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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.

EunieIsTheBus ,

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.

I think this is a core problem of lemmy as it is right now. This place is meant to be federated and decentralized. Instead it is heavily centralized as communities lie on one instance. What one needs should be federated communities as well. Like say c/[email protected] is the same as c/[email protected]. this way one could subscribe to communities on your home instance and if the home instance defederates from one other instance the community can defederate from the community on that instance without completely breaking apart

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Communities living on instances is a feature i think actually. Where else would it be? It must be hosted or originate from somewhere. I’m also not sure how you would make it more decentralised in practice - I mean, what if you defederate from the instance that has all the mods of the community for example? How is moderation handled in general?

Also to be clear, it’s more of an ActivityPub thing than a Lemmy thing. This is just how ActivityPub works.

carbon_based ,
@carbon_based@sh.itjust.works avatar

[OT; tl/dr: the issues with forums and user accounts being under hegemony of server instances is by design but it’s not actually the way one would design a truely de-centralised network]

It’s a feature but not the best practice if the idea would be forums (and users) being free of domains (and the dangers of domains being taken down, and host admins’ whims). The design approach of Lemmy however, speaks “hegemony” all over. It says a lot about the mindset of its creators.
An alternative would be indeed distributed directory systems, employing concepts like DHT … well proven de-centralized resiliency for quite a while. Would it have been done in such a way, there would be no difficulty with migrating forums and users across instances, and even a domain getting lost would not necessarily lead to all forums/accounts there-on to be lost. Also the issues with link creation across instances were due to forums being bound to domain names instead of them having Universal IDs thus being agnostic of which node they are actually hosted on.

ActivityPub, AFAIK only defines a protocol for communicating datasets between instances, not the structures in which federation should be done.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

It’s a feature but not the best practice if the idea would be forums (and users) being free of domains

I don’t think the idea is for users to be free of domains. One of the key benefits of tying users to their instance is that you defederate from the users of an instance when you defederate from an instance. If users were not bound to instances, it would be hard to defederate from certain groups without manually defederating a million users. Users being tied to domains makes moderation via defederation much, much simpler.

The design approach of Lemmy however, speaks “hegemony” all over. It says a lot about the mindset of its creators.

[…]

ActivityPub, AFAIK only defines a protocol for communicating datasets between instances, not the structures in which federation should be done.

I’m not an expert on ActivityPub but I think you’re wrong about this being Lemmy’s design decision. I think ActivityPub is designed in this way and it is intentional. I mean, all other ActivityPub apps do the same thing (e.g. Mastodon users are also tied to their instance).

forums being bound to domain names instead of them having Universal IDs thus being agnostic of which node they are actually hosted on.

Just want to point out that domain names are also perfectly capable of being agnostic about nodes - i.e. you can host multiple websites on a single computer or distribute the hosting of a website across many computers. I’m not really sure what you’re saying here but I don’t know if it’s important.

carbon_based ,
@carbon_based@sh.itjust.works avatar

Umm… I was not so very clear perhaps. The idea would still be that user accounts as well as forums all contain their domain name, as their site of origin rather than a location identifier. Just that the host could change to any other domain (after negociation with the new host, that is). So it’s not about domains being tied to specific hosts/IPs but entities being tied to domains. It would be up for design discussion if that identifier should change or not, iin the case of a migration. The idea would be to give entities the ability to roam or be resurrected from any federated copy in case they are dissatisfied with the policies of their hosts, or in the event a domain gets taken down by authoritrian actors. (That’s why this actually is off-topic here)

From my glance into the ActivityPub doc, I concluded that it’s really only about the data exchange protocol, yet I might have overlooked something as I never had an in-depth talk with people who implement the thing. Yet, just because many do it in a certain way does not mean to me that this is written in stone somewhere. :-)

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

What you are describing is basically Mastodon (or, if you like porn and hatespeech, twitter… non-consensual porn because a lot of Mastodon instances are REALLY horny).

The moment you aggregate communities across instances you remove the ability to moderate them. Because maybe a hexbear mod wants to remove all mention of the Uyghur people, an ml mod wants to remove all mention of genocide against them, and a zip mod wants to remove all the comments about why genocide is good in a thread about god damned Bluey.

