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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.

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

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.

merthyr1831 ,

Join literally any other community if you’re upset at their moderation, which again is only upsetting y’all because it doesn’t align to Reddit and the US state department

Hadriscus ,

It’s upsetting because of the reasons listed in the post, and everywhere else in the thread

Nom ,

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.

Very true, I saw a post about censorship posted on !mildlyinfuriating that happened in !comics (instead of another instance with the same subject community) possibly because of this reason OP mentioned. This complaint post was also deleted from the community because it was violating the rules which I suppose it was since this was the reason:

alt text

The title of the post in the picture above was the reason given by the comics mod:

alt text

My unpopular opinion however is that simply de-federating won’t help as it just promotes those instances into becoming louder echo chambers. I think the simpler solution would be to have a dedicated community for mod abuse (I’m aware of !modabuse but .world blocked /c/piracy so…) , so users can be aware of said issues and create or migrate to different communities as we see fit. Besides, users can simply block entire instances for themselves. Please don’t comment on the paradox of tolerance as I just mentioned blocking for oneself already.

P.S.

Devs please make it easier to browse the modlog, having to press the next button is bafflingly tedious. I had to resort to editing the url to browse faster, add a jump to by time/date or something.

JimSamtanko ,

I have them blocked and I can say I’m not missing anything at all.

secretlyaddictedtolinux ,

Thanks for posting this.

I read the article you posted also.

I think the article is likely entirely true. One of the difficulties I have, as a regular reader not highly educated in Asian politics and history, is that I know Western governments do lie in order to protect their interests. Not only that, many of their rules allow them to lie. There are gag orders, and levels of secret classifications, and ps-ops and we all know that exists.

I am pro free speech and pro protest rights. I think since China does not allow free speech it’s likely the entire post is completely true. I really wish I could believe it completely. One thing that many Western pro-free speech countries don’t understand is that lying frequently, even if it’s sanctioned by the government and justified somehow, means they lose moral credibility with the truth of anything they say. Is it the truth this time… or is this one of the lies?

I still want to live in a world of free speech and women and LGBT people having rights and Western governments seem to be the best at doing this, but I just wish I could believe the article you linked without any doubt at all.

If it’s really that bad on lemmy.ml, couldn’t all the communities be replicated? I use lemmy.world and don’t know if there’s an option for me to block lemmy.ml unless I change federations. The plight of the poor and concentration of wealth among the upper classes has become very bad, and environmental problems will likely kill us all within 300 years (capitalism and democracy have environmentally failed) but I don’t want to be a part of something in which mere discussion of different views results in banning and deletion of comments, even if I have very pro-poor people views.

wahming ,

Using the website interface, you can go to your settings and block specific instances from there.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

I’ve commented there on a /news community with sourced points to make my argument and was basically told to shut the F up and had my comments deleted.

So I blocked the community.

I’m not sure how to deal with extremist mods any other way. Their instance, their community, and other than defederating and putting a lot of effort into restarting and growing any valuable communities on another instance while keeping the undesirable .ml gang out, I’m not sure there is any other solution.

SpaceCadet OP ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

The problem is more that they’re holding several large bona fide communities hostage this way. For example !linux is by far the most active Linux community on Lemmy, and because of network effect it’s not easy to get people to move to another instance.

It would take something huge to get people to move, for example some of the larger instances like lemmy.world defederating lemmy.ml.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

I don’t disagree that it’s an issue, the only thing I can offer is that Linux shouldn’t be a community full of controversy needing block/bans of participants - the issue being is views the .ml mods do espouse being placed deliberately or left as propaganda.

MolochAlter , (edited )

I fucking hate tankies, but.

The problem i have, every time this conversation happens, is that cutting them out doesn’t solve anything, and that I don’t want to be coddled.

The 2 main issues we have, as lemmy at large, is that there are some wildly uneven standards enforced across instances and that we have no say about that. There was that hugbox instance that would ban people for being rude and yeeted itself into the void, there was hexbear that got de-federated for its mods actively encouraging being subversive (despite its users receiving intolerable psychic damage after 5 minutes in any lib space where people are free to call them names, or was that lemmygrad?) and now we’re talking about removing lemmy.ml for the fact that its mods are somehow sentient pieces of actual shit.

And while I agree to all of those reasons, I don’t think defederating is the answer.

Every time we fragment the fediverse we make it overall worse.

