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

Which community was that?

Kyle_The_G ,

world news lol, Thats probably why. It was a comment under an article on that topic and they went censor-crazy.

awesome_lowlander ,

I’ll go out on a limb and guess China was mentioned somewhere

Sunny ,

Thanks for shedding light on this! I will do my part and no longer post in communities tied to lemmy.ml!

lltnskyc ,

You don’t see even a bit of hypocrisy in that? Holy shit…
I have exactly the same complaint about lemmy.world - it’s censuring everything that doesn’t align with leftist views (and on the other hand, when I post on lemmy.ml it’s usually not deleted).
Oh I know, I know, let me guess, they are censoring people because they are evil and authoritarian and are bad people, but you are censuring people because you are all democratic and for freedom and so on and anyway the ones that get censored are tankies and fascists and russian bots/propagandists?..
knowyourmeme.com/…/2355607-our-blessed-homeland-t…

zbyte64 ,

Yeah, very ironic that deleting misinformation is equated to deleting accurate information.

lltnskyc ,

Oh yeah definitely, I forgot that one - everything they say is a misinformation, no matter the included sources and any proofs, and everything we say is the purest truth possible!
Seriously, it’s like the meme was created exactly for this post 🙃

zbyte64 ,

everything we say is the purest truth possible!

People obsessed with purity will think like that.

aleph ,
@aleph@lemm.ee avatar

It’s not exactly the same complaint at all. You got a single comment removed from a single thread by a single moderator.

The equivalent would be if the admin of lemmy.world stepped in and not only banned you from World News but also every single other LW community you posted in, out of spite.

lltnskyc ,

Okay, that’s fair enough.
Still, complaining about censorship while engaging in censorship is hypocritical 🤷

rimu ,
@rimu@piefed.social avatar

Sorry you stumbled into the wrong instance. Fortunately, other instances already offer alternative communities that are more active and moderated differently.

This could have been avoided if the UI included a warning about communities with problems. Like how PieFed does: https://piefed.social/post/89659

Thorny_Insight ,

I usually refrain from replying to threads on those instances and when possible use the non-.ml equivalent

thesocavault ,
@thesocavault@lemmy.world avatar

As being new to Lemmy, I do understand what you are saying. There is no balance of conversation - it’s I’m taking my ball and going home type of thing.

Rather not all cases, but it does happen.

**People just want a good conversation **

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

**People just want a good conversation **

Feel free to join at !casualconversation

PrettyFlyForAFatGuy ,

I moved from .ml because of this. Haven’t had a ban since and can still interact with .ml communities

Alpha71 ,

Np offense but so what? nothing you post on there is going to change anything, anywhere. You’re shouting into a vacuum.

Fizz ,
@Fizz@lemmy.nz avatar

Eventually lemmy will grow to a point where these communities are moved off that instance.

nahuse ,

Thanks for illustrating that I was banned from not just one community I don’t participate in aside from upvoting, but several that I have never even visited. All for “Rule 4,” which as far as I can tell is spamming ads, which I have never done. I’ve tried to message the mods of those communities, but haven’t gotten any kind of response.

It’s really disappointing that this is how Lemmy seems to work. As a new user, I had to actively persevere through the .ml bullshit to understand that lemmy as a whole is not like that. But it’s almost impossible to be a progressive (but not full blown anti-western communist) on an awful lot of this platform.

It really does the other large instances a disservice that those mod/admin practices are so commonplace.

I know the answer is to defederate/block them, but I genuinely find the news and posts interesting, and .ml was one of the instances that I was first looking into, because I literally didn’t understand how the fediverse worked but kept hearing “just pick an instance, there no wrong choice since you have access to all the other instances.”

But even those posts about topics I am educated in and care about, it all just literally seems to be a vessel for a specific type of (dis/mis)information in the comments, which actively preys on the gullible and shuts out even moderately different views.

Edit: mobile formatting fix

catloaf ,

Same. I’ve only ever made one post, and it wasn’t to lemmy.ml, nor have I made a significant number of comments, yet I was banned first from the instance, then from the communities, for allegedly spamming. I asked in the Matrix chat linked in their sidebar, and they suggested I message dessalines, so I did. He rejected the message request.

If this is their ideal of Lemmy, then Lemmy is dead on arrival.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

It really does the other large instances a disservice that those mod/admin practices are so commonplace.

Agree.

On the other hand nowadays now most of the communities are on LW (lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active) so at least it’s a bit better compared to a year ago.

nahuse ,

It’s a good trend, but I still think it would behoove the admin of more reasonable instances to make it more obvious that there is a sizable and aggressive group of people with nearly unlimited (internet) power, and making it clear that they do not associate at all with those instances/individual practices.