Do they all get to delete everything across every instance? Do you start having different views of the same community depending on your home instance?

Nomecks ,

No, they control their content and you control whose instances you sub to.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Again, how does that work if c/linux is “the same” on every instance?

Will comments and posts exist on the world view of c/linux but not the zip view? At which point… what are we actually getting over the status quo? Because you can bet that anyone who has hexbear unblocked would see two different versions of every single thread because nobody else would see the hexbear posted thread.

EunieIsTheBus ,

What I mean is that a subset of all Linux communities agrees on a common set of rules and forms a community of communities. Content of all communities is shared with everyone who subscribes to one of the communities. Every community moderates its own content. If one community decides to have stricter rules than the others it can defederate. Basically just like on the level of instances.

What stops us to just defederate from lemmy.ml is that the community is hosted there and all members are linked to that one point of failure.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

So… exactly what we already have except instead of c/[email protected] it is c/[email protected]?

EunieIsTheBus ,

What you are describing is basically Mastodon

No. Mastodon and twitter are short message services. Lemmy and reddit are content aggregators.

The moment you aggregate communities across instances you remove the ability to moderate them. Because maybe a hexbear mod wants to remove all mention of the Uyghur people, an ml mod wants to remove all mention of genocide against them, and a zip mod wants to remove all the comments about why genocide is good in a thread about god damned Bluey. Do they all get to delete everything across every instance? Do you start having different views of the same community depending on your home instance?

Instance A also cannot moderate the content of Instance B. Your argument is therefore invalid. The point of federation is that instances can agree on a common set of rules and values or not. In that case they defederate from each other. However, this doesn’t work in practice as communities are centralized. Obviously, most of us agree that lemmy.ml is a problem but we don’t federate just because they ‘own’ the instance.

socialmedia ,

If we keep going we might accidentally reinvent Usenet news.

Not saying that like its a bad thing, just saying we might be able to take some inspiration from there.

urska ,

Cant talk about shit nowadays that the left doesnt want to. Europe and Canada are being invaded by muslims and indians where they are already making demands without being citizens and creating social havoc. Cant criticize Israel either.

Hadriscus ,

Oh no please not this shit

urska ,

Thanks for proving my point.

Hadriscus ,

Look, I’d love to discuss, but usually with this kind of bigotry it amounts to pissing in a violin. There’s no room for hate in my world

Hadriscus ,

You’re free to talk all you like, in fact -but you’re going to be rightfully considered a dipshit. It comes with the territory. Be prepared, my fragile friend.

barsoap ,

s/about /bull/

i_ben_fine ,

Would rather have .ml or hexbear than whatever this is

assassin_aragorn ,

Yeah it was only a matter of time before you explicitly lumped Indians into the persona non grata list. I always knew you guys would eventually just say “fuck all brown people”. This is exactly why Indians born in the West to Indian immigrants have strong solidarity with other brown people regardless of their religion. We don’t trust you conservatives and never will.

You came invaded our ancestral country, subjugated us, stole our natural resources, and divided us. You still have items you stole from us in your museums. And you have the audacity to say that Indians and Muslims are invading Europe after Europe invaded us and stole from us.

Naw. This is why we’re on the left. Fuck you all. If you say we’re invading you, then fuck it. We are invading you, and we’ve raised “anchor babies” as sleeper cell spies – and we’re going to save the West from you pathetic conservative colonizers.

Strawberry ,

i love it when racist Europeans show their ass

barsoap ,

I’d like to note for the record that I downvoted you not for using the term “racist”, that definitely seems to be an accurate assessment, but for saying “European”. For one, a European racist wouldn’t care about Canada, for two, Indians aren’t really a large or noticeable or denigrated immigrant group anywhere in Europe but maybe the UK, and for three, UK racists wouldn’t care about “the continent”.

No, what we’re looking at here seems to be a Canadian racist. They can keep them.

Snowpix ,
@Snowpix@lemmy.ca avatar

As a Canadian, we don’t want him either. How about we dump 'em in the ocean?

barsoap ,

Hmm… Gulag on Hans’ Island?