Average users don’t even understand what they’re looking at when it comes to decentralized networks, let alone can they understand that there’s politicking between instances and such. If I were told “you can make an account on instance x or y, but they don’t talk to eachother so if you want to see stuff on instance y you can’t make an account on instance x” as a rando, I would go back to reddit, the only reason I didn’t is that i really hate the app and I am tech/net savvy enough to handle this.

I am a tad more radical when it comes to speech than most, and I accept that, but I do believe that these people have no power so long as they can’t abuse moderation, so the answer to the question “how do we handle open propagandists”, to me, is to create perhaps a “moderation neutrality charter” and making it very clear which instances subscribe to it, having each instance’s moderation team maybe be required to weigh in on appeals to bans from other instances to ensure a certain amount of balance.

That would take care of that real quick. They can subscribe to the charter and start abiding by neutral moderation standards agreed to across the board by some democratic standard, or they can defederate themselves.

That’s actually something twitter does right with the idea of community notes, that for the note to be published it needs to be agreed on by multiple parties that don’t usually agree in those votes, to ensure there is a bipartisan agreement.

I know this is perhaps too lofty for a ragtag group of essentially microblogging self-hosters, but a man can dream.

secretlyaddictedtolinux ,

Would there be able to be some sort of online meeting for the different instances with someone mediating to try to find a way to fragment less but also not ban certain views?

Or could there be a settings option to let readers view all deleted posts on certain instances that would make everyone happy?

It’s a good point you’re making about fragmentation and the problems it could create.

MolochAlter ,

Man, I genuinely don’t know.

I’d expect this to be some sort of public cross-instance structure that is readonly to users so we could spectate the conversations and maybe up/downvote, where you could see what essentially amounts to the meeting minutes in the form of a normal thread?

But before we even get there there’d need to be an agreement and either a fork of the core lemmy code to implement this or we’d need to get the lemmy devs on board and LMAO good luck with that, we’re literally discussing creating a system to divest them of their power and they’re ideologically authoritarian.

rah ,

Every time we fragment the fediverse we make it overall worse.

Only if your conception of better/worse is focussed on user count rather than user quality.

Average users don’t even understand what they’re looking at when it comes to decentralized networks

Refraining from defederation won’t change that.

MolochAlter ,

Only if your conception of better/worse is focussed on user count rather than user quality.

No, decidedly not. Unless out there there is an instance whose users are all all-around paste eaters, every instance has some users worth keeping in some conversation, furthermore political alignment says nothing about insight or competence in fields unrelated to politics.

A nazi is just as likely to know how to fix an obscure bug in some game or program than a tankie or a liberal, people are more complicated than their political allegiances and blanket removing an instance does us a disservice as much as it does them.

Refraining from defederation won’t change that.

Refraining from making the fediverse an archipelago where people refuse to talk to anyone who had the misfortune of picking the wrong instance is going to make that better, yes.

Not everyone who made an instance on lemmy.ml is a tankie. I almost did, and the only reason I didn’t is that they very gracefully and clearly state that Lemmy.ml is the flagship but not the largest instance.

rah ,

every instance has some users worth keeping in some conversation

That doesn’t contradict what I said.

Refraining from making the fediverse an archipelago where people refuse to talk to anyone who had the misfortune of picking the wrong instance

The fediverse cannot now be made that because the fediverse is already that.

retrospectology ,
@retrospectology@lemmy.world avatar

Tankie mods don’t moderate in good faith though, to do so would entirely undermine their political objectives. That’s kind of the point of the thread here – to defederate so that the tankies aren’t deciding what people can or cannot see and say.

I don’t see how the charter idea would actually help with that but maybe I’m not understanding the mechanics of how other mods “weigh in” on ban appeals from other instances.

MolochAlter ,

Tankie mods don’t moderate in good faith though

Yeah, that’s why I’m suggesting making mods of other instances review ban appeals.

If you ban someone because you’re butthurt your precious red-brown alliance is being besmirched, mods from instances that don’t suck Stalin’s dick on the daily will hopefully call you out on it and force you to reverse the ban or defederate.

My hope is to make it so defederation is not something we do to undesirable instances, but that they do to themselves.

The latter is preferable because it requires an instance to be so ideologically far gone that its own denizens would agree with this over replacing the mod team, whereas the former only really needs a bad enough opinion of the instance from its neighbours, which IMO is not a good standard.

merthyr1831 ,

go back to reddit if you want to live in the bubble of “America does nothing wrong”

SpaceCadet OP ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

Living in the bubble of “CCP did nothing wrong (and we will ban you from all your favorite communities if you dare to disagree)” isn’t exactly a great alternative.

