Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem - Lemmy.World
lemmy.world
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.

https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

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.

  • BlazeEnglish
    23·
    20 days ago

    Thanks for posting it here

    • OpenStars@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
      14·
      20 days ago

      You are very welcome!:-)

      I am never sure about how to do the links - here I went with the instance of the community that it was posted to rather than the poster’s original instance where it originated. Lemmy.world is also more populated so fewer people will have to search for it on their home instance that way. One day I hope the tools catch up to allow federated linking to posts and comments:-).

      • BlazeEnglish
        9·
        20 days ago

        I would maybe add the link to the post (the LW one) at the beginning of the text, so that people can paste in the search bar of their instance and get the post on their instance

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
          9·
          20 days ago

          Oh wow I had no idea that that worked!?:-) Here all this time I have been using title words, but that is very convenient, thank you so much for the tip!:-)