Snowpix ,
@Snowpix@lemmy.ca avatar

We’ll have to ask Denmark and see what they think. I’m sure they won’t mind…

Strawberry ,

ok

pukeko ,

Whenever this topic comes up, I find myself wondering what these folks do all day. Not in a Boomer “don’t these people have jobs?!?” way, but more … what is it like to be them? Do they just sit in front of the computer looking for conversations to disrupt? What is their daily existence? Because I find their volume and dedication to what they do fascinating. Cancerous and absurd, but also fascinating.

stoly ,

This was my experience. My first interaction was me asking a question in good faith. I was then attacked en masse and banned. When I asked about it, I was told how I was a terrible person for not already knowing and believing what they do.

pukeko ,

Keeping in mind that “knowing and believing what they do” is itself a perilous notion because one of them might be a “Post-Madrid 1933 purple throated” Marxist while another might be a “Modernist new path” Marxist (I made those terms up). I mean I know “lol factions” is an old discussion with the farthest left, but they can’t even agree with each other.

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

Honestly once you sort of realize that you can’t be on the left and also support authoritarianism/fascism (regardless of the label or intent) the factionalism kind of isn’t as troublesome or confusing.

You end up with those who believe in supporting progress informed by rational, current understanding of reality and then you have those who cling to failed ideas the same way conservatives do.

The left can debate solutions and data reasonably without splitting into contradicting camps, people just need to always check and see if they’re actually oriented towards the defining principles of left wing politics; bolstering human rights and well being, strengthening democratic institutions and outcomes using the most current understanding of the world we have available to us right now.

The left, by definition, flexes and adapts to reality to achieve an outcome, conservativism is when people try to bend reality to fit their ideology.

pukeko ,

My wife and I have a saying we find ourselves using far, FAR too often: “Conservatism lurks in the most unexpected places…”

JimSamtanko ,

Yes.

fine_sandy_bottom ,

I really want to understand their relationship with the CCP.

Do they genuinely believe the shit they’re peddling or are they paid propagandists or is their something more nefarious afoot.

barsquid ,

They get half a yuan per post. Not sure what the rate is on banning or deleting comments.

PrettyFlyForAFatGuy ,

i’ve seen you say this more than once. do you have a source?

ryan_ ,

This is what’s being referred to:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

rah , (edited )

Do they genuinely believe the shit they’re peddling or are they paid propagandists or is their something more nefarious afoot.

From my interactions, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re mostly seriously broken people who’ve discovered Marx, convinced themselves that capitalism is the cause of all suffering and believe socialism is the solution that will free them from their trauma. The degree of their attachment to socialism is a reflection of the degree of their suffering and brokenness.

If they weren’t so toxic, they’d be deserving of compassion and forebearance.

boredtortoise ,

It is an interesting question because even China doesn’t believe in the disinformation they spread. It’s just a tactic

barsquid ,

This is their job. They get half a yuan (wumao) per post.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

The only thing you can really do is create new communities and wait for them to grow.

TrickDacy ,

I am surprised that my comments on that post weren’t removed.

It is pretty horrifying that there are people in positions of moderating what thoughts are allowed to propagate who deny or cover up the events that took place in Tienanmen Square.

IndustryStandard ,

What did you say and what was the removal reason?

TrickDacy ,

I said they **weren’t **removed. I think I was just commenting that China has covered up that it happened.

IndustryStandard ,

Oh thanks. Sometimes ml posts end up on my world feed but the comments look normal and have many world users.

When I read about people getting banned from ml for posting what they post on world I wonder if the ml mods ban world users in those posts at random or I am missing something.

the_post_of_tom_joad ,

Tankies make liberals uncomfortable because liberals believe they are the furthest left you can go before you become wrong and bad (forgetting that there are folks to their right on the political spectrum who think they are.

The worst thing for a tankie like me was running here to get away from the insane msn-pilled discourse, finding some actual leftists, only to have have leredditors chase me down sayin’ i am following them.