Hadriscus ,

See, I don’t think anybody says that

Belastend ,

Showing pictures of the protesters murdered at TS is absolving the US of all wrong i guess.

Snowpix ,
@Snowpix@lemmy.ca avatar

This is a classic strawman argument. Nobody is reasonably arguing “Americs does nothing wrong”. Criticism of the East is not implicit support for the West, nor vice versa. Turns out, both can be wrong. Ain’t that a surprise?

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

As a marxist, I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism. And I don’t even understand how people can stay with “Stalin was not so bad”, knowing that he never planned to apply the last state of the Communist theory, and even if it did, massacre are not acceptable (sounds obvious), same applying with China and their open market.
In my country (France), Stalinism isn’t a thing, all communists are against what happend in USSR, and most are anti-china.

finder585 ,

I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism.

It’s because tankies are just contrarians that use communist ideology as a vehicle to be anti-west / anti-United States (anti-liberal democracy). Tankies will defend any cause or ideology that is against ‘the west’ even if that means happily ignoring the blatant homophobic, genocidal and repressive authoritarianism.

Hadriscus ,

That describes them well imo

Doom ,

wow this is literally them

Bernie_Sandals ,
@Bernie_Sandals@lemmy.world avatar

It’s called second campism, and it’s been happening for a long time, it just used to make more sense when it could actually seem like there was two hegemonic camps during the cold war (still an oversimplistic view).

Now they just support any regime that’s anti-US/the original capitalist camp because they have no hegemonic camp of their own to support, just a broad smattering of authoritarian regimes with completely different ideologies.

Lianodel ,

And capitalist regimes. The Russian Federation was literally founded by a betrayal of a reformist movement in the USSR, and China consulted with Milton Goddamn Friedman on their economy, ending up with billionaires. I even saw .ml users crying about Russian *oligarchs" having their assets seized (“stolen,” as they said), and unironically citing Matt Taibbi. Not even “back in the day” Taibbi, but literally The Twitter Files. Using bought & paid for corporate propaganda to make their point.

They’re just campists. I don’t want to run afoul of a “No True Scotsman” situation, but fuck, for people who seem to think they’re the Only True Socialists, they’re willing to drop socialism in an instant if it means they can be edgy dickheads on the internet.

Drivebyhaiku ,

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.

masquenox ,

When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies

You complain about the tankies’ whataboutist replies “critical of the USA and the west” - yet your very first comment up there proves that you, too, were very quick to bring the west into a discussion about Tiananmen.

but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

You think the liberal hive mind here on lemmy.world is (somehow) more “reasonable” than the views held by tankies?

By what metrics are you measuring this (alleged) “reasonable-ness”?

stephen01king ,

There are lots of comments on that thread trying to divert the issue by pointing out the violence done by the western countries. I would assume his comment was in response to one of these comments, so he wouldn’t be the one to bring up the West into the discussion.

masquenox ,

There are lots of comments on that thread trying to divert the issue by pointing out the violence done by the western countries

Yeah, I know - me (and all the other leftists) were dealing with tankies long before these libs even knew what the term tankie meant.

A liberal showing up and pretending that the west (supposedly) puts “attention on those misdeeds to ensure future generations don’t repeat the mistakes” is an utterly fallacious piece of propaganda that any leftist is going to debunk hard no matter what is being discussed. All they actually achieved is to give the tankies a justification to divert the issue.

I have no idea why libs think they are politically competent enough to argue with tankies - they aren’t even competent enough to deal with their alt-right cousins.

SpaceCadet OP ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

I didn’t react to any of the “but the West also…” comments. I replied directly to the top level of the post, linking to an article that goes in depth on what actually happened as most people in the West nowadays only know about the iconic tank man image.

stringere ,

We found the thin skinned tankie.

masquenox ,

Oh, look… a liberal that doesn’t know what the term tankie means.

Yawn.

AhismaMiasma ,

You appear to be lacking critical thickness in the rolled homogeneous armor of your Type 57.

masquenox ,

Oh, look… another liberal that doesn’t know what the term tankie means.

Is there any one of you libs that have a smidgen of political competence to demonstrate here?

AhismaMiasma ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    masquenox ,

    Yeah, you just happen to buy into liberal claptrap for reasons that are totally not the same as every other liberal that hates having their ideology named and shamed.

    Okay, totally-not-a-liberal.

    cloudless ,

    For people who want to avoid all content from lemmy.ml, including posts and comments:

    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.

    mal3oon ,

    I’m half retarded, any videos explaining the structure of Lemmy? No idea the difference between .ml and .cafe, is it supposed to be different subreddits? Or different websites?

