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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.

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.

ptz , (edited )
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

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.

Did that months ago; defederated completely when they turned into Lemmygrad-lite. At first I missed some more active FOSS communities, but since then, others on different instances have become more active. programming.dev has a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on .ml so maybe check out what they’ve got.

If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else, nurture it, and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably won’t be the last.

Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.

Edit: Oh yeah. Didn’t recognize your username at first, but I was looking at the modlog the other day from my LW account, and saw a bunch of individual community bans from Dessalines and wondered what was up. Figured it was something exactly like this, and it was. Thanks for sharing.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably wont’ be the last.

Maybe we should open a thread on !fedigrow about this

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

TIL that community existed. thanks!

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

What? I thought I pinged you there a while ago! Anyway, have a look, there should be some topics you might find interesting

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

May have been my LW account? I mostly use it for my mod role, but I’ll switch to it sometimes and browse all there to look for new communities I might like. Perhaps it was that account and I only interacted from there? (My memory is terrible these days 😆)

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

I don’t remember, you’ll see a post with a lot of pings, one of your accounts should be there 😄

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

Did you ping in the post body or comments? I learned a month or two ago from someone that mentions only generate a notification if they’re in the comments.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

I made sure to ping in the comment for this reason. Actually now I’m curious, let me have a look

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

I got the one you just sent, but it was after I had resolved the community locally (and subscribed). Perhaps the mentions don’t work if they’re to a community the other person’s instance doesn’t know about?

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

To be honest I might have forgotten to ping you actually (maybe because you were less active for a bit and I basically mentioned people when I saw their posts in All?) but at least now it is solved!

victorz ,

programming.dev has a lot of communities

Is there a way to search for/browse communities on a single instance?

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

You can in Tesseract, but AFAIK, that’s the only UI that lets you browse remote instances. Otherwise, you gotta go to it directly, browse communities, and copy/paste the URL into your instance and search for it.

boredtortoise , (edited )

Is it possible to see who is behind a mod action? I’ve figured something like world news on ml has some compromised fascist actors as mods but if it’s the main creator doing this then that’s crazy

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

There’s an instance level setting to hide moderator names from unauthenticated and/or non-mod users. They probably have that enabled. Those actions federate, though, so the mod names won’t be hidden if viewed from an instance that doesn’t hide the mod names.

TropicalDingdong ,

Happy cakeday.

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

Shit, so it is (depending on tiemzone) lol Thanks!

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

It is actually tomorrow but there’s a bug that causes the cake symbol to appear a day early in the default UI, because 2024 is a leap year.

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

Ah, gotcha. Without doing the math, I assumed it was basing it on UTC or something.

imaqtpie ,
@imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works avatar

Haha thank you for the info, I have been quite confused about this. At first I thought it was because it was already tomorrow in Australia, but then I checked a world clock and it wasn’t even close 😅

PugJesus ,

Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.

I had actually considered Lemmy before The Great Reddit Exodus. Lemmy.ml turned me off from that.

Now we have Kbin (you can make it, my love!) and Lemmy.world, and I feel much better.

atocci ,

Kbin, please come back to me

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

I… don’t think Kbin.social is going to make it. Even if it comes back, too much trust has been lost. Ernst should have stuck to just working on his coding project, not also administering his own instance, b/c that carries with it a certain level of “always-on” responsibility - e.g. I have unfortunately had to block Kbin.social lately, b/c nearly all (>>99%) of the spam that I currently see on the Fediverse was coming from the communities on it. Since I blocked it, I think I’ve seen like 1 single spam post for the past month.

So Kbin.social is turning people away too, for different reasons.

Mbin seems healthy though?:-)

cloudless ,

I want to use Mbin, but all Mbin instances are federated with tankie instances, including hexbear.

And Mbin doesn’t make it easy to see user/community instance.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

I gave up on the Kbin/Mbin style entirely - it sounds nice to Federate with both Lemmy and Mastodon, but I don’t like the interface.

Can you not do personal user instance blocks like you can in Lemmy as of v0.19.3 half a year ago? That would be an absolute deal breaker for me too. On Kbin.social though it was not an issue bc they were defederated at the instance level.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I really want Kbin to succeed, but Ernest seems to see the project as something he checks on once every few months and then ignores, but he still seems to want to be the only one who gets to make decisions. I get that he has stuff going on in his life, but the solution to all these problem starts with communicating and working with the community, not disappearing for months at a time and refusing to work with the people who try to help him. You just can’t have a successful project with an approach like that.

Nothing4You ,

It should be noted that the (visibility of) community bans are a result of better enforcement of site bans in 0.19.4, which for now is implemented by sending out community bans for local communities when a user gets instance banned: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4464

Prior to this, when a user got instance banned from .ml, they were also implicitly banned from .ml communities, but this was only known to the instance they were banned on. As a result, users were still able to post, comment, and vote on those communities, but it would be visible only on that user’s instance, not federated anywhere else. Visibility of this ban was exclusively on the banning instance’s modlog.

fyi @SpaceCadet

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