One of the biggest topics of these days is that of mods in lemmy.ml banning and censoring people because they’re Tankies. This has had a rather sizeable discussion of people agreeing and even arguing for defederating ml. I’m sure a lot of people are arguing from good intentions, but there’s also bad faith actors among...
The Washington Post has written twice this spring about allegations that have cropped up in British court proceedings involving its new publisher and CEO, Will Lewis. In both instances Lewis pushed his newsroom chief hard not to run the story....
The Washington Post has written twice this spring about allegations that have cropped up in British court proceedings involving its new publisher and CEO, Will Lewis. In both instances Lewis pushed his newsroom chief hard not to run the story.
According to several people at the newspaper, then-Executive Editor Sally Buzbee emerged rattled from both discussions in March and in May. Lewis’ efforts were first reported by the New York Times. The second Post article in May, which was thorough and detailed, ran just days before Lewis announced his priorities for the paper, which is financially troubled.
On Thursday, a spokesperson for Lewis denied the publisher had pressured his editor, saying, “That is not true. That is not what happened.”
Buzbee did not recuse herself from the stories, which were overseen by Managing Editor Matea Gold, and drew upon reporters from three desks. Lewis did not block the story from running. He unexpectedly announced Buzbee’s departure on Sunday night, about three-and-a-half weeks after the longer story ran, along with a restructuring of the newsroom’s leadership structure.
It is not the first time that Lewis has engaged in intense efforts to head off coverage about him in ways that many U.S. journalists would consider deeply inappropriate.
…
In December, I wrote the first comprehensive piece based on new documents cited in a London courtroom alleging that Lewis had helped cover up a scandal involving widespread criminal practices at media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids. (Lewis has previously denied the allegations.)
At that time, Lewis had just been named publisher and CEO by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, but had not yet started. In several conversations, Lewis repeatedly — and heatedly —offered to give me an exclusive interview about the Post’s future, as long as I dropped the story about the allegations.
At that time, the same spokesperson, who works directly for Lewis from the U.K. and has advised him since his days at the Wall Street Journal, confirmed to me that an explicit offer was on the table: drop the story, get the interview.
NPR published the story nonetheless. On Thursday, the spokesperson declined comment about that offer.
OP has been here two months, and they were shocked to find out an instance literally named after Karl Marx and John Lennin would pretend to be on the left but support authoritarian governments…
And they assume since they just “discovered” it, no one else knows.
How is “defederat[ing] from everyone but lemmygrad and hexbear” not instance politics? Politics, at its core, is the way we distribute political goods, such as physical goods, access to information (including instance posts), and legitimacy, to name a few of the options. What is your definition of politics?
I suspect there’s way worse on the fediverse than Jailbait. There was a list posted a few months back of all the most defederated instance, and tankies didn’t even get a look in. I didn’t dare click them. Some of the domain names alone made me feel like I was going on a watchlist for even knowing about them.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !worldnews
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !usa
Courtesy of Roger Ailes and the invention of political talk radio, The United States was the breeding ground for media manipulation tactics that later arrived in Europe, and those have been most heavily utilized by right-wing actors – think Sky News/The Daily Mail/The Sun in the UK, or instance. When you poll most people about what they want out of government here in the US, they tend to be in alignment with “liberal” values in the US or center-left parties in Europe, but when you ask them if they support implementations of those values by name (i.e., “Social Security” or “Medicaid” or “food stamps” instead of just asking “should the government help needy people stay fed and healthy?” people who consume right-wing media suddenly flip to be against those policies, because they are brainwashed by their media diet to oppose them even though in principle they express support for them.
Bottom line, after almost forty years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and thirty years of Fox News deliberately manipulating the American right to become hateful and reactionary in spite of their own natural impulses, the gap between left and right has become incredibly difficult to bridge in any meaningful way. IMO, the only hope for reconciliation is to push those extreme voices out of the mainstream in order to limit their ability to influence the gullible, and there’s just not many viable mechanisms to do that.
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...
There’s an instance level setting to hide moderator names from unauthenticated and/or non-mod users. They probably have that enabled. Those actions federate, though, so the mod names won’t be hidden if viewed from an instance that doesn’t hide the mod names.
Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.
Lemmy.ml also has the funny quirk that it doesnt have a proper legal imprint or team list afaik. So we don’t have actual transparent information on who is on that instances admin team and who is not. Iirc only one of dessalines and nutomic is on that admin team anymore.
Nothing good or productive would come out of showing mod names in mod logs. Would just have people doing witch hunts on user level instead of instances like they do now
It’s a good trend, but I still think it would behoove the admin of more reasonable instances to make it more obvious that there is a sizable and aggressive group of people with nearly unlimited (internet) power, and making it clear that they do not associate at all with those instances/individual practices.