    Blaze ,
    @Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

    Hello,

    Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.cafe are like Gmail and Outlook, different services that can still send email to each other in a normal configuration.

    Except here Lemmy.cafe decided to block Lemmy.ml. Using Lemmy.cafe you can still interact with for instance lemmy.world communities and users for instance

    cloudless ,

    Not video, but I will try to explain it in a simple way:

    Lemmy instances are individual websites that run the Lemmy software. These instances are operated by different people or organizations and can have their own unique topics, rules, and communities.

    Lemmy instances federate using the ActivityPub protocol. This protocol allows different servers, or instances, to communicate and share data such as posts, comments, and community interactions.

    Different instances use the same software, but are managed by different admins.

    For more detail about the admin of lemmy.ml, please refer to this post: lemmy.world/post/16239454

    Schadrach ,

    The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to email.

    You know how you might have a gmail address, your friend might have a protonmail address and your parents might still have their old aol email address? But you can all still freely talk to each other anyways?

    Lemmy is like doing that, but for something like Reddit. If you notice, usernames have an @servername on the end and just like an email address that’s the server that person is connecting through. For example, I’m [email protected].

    Which means I log in to lemmy.sdf.org and use their servers to read Lemmy, but I can read, post and comment on communities on any other Lemmy server that is federated with lemmy.sdf.org just like they’re on lemmy.sdf.org just like you can send an email to someone using a different email service and it makes no difference on your end.

    Communities work the same way - so for example [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] are all different communities hosted on different servers with their own separate posts, subscribers, mods etc. And users on any Lemmy server federated with the server that community is on can read, comment, post, etc (mod action notwithstanding).

    This federation thing I keep mentioning is just which servers are willing to talk to which other servers - again you can compare to email. Sometimes email servers pop up to send massive amounts of spam, and when they do mail providers blacklist them and simply ignore all messages from that source. Defederating is the same idea. You use lemmy.world according to your username, so if lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml then you will no longer be able to see any communities @lemmy.ml or read any posts or comments posted by someone @lemmy.ml - to you it will be like lemmy.ml just doesn’t exist.

    If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link labeled “Instances”, which will give you a list of which servers lemmy.world talks to and which ones they’ve specifically blocked. Lemmy.world has a pretty long list of blocked instances.

    One of the reasons I picked SDF’s lemmy instance was because they don’t block **any **instances - as far as SDF is concerned it’s up to the end user what they want to see. Also SDF is kinda a cool entity - they’re a non-profit best known for maintaining public access unix servers and a bunch of retrocomputing stuff (like dial up internet and a gopher server) that has been around since 1987 (the name is literally an old anime reference because they started out as an anime BBS).

    pyre ,

    do you mean i have to make a new account? or is there a way to “move” basically?

    ProdigalFrog ,

    You will need to create a new account, but it is possible to export all of your subscriptions to a new account. There should be a thing you can click for that in your settings menu to download the export file, which you would then import into your new account.

    Your old comments will not transfer, however.

    ryathal ,

    I think some mobile apps have functionality to essentially move your subscription list.

    Crashumbc ,

    Side question, how do you retrieve or see “removed” comments? I get some removed and I’m not sure what they were…

    barsquid ,

    lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=1082…

    SpaceCadet OP ,
    @SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

    Yeah the modlog is where you can normally see them. Mind you they seem to selectively purge the modlog too, presumably to hide their obvious censorship bias.

    Crashumbc ,

    Yeah, that’s one thing reddit did right, ban/removal notifications included a copy of the comment.

    SpaceCadet OP ,
    @SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

    No they don’t. I received a two week ban in the wake of the API protests, never got an explanation why or what comment triggered it.

    Crashumbc ,

    Shrug, my notifications always included it. Maybe the mod just banged you directly or something.

    mightyfoolish ,

    selectively purge the modlog

    Now this would be a good reason to defederate from an instance. Modlog is what keeps mods consistent (right now I don’t like the Lemmy.ml mods rulebrick but at least they were open about what they don’t like).

    merthyr1831 ,

    deleted_by_moderator

    •
    A_Random_Idiot ,

    deleted_by_moderator

    •
    A_Random_Idiot ,

    Lemmy should tell you the text of what was deleted and the mod who deleted it, cause there was nothing uncivil about what I said.

