Following the news that Lemmy world has decided to defederate from hexbear without consulting their community and before hexbear even federated with anyone, I'd like to make this announcement to settle things once and for all about us "scary tankies" who apparently don't tolerate free expression or whatever.
Lemmygrad has been around since the very beginning of Lemmy as a project, we are one of the oldest instance with lemmy.ml.
In that time, we have never defederated from anyone except in three cases:
- troll instances (usually inactive and unmoderated, with free account requests, that trolls used back in the day to bypass their bans). We usually refederate if they start being moderated again.
- outright fascist instances such as exploding heads or powerballs or whatever before the admin deleted it (which you're welcome, it's because there's communists on Lemmy that there's so few fascists)
- and, the fringe case, the couple specifically NSFW instances that we instantly defederated from because we don't want to host porn on our database and our rule 5 prohibits porn anywhere on Lemmygrad.
Otherwise, we have no reason to defederate from anyone. Holier-than-thou liberals can be difficult and irritating, I'm not denying that or implying we're somehow above it all, but to defederate would imply we are scared of what they have to say. We're not, because what they have to say is stuff we've all seen for ourselves and used to believe too.
You can see our blocklist here for yourself: https://lemmygrad.ml/instances, we only block around 40 instances, which might seem like a lot, but then compare to lemmy world which blocks 141 instances, or beehaw which blocks 765 instances.
Nobody is born a communist. Nobody is born a liberal either, but we become one through the self-reproduction of culture. From our earliest age we're exposed to liberalism (the ideology of capitalism) to the point that we integrate it. Did you have a model UN in school and vote for class presidents?
So really we can't be scared of anti-communist arguments because we've heard them all before. It's especially weird when people say we "buy into old propaganda" around Stalin or whatever, when anywhere you look, Soviet historiography in academia amounts to little more than "Stalin was paranoid and acted like the Tsar but called himself a communist". Like we went to public school too lol, we had a unit on the USSR lol.
Anyway, all defederations that happened on Lemmygrad come from other instances themselves, most of them pre-emptively defederating us before they even saw a single post from us. If beehaw, or shitjustworks, or lemmy dot whatever wanted to refederate, they could do it instantly and we'd be federated again.
And on that topic, let's talk about bans. We don't ban people who ask questions in good faith. But we will instantly ban anyone who comes to Lemmygrad solely to troll, as all online forums have done since time immemorial.
Likewise on blocklist issues, we poll our community very often for their input and allow them to propose changes. You can look at our [email protected] to see some things we've included the community on. We try to practice democratic centralism where applicable.
It goes even further; we allow communities and posts that some both on Lemmygrad or outside might disagree with, on the principle that we see ourselves as a more generalistic ML instance. We allow users to have their own community and moderate it however they want (respecting sitewide rules), and generally the removal of a community goes through an admin chat and might even go to a community feedback session. We have meme communities, we have religious communities, we have shitposting communities, and we also have serious discussion communities. And a plethora of personal communities for users who want to post in their own space like a blog.
We also have exactly 6 rules and no lengthy code of conduct or other documents one needs to read to participate here. This is helped by the fact that as we're all communists and more specifically mainly marxist-leninists, most of us already behave the expected way around comrades and don't need to be told how to conduct themselves.
So let me ask this; who is really censoring who here?
There's a youtube video I watched 3 years ago, by a Chinese content creator about the great firewall. His closing comment was a prediction that over 5-10 years we'd see China slowly reduce its internet censorship and 'other nations' start to build their own. It's looking more and more like that's going to be the case, and it's happening even faster below the national censorship level. The pattern of who's defederating from whom is another facet of that.
Truth is a powerful ally.
Let them hide. Their users know where to find us when they get curious about what's on the other side.
I come from white country bombarded by nato decades ago and destroyed by Germany in WW1 and WW2 (easy to pinpoint). People casually wear t-shirts with Putin, not so much as support for Russia as much as statement against nato.
And was talking with progressive-liberal-anti-capitalist from Germany. He got mad and could not understand why we don't support nato, us and germany.
I got scared shitless from that conversation imagining what normal capitalist, hard right Germans think of us. Crazy. Hate and racism is so strong in Global West, they can not even hide it anymore.
Point is: they will get curious, I just hope we can avoid another war.
Speaking of the firewall in China, the reason they have it is to help create their own tech solutions instead of relying on US Silicon Valley apps, which is the right move for software.
On top of that, the Chinese government is very careful about not letting their population become racist or bigoted against foreigners (specifically the West in this case) and letting them get access to the wider internet (which they can easily through a VPN, though it's an extra step most people don't care enough to go through) would expose them to all the hostility they receive. Like step into the shoes of a reddit lib who, on the one hand, screams "Fuck CCP all Chinese eat bats and dogs" and on the other, tries to smugly say "hey I just want Chinese people to be free and have access to the internet". Why? So they can see all the racist trash remarks people say about them? How is that productive?
The truth is people in China don't care about Wikipedia and Facebook, and to think they would is something only liberals entertain because they can't place themselves in someone else's shoes. There might even be some nationalist pride in it because how dare China not consume our all-American slop?
Like go on douyin right this moment, and then go on tiktok -- you can access both from your browser right now. Douyin has educational and cool video content, and TikTok is an attention sinkhole that pulls you into the screen for hours where the only design consideration behind a video is "will people watch this long enough that I get to make money off of it?". There's no rage-baiting videos or content farms on Douyin.
But overall the firewall protects the west more than it does China lol. They have more people than the imperial core (Western Europe+USA and Canada), libs are not ready for the deluge if the gates were opened. They seem to think "reasonable" Chinese people would side with them into hating their own nationality but Chinese people highly support the CPC by far and this becomes evident to anyone who actually visits China.