I mean shit I’m just trying to talk leftist ideals that haven’t been twisted into neoliberal business-school-bullshit talking points. I care bout the same shit yall do, i just don’t think the DNC is going to help us get there. That prospect does not make me happy, believe me.

Libs? If you are burning with desire to debate politics? I am begging… begging you to understand that the education in school and the news yesterday on the tv Aren’t. Acumen.(why would they be more credible than the commercials in between them?), and do not fear but embrace the idea/possibility that there’s an iota of a chance you might not actually be right.

Does this notion mean i am? No. But if you don’t think you might be wrong then you’ll likely never find out you are.

buddascrayon ,

a tankie like me

I’m not sure you understand exactly what a tankie is. I mean, do you really think it’s all right to sacrifice (I.E. straight up murder) people to the ideals of communism and socialism?

Being ultra liberal is fine IMO, even having the attitude that we might have to have use violence to overthrow of our government in order to get liberal ideals to be a part of our system is somewhat okay. But to think that our government, should it become communist, should be allowed to kill people in order to maintain a socialist or communist society is just straight up wrong and as far as I know that’s what a tankie is, someone who thinks that Tiananmen Square and Stalin’s reign of terror was just a necessary evil in order to strengthen the communist societal norm.

areyouevenreal ,

But to think that our government, should it become communist, should be allowed to kill people in order to maintain a socialist or communist society is just straight up wrong and as far as I know that’s what a tankie is, someone who thinks that Tiananmen Square and Stalin’s reign of terror was just a necessary evil in order to strengthen the communist societal norm.

All governments kill people. That’s what governments do, specifically militaries do. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong for a socialist or communist nation to defend itself. What’s wrong is countries killing peaceful protesters for no other reason than vocally disagreeing with them. That’s what makes Tiananmen Square and Stalin wrong, not just that they killed people.

buddascrayon ,

Well, I stand corrected. You are, indeed, a tankie.

In that case, get fucked. Governments murdering its citizens, or anyone for that matter, for any reason whatsoever is not okay.

areyouevenreal ,

I wasn’t the one calling myself a tankie, learn to read usernames. I am not a marxist so can’t be one anyway. Are you a pacifist or something? Because it sounds like you oppose all militarism.

zbyte64 ,

But to think that our government, should it become communist liberal, should be allowed to kill people in order to maintain a socialist or communist liberal or capitalist society

Seems to me the real objection should not be the ideology but the existence of any system that must murder the people it governs in order to continue to govern.

areyouevenreal ,

That’s not what’s happening here. Not all marxists are okay with covering up Tiananmen Square or supporting the CCP. I used to be part of a Trotskyist org and they wouldn’t be caught dead supporting either Stalin or the CCP. Anarchists certainly aren’t okay with it, and they are further left than you are. Stop pretending all your enemies are liberals.

the_post_of_tom_joad ,

Liberals aren’t my enemies though? I’m not pretending anything. Liberals are very high representation in lotsa comms and they are who i’m talking to seeing how this is a thread with a liberal complaining about me. Capice? Let’s not fight, let’s just chill today

areyouevenreal ,

Bro your the one supporting genocide denial, that’s the reason people are fighting you. Stop doing things like that and maybe “the liberals” and everyone else will leave you alone. In fact no one actually mentioned liberals until you did. You are the problem here.

the_post_of_tom_joad ,

Bro your the one supporting genocide denia-

No.

areyouevenreal ,

So you acknowledge the Uighur cultural genocide then? Also you weren’t denying the Tiananmen square massacre earlier? Why are you in this comment section if you don’t deny these things? It’s specifically complaining about Tankies who deny both those atrocities committed by the CCP.

cygon ,

Tankies make liberals uncomfortable because liberals believe they are the furthest left you can go

Without trying to be combative, but that sounds like one of those tidbits which one side believes about the other, circulated only to divide. At least I don’t have the impression that it is a view with any footing amongst liberal-minded people.

2021 PEW poll showing that 89% of liberals and 24% of conservatives support tuition-free college.

Most liberals want to move further left, ideas like free college and public education, public transport, less corporate power and splitting up large corporations, even unconditional basic income, etc. are popular with the majority. Just violent revolution and authoritarianism won’t roll, after all, liberal means “live and let live.”