    Flatworm7591 ,
    @Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    I don’t know what to tell ya, I don’t find the word that rhymes with “hanky” offensive at all, especially when it’s applied to someone who seems to fit the bill. I think the main difference between MLs and liberals is that liberals are well aware their governments are flawed and are willing and able to criticize them and protest against bad policies, whereas the MLs are dedicated to the idea that it’s wrong to criticize non-Western governments, because “left unity”, “critical support” etc. This, despite the fact (or maybe because of it) that most of the governments they defend are totalitarian states where government criticism lands you in jail, in a re-education camp, or falling out of a window. This quote sums it up nicely:

    Authoritarians, having argued so doggedly for the domination of a paternalistic state and having therefore turned themselves into ideological infants, then develop a hyper-reductive view of geopolitics; precisely the one, in fact, that a state would like for them to have. “Socialism” becomes pathologically confused with “opposing capitalist nations” or more appropriately, “opposing all states aligned with the United States.” They attempt to simplify the struggles of the entire planet down into two camps, the “bad guy imperialist states” and the “good guy anti-imperialist states.” In doing so, worker emancipation is simplified into a single question: “do you support the imperialists or the anti-imperialists?” Woe be to those who do not submit to their reductive understanding. The statists who advocate this position are completely incapable of even understanding what an “anti-imperialist” entity might look like. They, in fact, simply support one imperialist bloc over the other in a battle of two power-hoarders.

    Daniel Baryon

    cygon ,

    Thanks for bringing this up, it’s really needed.

    Your example is just one of many I’ve seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.

    I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.

    barsquid ,

    I don’t think we can help them. They’re praising the authoritarian state capitalist nation of China as an ideal form of government just because the country lies about being socialist. (The “Chinese characteristics” are billionaires and capitalism.) They need cult deprogramming to re-enter reality. Just like the Trumpanzees who think Donald did a good job.

    For the rest of us, a team should fork the code and the rest of us cut them loose. I came to Lemmy to get away from delusional far-right redditors. I don’t want to read similar idiotic doublethink from “communists” who love capitalism and think North Korea has done nothing wrong.

    PrettyFlyForAFatGuy ,

    You don’t need to do a full lemmy code fork ffs. The problem is moderation style of a specific instance, just set up a new instance and defed from the problem instances.

    barsquid ,

    If we don’t trust them to moderate instances with integrity I don’t know why we would trust them to maintain the source indefinitely. We’ll eventually have to fork even if it doesn’t seem necessary at the moment.

    PrettyFlyForAFatGuy ,

    you can’t trust anyone to maintain source indefinitely. forking now just means everything has to be done twice

    niktemadur ,

    The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign

    That’s too subtle a statement. It is a willful, bad-faith, full-on attack on objective reality via the rewriting of historical facts, redaction of massive volumes of information and constant aggressive, knee-jerk silencing of voices.

    As such, it can also be described as a malicious assault on the mental health of individuals and society as a whole. Their actions a clear example of the type of repressive, miserable society they would have us live in, if given the chance by hook or by crook.

    phoenixz ,

    Makes you wonder if they are supported, or directly controlled by either china or russia

    Delta_V , (edited )

    Or simply working out of troll farms in China or Russia while being bankrolled by Republicans in USA. Same M.O.

    edit: for example: dailydot.com/…/chatgpt-bot-x-russian-campaign-mem…

    Raffster ,

    Yet so few people see this reality. And engage in pointless fights where there is absolutely nothing to gain but only lost time and effort. Meanwhile this strategy seems to work very successfully and not only here…

    Schadrach ,

    I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.

    This is essentially the same problem Reddit has (mods/admins can control what is discussed on their boards), stems from the same place (mods/admins have essentially unlimited power over their boards/instances), and has the same basic solution - let the echo chamber echo chamber and create alternative communities that don’t have that problem. And on the upside, since this is a federated space you can just have [email protected] instead of r/truewhatever7alpha.

    It’s just more noticeable here because the censorious leftward fringe is both more extreme and more aggressive about it.

    At least we haven’t started getting mods running bots to auto-ban anyone who has ever interacted with other specific communities yet.

    hellofriend ,

    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, …

    So what you’re essentially saying is that these moderators are effectively propagandists/state actors for China, Russia, and so on. I left Reddit to get away from psychic attacks like that, so I’m perfectly happy to defed from the instance. Glad I have the option, too.

    barsquid ,

    Defederation is a good step but I think it blocks only posts and leaves you still able to see user comments on other instances.

    cloudless ,

    My account is on lemmy.cafe which has defederated from lemmy.ml

    I never see any comment from lemmy.ml users.

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@startrek.website avatar

    You are talking about user-level blocking, whereas iirc defederation is an instance-level blocking that also stops user comments too, as well as votes.

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