this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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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/[email protected] 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.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 5 months ago (6 children)

.ml = Marxism-Leninism

This wasn't obvious to me because ML could also mean the country of Mali or machine learning, but based on their content and moderation patterns, it's unmistakable that the ".ml" in Lemmy instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml stands for Marxism-Leninism.

Hope that clears things up.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I am surprised that my comments on that post weren't removed.

It is pretty horrifying that there are people in positions of moderating what thoughts are allowed to propagate who deny or cover up the events that took place in Tienanmen Square.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 5 months ago (11 children)

They will ban you for comments that are so inert it's impossible to even know what offended them, it's ridiculous.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Tankies gonna tank. Just block their shit instance and move on with your life.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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, ...

So what you're essentially saying is that these moderators are effectively propagandists/state actors for China, Russia, and so on. I left Reddit to get away from psychic attacks like that, so I'm perfectly happy to defed from the instance. Glad I have the option, too.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago

I’ve been making fun of Lemmy.Ml for months, I’m glad to see I’m not the only one

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago (11 children)

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.

I think this is a core problem of lemmy as it is right now. This place is meant to be federated and decentralized. Instead it is heavily centralized as communities lie on one instance. What one needs should be federated communities as well. Like say c/[email protected] is the same as c/[email protected]. this way one could subscribe to communities on your home instance and if the home instance defederates from one other instance the community can defederate from the community on that instance without completely breaking apart

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago

They're also hyper sensitive and generally toxic with their reflex delete/ban/block. They'll see what they want to see in the most mundane comments and nuke an entire thread. Best to just block them and ignore.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago (27 children)

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']"

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 months ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (31 children)

Yeah, I've been banned because I said something about Uighur genocide, on the other hand I'm wondering about dessalines' nationality and his knowledge about communism, it's easy to be communist of you only touched it online, I for example live in post communist country and remember some of it, old people are talking about it, it wasn't that good

I'd "understand" if everything would be transparent and they admitted it's tankie instance and you're banned because you don't like China but no, everything is against their own COC

Do we want someone like that not only administrating the oldest Lemmy instance but developing the whole platform?

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I've been censored/shadowbanned in a couple .ml instances for calling out their overzealous comment-nuking mods. Not even political in nature, just seeing threads where 80-90% of the comments are 'removed by moderator' and commenting how suspicious it was.

Then they removed that comment, and after taking a screenshot of the new comment calling out that, I got shadowbanned and can't even vote there anymore.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago (5 children)

That's just a regular ban. If you were shadowbanned, you would be able to vote but it wouldn't do anything. As far as I know, Lemmy doesn't have shadowbanning.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 months ago (3 children)

The confusion about how the protocol works for new users is real, and suggestions that 'any instance is fine', although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading, firstly when you're not used to how fediverse stuff works, but also when bizarre rules about no swearing or NSFW content are applied at an admin level. I first started on .ml, but moved here after some deliberation because people can tailor their feed and content through joining communities, not having their instance hyper-politicised by ban-happy tankies. (I'm very progressive myself, before it's claimed otherwise)

I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption. Of course admins are entitled to their own opinions, but the entire purpose of communities like this is to try and decentralise the problematic censorship which has ruined reddit (among other issues). Having faith in the users and mods to consider content and conduct with as impartial as possible development and administration is vital to the site having any chance of being transparent and worth-contributing to.

I don't want to see the whole concept of Lemmy written off by outsiders because their first experiences of the site are of the rabid circlejerk messageboards instead of a new and exciting format for online content with greater interoperability and user control. To this effect, I'm still on the fence about defederating with those communities at a user level, but I think that I'm going to make a more concerted effort to make content and foster the communities I want here, so that .ml fades into insignificance - I don't want to feed into their narratives of persecution.

I wanna call on @dessalines, and @Nutomic, among others, with the greatest respect for their views and contributions to the project, to put the future of the platform ahead of turning it into an echo chamber - either by relinquishing themselves from one or the other (admin/dev), or by the admins collectively creating a clear policy about politicised banning to acknowledge people's concerns about this behaviour.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I was imagining something like this in hexbear or lemmygrad, as people there seemed quite dogmatic at times, but even on Lemmy.ml? Sad to see this, as I had mostly positive interactions there till now

[–] [email protected] 44 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I think unlike on hexbear and lemmygrad, most lemmy.ml users simply don't know, and many communities hosted there are bona fide. I'm not throwing stones at them, it's the admins of the instance that I have a beef with.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 5 months ago (9 children)

The hexbears realized that EVERYONE blocks them. One particularly humorous youtube even did a "One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let's use hexbear as an example. Please follow along" gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.

Since ml was generally sympathetic to tankies, if not full of the idiots, the hexbears basically just joined that en masse.

But yeah. Caught a ban for racism/xenophobia because I questioned what positive benefit accelerationism would have for the Palestinian people. Reminded me way too much of attempting to interact with hexbear so I used that as an excuse to just start blocking any .ml community that I see in my feed. Not QUITE at the point of blocking the whole instance but... I expect to be there by the end of the month.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago (7 children)

For people who want to avoid all content from lemmy.ml, including posts and comments:

I use lemmy.cafe now because it has defederated with lemmy.ml.

As a lemmy.cafe user, I don't see any post/comment from lemmy.ml users at all.

Communities on lemmy.cafe are invisible to lemmy.ml users, so I would recommend creating more communities there.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago

I agree completely. Blocked the instance only now despite them becoming more and more annoying each month.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (6 children)

LW needs to defederate from LML so that they aren't being spoonfed users from the biggest instance.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago (8 children)

Hello,

A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml.

Are they? Most of the communities are rather on LW: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active

[email protected] is moving to [email protected]

Is there any community you need that doesn't have a LW or another equivalent on another instance?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (10 children)

I was among reddit refugees a year ago and it took me a moment to notice what was going on ml and their communities were more significant in comparison to what we have today.

One of the reasons I'm on sopuli.xyz now is that it was one of the first reasonably big instances to defederate hexbear outright. Hesitance and outright hostility to defederate it from some instance admins was also worrying.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago

Yeah, I made a specific point of avoiding participation in any .ml groups for that very reason.

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