As a mixed-ideology lefty (maybe I fit within your definition of liberal), I’m not worried about tankies being too far left, not at all, rather, I am tempted to think of them as confused right wingers believing themselves to be “the left.”

the_post_of_tom_joad ,

Yeah that’s horseshoe theory my man! There is a left further than liberal! It’s not like liberal is the end of the pol spec right? It’s hard to get my tone right here but the idea itself that tankies are right wing is itself one of those things I’ve side believes about the other.

Also, i don’t hate liberals, i like em! I was one even. My family’s lib. I want to help libs move left of course, like you guys wanna make me see the light. The ones who tell me my politics like they know better are the only ones who annoy me and an example of the type of commenter i tried to leave behind.

areyouevenreal ,

Except tankies are authoritarians, and some even support the CCP, who are basically a dictatorship. How is this left wing again?

I am not going to say that tankies are right wing like this guy you’re replying to. What they are is confused people who tried to join the left for the wrong reasons and ended up becoming authoritarians because of it. That or you fell into a cult-like group that spreads misinformation.

Also Tankies saying they like liberals is a new one to me. Normally they like complaining about liberals. I’ve been called a liberal for some of the most asinine shit imaginable, basically just because I don’t immediately agree with them.

pjwestin ,
@pjwestin@lemmy.world avatar

The worst thing for a tankie like me was running here to get away from the insane msn-pilled discourse, finding some actual leftists, only to have have leredditors chase me down sayin’ i am following them.

Uh…tankies and leftists are not the same thing (though the liberals on Political Memes don’t seem to understand the difference). Tankies are authoritarian-apologists. It was coined by British communists who wanted to differentiate themselves from pro-Soviet communists (specifically, communists who were defending the Soviets sending tanks into Hungary). In the modern sense, it’s used to describe communists who defend authoritarian socialist or communist states. If you don’t feel compelled to justify Stalinism, the Tiananmen Square massacre, or the Uyghur genocide, you’re probably not a tankie.

the_post_of_tom_joad ,

weeeeellllll some of those things i am compelled to defend. Mostly in the sense that two of those are terribly misrepresented. I dont count tiennamen square with those other two, but i haven’t read anything on it. So i guess i am a tankie! Anyway I’m not here to change minds so let’s leave it there

pjwestin ,
@pjwestin@lemmy.world avatar

I mean, fair enough, but I’ve never heard anyone use tankie as…well, not a pejorative. Like, I’ve never heard a liberal call themselves a, “libtard.”

the_post_of_tom_joad ,

Yeah you’re probably right that it started out as a prejorative. I’ve personally embraced the term cuz fuck it if I’m gonna get called names for expressing my opinion i may as well own that shit

Nosavingthrow ,

If they are going to call me a horse fucker, well, I guess I better own it.

the_post_of_tom_joad ,

Now you get it!

Nosavingthrow ,

Whatever you say, horse fucker.

AncientMariner ,

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

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

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

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

pyre ,

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

Kaboom ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.dictionary.com/browse/populism

Noun British

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

pyre ,

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

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

PeriodicallyPedantic ,

I don’t think there is a solution.
Effective moderation to protect vulnerable people needs more centralization. Avoiding the influence of bad-actor mods needs more decentralization. The two seem fairly mutually exclusive. Or rather, they trade off against each other.

With more users, having a fractured community wouldn’t be a huge problem, because they could all have critical mass. But with the current user base that is generally not feasible, even for really popular topics.

SpaceCadet OP ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

Defederation of lemmy.ml from the larger instances would be a solution.

PeriodicallyPedantic ,

I’m talking about systemic solutions for the general problem of bad-actor mods.

Defederating an instance is fracturing the community which difficult for a community to withstand with our current user numbers.

Giving mods less power, such as making communities themselves defederated, makes problems for good-faith mods who are trying to protect vulnerable community members.