There is a huge dearth of naming and shaming bad actors, and it’s going to reach a size where people won’t do their research as I did, but will assume that all of the fediverse is run by authoritarian Communists and (not) engage based on that.
And that wouldn’t be an unfair understanding, given who the creators of Lemmy are, who their disciples/mods are, and their influence across the platform.
Lemmy really runs the risk of being “left wing Truth Social” otherwise.
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.
I don’t mind being banned from the ml instance. The issue is their users come to all the other instances and use the same old strategies to stifle any speech by engaging extremely hyperbolic language and name-calling. The goal is to have a chilling effect on any discourse where their opinions are scrutinized in the slightest.
They can’t engage with any topics or offer counter arguments. Every response is:
“I don’t know how to respond to your argument. You must be a _____________[insert ‘racist’ or ‘genocide defending’ or ‘fascist’ or my new favorite ‘zionist’]”
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.
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).
On another note, are you Ukrainian by any chance brother?
I am. Although nobody believes that because I don’t praise our glorious Lord and Savior Zelensky.
I really feel for you and I can tell that the draft is reality and not a joke for you if that’s the case.
Thanks man, really appreciate it! It’s rare to hear that on this instance :(
I hope I wasn’t rude
You are perfectly reasonable, I wish the rest of the instance could participate in a civil discussion instead of name-calling and ad hominem.
stay safe
Thanks again man.
I am safe, as I’ve left Ukraine before the war started, so unless other countries start cooperating with Zelensky’s regime and kidnap people from the streets [and send them to Ukraine to die] there is no threat for me.
Unfortunately it’s not true for some of my family members, my friends, and millions of Ukrainians :(
This is the best solution - the answers are in our hands
There is the problem of network effect though. People who frequent communities on lemmy.ml are often blissfully unaware of how problematic that instance is, like I was until a few days ago, and so they’re unlikely to just move as they have no immediate reason to.
It’s easy to say just pack up and move … but I’ve been really struggling to find an alternative for !linux, to name one example. The equivalent communities !linux and !linux are rather stale with days old posts without comments.
So I think it’s not just something an individual user can solve for themselves, and I think that the larger instances also have a role to play here. If they would defederate from lemmy.ml, it would urge users along to move away from lemmy.ml communities towards communities on other, more suitable instances.
Next to that, we should also spread awareness about the lemmy.ml problem, and that was my intent when I originally made this post.
[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.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !worldnews
That only shows you the communities that your particular instance knows about. But it’s not even all communities over all federated instances.
An instance only “knows” about a community on another instance once both (a) it has federated with the other instance and (b) someone has explicitly triggered a search for “!communityname” on an instance. Like, that community doesn’t get added to the list of known communities on federated instances just because someone has created it.
For example, take bbs.9tail.net, a small lemmy instance.
You can see that that it’s federated with lemmy.world on its instances page:
And it’s only blocked a single instance, lemmygrad.ml.
But (as of this writing, and that could change if someone goes and starts triggering searches for stuff on there), it only has two pages of communities, with 63 (in a quick count) known. There are far more than 63 communities on lemmy.world alone, not to mention on all the other instances that bbs.9tail.net is federated with.
Lemmyverse.net, on the other hand, crawls all the instances it can find and builds a full index. Currently has over 27,000 communities. Once you get a “!community” name from there, you can trigger a search for it on your home instance, and your home instance will learn about it. But until you or someone else does that, your home instance won’t know about that community.
In response to the lemmy.ml moderation polemic: beware of bad faith agents!
One of the biggest topics of these days is that of mods in lemmy.ml banning and censoring people because they’re Tankies. This has had a rather sizeable discussion of people agreeing and even arguing for defederating ml. I’m sure a lot of people are arguing from good intentions, but there’s also bad faith actors among...
'Washington Post' publisher tried to kill a story about him. It wasn’t the first time. (www.npr.org)
The Washington Post has written twice this spring about allegations that have cropped up in British court proceedings involving its new publisher and CEO, Will Lewis. In both instances Lewis pushed his newsroom chief hard not to run the story....
The Washington Post is about to embrace the darkness (www.sfgate.com)
YSK: lemmy.ml is managed by tankies, and lead lemmy developer is a tankie
Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide...
Are you a 'tankie'
edit: this is now closed future comments won’t be counted...
Solar project to destroy thousands of Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert (ca.news.yahoo.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.crimedad.work/post/91685...
Gay Republican candidate melts down when he figured out that his party is homophobic (www.lgbtqnation.com)
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...
Number of monthly active Lemmy users rising again
lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats...