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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.

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.

elliot_crane ,

As you say OP, the solution here is to use the fediverse model as intended and use different instances/communities. It sucks because it fragments the community, but that’s the way it is. I’ve long held the opinion that I’m grateful to the lemmy developers for building this whole thing that we all get to enjoy, but their approach to administering an instance is reprehensible and actively damaging to the relatively free and open exchange of ideas that should happen on the fediverse.

boredtortoise ,

That hides the problem instead of fixing it… and if it’s a dev as well, the whole system isn’t really safe

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

Code is opensource, if they were to put a backdoor or anything that would be seen, and once detected, the code can be forked

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

You… should probably pay more attention to the news.

It is very possible for bad actors to inject malicious code into an open source project. And it is very probable for people to not notice because the vast majority of developers never read a single line of the open source code they claim to value so much.

“Any bad code will be detected by the armies of people who do rigorous code analysis of every single pull request” was always nonsense.

Alice ,
@Alice@hilariouschaos.com avatar

Dam. You’re fucking sharp like for real. Good ass fuckin point. Like assuming everyone has good intentions is really nieve seriously

FozzyOsbourne ,

Are you referring to any news stories in particular? Because the only big one I recall recently was the xz backdoor which took three years of social engineering to get in and was detected and patched within a couple of weeks!

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

There have been a number of articles (pop and scholarly) about malicious code being social engineered into codebases over the past few years. And, in this case, the malice is “expected” from one of the long time developers to begin with.

Also: We got INCREDIBLY lucky that Andres Freund detected it when he did. Because that was hitting right around the time a lot of the major distros were preparing their major releases (Fedora basically escaped by the skin of their teeth).

Malicious manipulation of open source projects has always been a concern. And the vast majority of us do the equivalent of signing whatever form we are given because “oh it just looks like a standard contract”.

elliot_crane ,

I don’t agree with the “hiding the problem” notion because different instances are independently operated, and defederation is the by-design way to “fix” malignant instances (see the LW defed of hexbear and lemmygrad for exactly this kind of behavior).

As for the whole system not being safe, I’d also disagree on that point as the entire lemmy server code is licensed under a copyleft license which allows anyone with a copy of the code to modify and distribute it. Ergo, hard forking lemmy is possible. Based on the github page, over 800 individuals already have forks of the server code. Any one of them, group of them, or some other individuals entirely, could pick up lemmy development and run with it if need be.

Alice ,
@Alice@hilariouschaos.com avatar

💯⚡️

Socsa ,

The threat is bigger than that though. These people control the code base and can easily just start running modified code to fuck with various aspects of federation to generally keep their finger on the scale of any instance which federates with them. At best they have shown they have no shame and cannot be trusted. If there is any means of abusing their power, it must be assumed that they will embrace it.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

People are working on alternatives - Ernst started Kbin and then kinda got stuck in it but refused to allow others to help so a community fork Mbin was created, and sublinks will eventually exist as well. However, this stuff takes time. You can help by contributing code or funds or activity to one of those if you like.

elliot_crane ,

Sure, to an extent. ActivityPub is an independent protocol not controlled by lemmy or any lemmy devs, so there’s a layer of protection there. This is also a trick that can only be pulled once, because any other instances would likely defederate in response and ML would render itself irreparably untrustworthy. I don’t mean to downplay your concerns as they are valid, but I also don’t think it’s an existential threat.

WanderingVentra ,

The people nodding the instance are generally different than the devs. Also, their code is open source.

PrettyFlyForAFatGuy ,

Lemmy is open source, anyone can fork it and start running “modified code”. it’s not like they have a monopoly on that

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

PugJesus ,

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

btaf45 ,

Thanks for calling this out. I will stop posting content to lemmy.ml. What is the next best alternative to lemmy.world? I have nothing against lemmy.world, but would like to spread out content to different sites.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

Really depends on the topic.

!movies for instance is more active than !movies

!games is a good alternative to !gaming

There is !til vs !todayilearned

But LW communities are mostly fine. The top priority on Lemmy is to get communities active, we can always migrate them later if needed.

Skepticpunk ,

Good. Lemmy communities need to be as instance-agnostic as possible.

threelonmusketeers ,

we can always migrate them later if needed

Can we? I’m not sure that community migration is that simple…

cloudless ,

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.

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.

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 🤷

hipsterdoofus ,

Unfortunately, lemmy.ml is run by lemmy’s actual developers and will likely remain one of the most popular instances. Best thing to do is block the instance and host new communities on other instances.

retrospectology ,
@retrospectology@lemmy.world avatar

That kind of makes me a bit more skeptical of Lemmy as a whole if I’m being honest. Not necessarily the instance owners, but the system as a whole.

hipsterdoofus ,

Yeah, I’ve been eyeing kbin/mbin for a bit, which can actually federate with lemmy.

Alice ,
@Alice@hilariouschaos.com avatar

👌

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

LW is already much more active than lemmy.ml (18k monthly active users vs 2.5k: fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), so the system is working, people have left for a less politically biased instance

Skepticpunk ,

Good. Is development of Lemmy still controlled by tankies?

AnxiousOtter ,

Yep

WanderingVentra , (edited )

Lemmy.world is biased, but in a way that’s harder to see. They’re more liberal and centrist, which isn’t political in the same way being white “isn’t”. It seems like it isn’t because it’s the default of the English speaking West.

But still, ya, lemmy.ml needs to cool it with the bans and heavy handed moderation. I’m glad it’s not the biggest anymore but now I think everything is too much on Lemmy.world. I wish people would split up their accounts and communities on more instances instead of putting it all on one (or two). This and Reddit is a great example of why we shouldn’t be giving the same people power over everything.

LesserAbe ,

Just like there’s no such thing as an unbiased person, there’s no unbiased instance. Better to know what you’re getting into than to assume what you’re reading isn’t coming from a particular point of view.

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

I’d say the problem with bias isn’t that it exists, but when it’s covert. The ML instances were covert for a while if you weren’t paying attention, LW is “centrist” and “neutral” which means it defaults to a vaguely conservative position (conservative in the sense of being passively okay with the status quo, not the US sense in which conservative is an electoral party), but it remains covert simply by being default.

It also has open sign up which means anyone can sign up, which will tend to attract people who know their politics suck, so it will tend to attract unpleasant users.

Another instance with open sign up is sh.itjust.works which I’ve noticed a lot of the more toxic assholes I’ve dealt with come from. I imagine having profanity implied in their name doesn’t help with that.

Whereas instances like lemmy.blahaj.zone and beehaw.org wear their bias on their sleeves and require sign ups be approved. I chose slrpnk.net for a similar reason. These instances seem like a much nicer experience in general, and I would recommend anyone wanting to join lemmy find an instance that they like that has an approval process.

I think the fediverse presents a vision of an internet based on trust, and I think that sign up process is an important place to start building that trust.

sudneo ,

They were openly discouraging people to sign up on .ml already a year ago (I remember a banner to register elsewhere). I don’t think “anything” in particular is working. The devs seem not to care less for having the biggest instance, or communities there etc. They had the instance long before most of Lemmy users joined, after all.

volodya_ilich ,

less politically biased

There’s no such thing as “less politically biased”, it’s just that you don’t perceive the things that align with the center of the overton window as political.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

We all have to wrestle with those ethics ourselves, but fwiw most of us have come down to the idea that writing code is one thing whereas administering an instance is something else altogether. People are working on other implementations of the ActivityPub protocol e.g. Kbin, its community fork Mbin, and things like sublinks that doesn’t fully exist yet.

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

I’m staring at the front page of lemmy.ml and I’m trying to find what’s got people so worked up. It seems fairly simple to not go into a prolonged rant about how much you hate China when the content is just silly imgr memes.

I mean, by all means, block it if you don’t like the content. But why are you obsessed with the modlogs of an instance you blocked?

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.

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

nutsack ,

as a communism sympathizing leftist, i hated these mods on reddit and i hate them here. the behavior is idiotic

Socsa ,

That’s the most frustrating part. These “leftists” are the stupid kind who seem to care more about relitigating idiotic cold war drama than evolving or pushing forward leftist philosophy. It’s straight up brain rot, mixed with obvious right wing agitprop disguised as leftist ideology. That fact that anyone other than trolls, spies and teenagers would engage with it is astounding.

Duamerthrax ,

Some people just have daddy issues and need an image of a power figure to guide their life. It’s obvious on the right, but I’ve seen various shades of it in the left as well.

WanderingVentra ,

Cold war drama is still alive and well. You could see it when people call freaking Bernie, or even more laughably Biden, a communist, or in the fall out of every country in the global south, from Latin America to the Middle East, from propped up divisions of countries in East Asia, to the poor former Soviet block of Eastern European countries looted in the wake of the fall of the USSR. Our present interference in South Korea, Taiwan, Cubs Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere are all relics of that time. The US has never really left the red scare mindset, and the global geopolitics of that era will reverberate for generations to come. It’s why everyone celebrated when Kissinger died.

Still, saying all that commie and socialist stuff, I still think lemmy.ml is too ban happy. I like that they don’t defederate as fast as Lemmy.world, which I think is too eager on that front. But in terms of their posting moderation, I think lemmy.ml is way too heavy handed, and hence I don’t like their moderation style at all. It’s why I made sure not to choose either of those instances despite them being the biggest and most default. I do like having the choice, though, which is one big thing I like about the fediverse. There’s no way to avoid that kind of shit on Reddit. I just wish people would split up the communities among different instances better, though.

fuckingkangaroos ,

“leftists”

They’re not, that’s just a cover for spreading CCP propaganda.

tigeruppercut ,

Let’s play identify the ml propaganda! Is it CCP or from the Kremlin?

fuckingkangaroos ,

Tough game, as part of their “super authentic bff” relationship they seem to be loosely coordinating social media disinformation operations.

Zeroxxx ,

If .ml is a CCP propaganda, then blahaj and co are terrorists.

It’s pretty weird with massive amount of money CCP has, they decide to spread propaganda on, gasp, smol forums like Fediverse.

Not that I support .ml, I don’t care either way, I just find your view… weird.

Cryophilia ,

Bigger bang for their buck here. Trust me, the fediverse is not their only target, but they can have a lot of influence with less effort than reddit or Facebook.

fuckingkangaroos ,

Yeah, there’s no central entity to address misinformation.

Zeroxxx ,

Disagreed. But you do you

bigboig ,

Anyone can spread propaganda pro bono

Halosheep ,

I got banned from a blahaj instance for likening them to ml and hexbear.

Fizz ,
@Fizz@lemmy.nz avatar

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

Alpha71 ,

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

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

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

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