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 “https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/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:

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:

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/linux@some.random.other.instance.world 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.

  • mightyfoolish@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1212·
    6 months ago

    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/worldnews@lemmy.ml even though I’m happy with how pro-Palestine those people are. The only community I look at Lemmy.ml is /c/linux@lemmy.ml. 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@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      6 months ago

      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@lemmy.worldEnglish
        71·
        6 months ago

        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@lemdro.idEnglish
      61·
      6 months ago

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

      • mightyfoolish@lemmy.worldEnglish
        25·
        6 months ago

        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.