It’d be neat if the community itself could vote to migrate to a new instance, but that’d be so fraught with abuse that I can’t see it actually working.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

It’d be neat if the community itself could vote to migrate to a new instance

You kind of already can do this. It’s just that instead of voting directly, people choose individually where to go instead. That is also kind of a “vote” - you vote by choosing a community and so whichever gets most votes becomes the new major community of that topic.

There is no need for a systematic solution, it is already in place. The admins/mods of lemmy.ml are acting in questionable ways and people are pointing this out and some are even trying to rally to defederate and trying to get people to move off the instance and all that. This is the systematic solution. The system is working as intended.

PeriodicallyPedantic ,

But again that fractures the community.

You lose all the community history, and not everyone migrates to the new community. You end up with a bunch of new splinter communities, none of which have critical mass to survive.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

You can’t have decentralisation without the possibility of some amount of fracturing. I mean decentralization is essentially fractured by design. I think this won’t be such a big problem in the future as instances and communities mature more.

PeriodicallyPedantic ,

I don’t necessarily agree that decentralized is fractured by design, nor that “working as intended” means that it’s the best solution for this/every situation.

I’m saying that as we decentralize, we get both advantages and disadvantages. I’m saying that this is a situation where we can’t both have our cake and eat it too.

For example:
We could decentralize communities themselves, preventing them from fracturing. Instead of having communities hosted on a single instance, communities could be feeds aggregating all posts tagged as belonging to that community. Then if you defederate an instance you simply stop seeing posts from users in that instance.
But then good-faith mods are defanged and can no longer protect vulnerable community members from antagonistic actors.

I think my straw example tradeoff is a bad one, that’s too much decentralization of power.

GreatDong3000 ,

Man do you know how many instances exist? I hate this idea of trying to coordinate defederation across all bigger instances all at once. You have the option of migrating to an instance which is already defederated from them, or hosting your own instance and defederating from whoever you want. You can also mute them. Don’t come to a decentralized network with the expectation of imposing centralized decision making behaviour?

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Effective moderation to protect vulnerable people needs more centralization.

No it doesn’t. Centralization would make it so that if there are bad mods, you would have nowhere to go instead. That’s how reddit is - if you don’t like the mods in a subreddit, tough luck.

Decentralisation helps by providing alternatives if the existing mods/admins go bad.

PeriodicallyPedantic ,

I actually already discussed that if you go back and read the comment that you’re replying to

ThePyroPython ,

And thus the inherent dichotomy of a decentralised social network is revealed: social networks require the network effect for good senses of communities which means one instance will end up hosting most of the bigger communities, therefore true decentralisation can’t occur on Lemmy but it’s a step in the right direction.

Lucidlethargy ,

I think all instances need to defederate. This is totally inexcusable. We shouldn’t be attached and well connected to a CCP-controlled (influenced or directly) community. This is propaganda, pure and simple.

It’s not a problem to have dissenting opinions to widely held beliefs, but it is a problem to have those injected constantly into our streams while all opposition is silently erased and curated to artifically support state-sponsored CCP propaganda.

flango ,

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

fine_sandy_bottom ,

This just wouldn’t work.

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

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

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

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@startrek.website avatar

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

As it should always be.

JimSamtanko , (edited )

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

asret ,

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

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

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

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

wahming ,

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

asret ,

Thanks!

I missed the site wide rules.

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

JimSamtanko ,

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

ZombiFrancis ,

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

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

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

Gullible ,

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

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

ZombiFrancis ,

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

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

taipan ,
@taipan@lemmy.world avatar

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

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

Twelve20two ,

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

ZombiFrancis ,

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

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

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

Gullible ,

Who’s from threads?

ZombiFrancis ,

:|

Gullible ,

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

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

ZombiFrancis ,

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

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

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

Gullible ,

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

mightyfoolish ,

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

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

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

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

taipan ,
@taipan@lemmy.world avatar

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

mightyfoolish ,

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

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

figaro ,

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

mightyfoolish ,

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

figaro ,

Is genocide denial not racism?

mightyfoolish ,

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

GreatDong3000 ,

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

Buddahriffic ,

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

figaro ,

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

LunarSpaceDani ,

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

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