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 [http://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
[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
[https://lemmy.ml/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 [http://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 [http://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
[/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 [http://lemmy.ml] hosted communities in favor of
communities on more reasonable instances.
Lemmy.ml, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, has consistently been accused of improper Federation practices and many instances have decided to ban one or both of the latter by default, with many individual users having already gone further to block the former as well. However, many individual users on lemmy.ml seem unaware of the accusations of the practices of their admins, and some people go so far as to see lemmy.ml as a sort of default instance on the Fediverse.
This discussion promotes wider knowledge of the situation and what might be done about it in the future, in order to e.g. not turn away new potential Federation members (Fedizens?:-) that could otherwise associate what happens on that instance as something relating to the Fediverse as a whole.
.ml very often features criticism about Russia and/or China without being removed. Case in point the Tienanmen square posts yesterday and today.
Ah yes… So much criticism there… Totally allowing outside viewpoints! No overzealous modding happening here! the entire comments of the linked thread is all pro-china going, with many outright claiming that tiananmen square didn’t happen or were a creation of western media.
The other thread named the same thing (cross-post) completely deleted. Notice that “delete” or “removed” isn’t in the modlog. Exactly as OP has stated that admins are doing on some instances.
This is the primary reason I have my own instance. Power tripping mods and admins cannot remove content from my server. I can view all the comments I like WITHOUT the interference of those people. Make my own choices rather than having them made for me.
Now those newer perspectives aren’t per-se correct. Many times you will find Tankies. Had one guy try to deny the Uyghur concentration camps. But I didn’t get banned for disagreeing with him because my replies didn’t consist of “lmao ur a tankie”.
And yet, I’ve been banned from lemmy.ml for saying, verbatim
“Because being critical of a Russian company = racism. At least according to lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml users.” in response to someone else asking why “how is not liking Kaspersky, in and of itself, racist or xenophobic?”. So much “Xenophobia” packed into my answer right? Considering that ban was handed out by dessalines himself. I’m going to have to agree with your “Many times you will find Tankies” statement, and that’s because nearly the whole of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml are all tankies.
So you painted all if lemmy.ml as a tankie fest and got banned. Just like I stated.
Be glad that it’s not for criticizing israel like /news and /politics on .world does. And if you point it out on those instances your comment also gets removed and you get banned.
And as I said. You will have tankies with insane takes. Those usually come from Lemmygrad or Hexbear. .ml is mostly lefties and just a few tankies in the mix. But the people I see getting banned from .ml are not banned for content but the presentation of said content.
Ah yes… So much criticism there… Totally allowing outside viewpoints! No overzealous modding happening here! the entire comments of the linked thread is all pro-china going, with many outright claiming that tiananmen square didn’t happen or were a creation of western media.
The other thread named the same thing (cross-post) completely deleted. Notice that “delete” or “removed” isn’t in the modlog. Exactly as OP has stated that admins are doing on some instances.
This is the primary reason I have my own instance. Power tripping mods and admins cannot remove content from my server. I can view all the comments I like WITHOUT the interference of those people. Make my own choices rather than having them made for me.
And yet, I’ve been banned from lemmy.ml for saying, verbatim
“Because being critical of a Russian company = racism. At least according to lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml users.” in response to someone else asking why “how is not liking Kaspersky, in and of itself, racist or xenophobic?”. So much “Xenophobia” packed into my answer right? Considering that ban was handed out by dessalines himself. I’m going to have to agree with your “Many times you will find Tankies” statement, and that’s because nearly the whole of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml are all tankies.
So you painted all if lemmy.ml as a tankie fest and got banned. Just like I stated.
Be glad that it’s not for criticizing israel like /news and /politics on .world does. And if you point it out on those instances your comment also gets removed and you get banned.
And as I said. You will have tankies with insane takes. Those usually come from Lemmygrad or Hexbear. .ml is mostly lefties and just a few tankies in the mix. But the people I see getting banned from .ml are not banned for content but the presentation of said content.