There is a huge dearth of naming and shaming bad actors, and it’s going to reach a size where people won’t do their research as I did, but will assume that all of the fediverse is run by authoritarian Communists and (not) engage based on that.

And that wouldn’t be an unfair understanding, given who the creators of Lemmy are, who their disciples/mods are, and their influence across the platform.

Lemmy really runs the risk of being “left wing Truth Social” otherwise.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

Lemmy really runs the risk of being “left wing Truth Social” otherwise.

Indeed. I’m still on /r/RedditAlternatives to talk about Lemmy, and I usually have to explain that most of the instances do not share the political stances of the main devs.

it would behoove the admin of more reasonable instances to make it more obvious that there is a sizable and aggressive group of people with nearly unlimited (internet) power, and making it clear that they do not associate at all with those instances/individual practices.

The situation here is a bit tricky: instance admins still have to debug the software (as they are the ones using it), and they have to interact with the Lemmy devs. Getting too much friction with them could break that collaboration, and leave everyone with worse software.

sublinks.org is still under development, hopefully once it will be ready instance admins will have another option to potentially replace Lemmy

nahuse ,

I hear you.

I’d just offer a slight counter, which is that if the devs want their software to succeed, they should probably work a little harder to police how their politics overflow, or work harder to contain them. And bringing these issues into the full light of day may help with that, or at least convince them to crack down on bad actors they a currently allow to function with impunity.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

convince them to crack down on bad actors

The Lemmy devs have expressed several times that they don’t want to interfere on how people use their software (e.g. admin the instances and mod the communities).

Which is good (and allow us to say that they can’t indeed interfere with Lemmy as a whole), but that also means that they won’t be the one “cracking down on bad actors”

gui.fediseer.com might be something along those lines, with a chain of trust between instances

delirium ,
@delirium@lemmy.world avatar

That’s a con and a pro of decentralized net: if you don’t like the owner, pick another instance or create your own and be the king. Bad news is, every instance is controlled by couple regular folks who’re not responsible financially so they can imply their own rules and post and ban whatever they want.

Like the jungle: you gotta learn to survive and avoid the monkeys with rabies.

Allonzee , (edited )

Fuck China’s and Fuck Russia’s elite.

That said, reasonable is in the eye of the beholder, and I see capitalism’s apologists at this late hour (I’m suffering a reckless capitalist growth/metastasis caused heat dome as we speak along with 10s of millions of other Americans) as just as unreasonable as you see socialism proponents.

Modding abuse destroys communities, and that’s wrong. But I don’t demand all the communities I frequent spend their days agreeing with me, nor do I walk away unless the entire ethos/subject of the sub is to be against what I’m for. By that I mean, I can generally enjoy talking about a movie, for example, with a capitalism proponent because it isn’t generally centrally relevant to the topic.

The point of discourse is discourse. An AI chatbot will be better at feeding one’s confirmation bias than any community made up of people ever can be.

NOT_RICK ,
@NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

It’s one thing to believe in and promote a particular political or economic system. The censorship found on instances like Lemmy.ml is an entirely different topic. It hurts the fediverse to have people banned from some of the larger communities for nothing other than wrongthink.

Allonzee , (edited )

I was banned from the LW comics sub because there was a comic about climate change being real, and I said something along the lines of having far more sympathy for non-human life suffering the hostile climate we’re creating because we’re doing it eyes wide open out of reckless greed , which according to that mod is “ecofascist rhetoric,” which I thought was funny because I wasn’t advocating doing… anything. Saying our species is more culpable for climate change than the other animals also suffering it was wrongthink that day.

That’s the paradox of power in any form, the vast majority who pursue it, from politicians, to police, to mods, usually sought that power with a biased agenda, maybe not even consciously, but still. Power corrupts, bans for wrongthink aren’t avoidable with people in charge and no additional layers of active monitoring/auditing which isn’t really tenable on a volunteer basis.

NOT_RICK ,
@NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

Your memory is spotty, you were banned from [email protected] for that comment. I will say good job though, I’ll have to add “ecofascist” to my rapidly growing list of wrongthink euphemisms.

Allonzee ,

My memory is fine, this isn’t the same account.

NOT_RICK ,
@NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

I know, it was AllonzeeLV, right? I inferred it was you based on the comment summary you gave and similarity to your newer account handle

Allonzee ,

That’s another account I have yes, but not the one I was referring to.

NOT_RICK ,
@NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

Ok, well that one was banned from .ml with the same exact reason for the same kind of comment you said got you banned from LW.

Allonzee ,

I freely admit I’m a broken record on the topics I’m passionate about. Man-made climate change being one of them.

My post history on all my accounts is testament to this.

PugJesus ,

Yeah, I made a specific point of avoiding participation in any .ml groups for that very reason.

goferking0 ,

Is this a call out comm now?

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • [email protected]
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •