this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
195 points (95.8% liked)

MeanwhileOnGrad

1397 readers
74 users here now

"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"

Welcome to MoG!


Meanwhile On Grad


Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!


What is a Tankie?


Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.

(caution of biased source)


Basic Rules:

Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.

Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.

Apologia(Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism, Islamic Terrorism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.

Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users as it handwaves their extremism.

Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.

Off-topic Discussion — Do not discuss unrelated topics to the point of derailing the thread. Stay focused on the direct content of the post as opposed to arguing.

You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Modlog, which includes a site ban—something only admins can do.

The community bans also include communities that aren't moderated by any instance admins, and some that are only moderated by a single person who likely isn't aware of actions taken under their community's name.

top 31 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 10 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

So does anyone know good leftist instances that aren't predominantly cantankerous tankies? Besides slrpnk, those guys seem cool.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

dbzer0 is a pretty good instance. Sadly, there are no good leftist instances other than slrpnk and dbzer0.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

Yeah I generally have decent experience with them as well.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The community bans also include communities that aren’t moderated by any instance admins, and some that are only moderated by a single person who likely isn’t aware of actions taken under their community’s name.

FYI, any site bans will also automatically generate community bans for all local communities that user has ever interacted with.
It's simply the current behavior for site bans and not an admin going through communities to ban that user.
That doesn't mean the site ban is legitimate, just that the community-bans are inherent to any site-bans.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago

That's kind of a weird way of doing it, but good to know thanks!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Yeah this is becoming a real problem with tech communities being hosted on .ml which is way to sensitive about anything remotely close to common sense. I'm very careful not to post anything political on .ml and I'm 100% threading on a knifes edge if I ever say or post anything regarding news or politics there. I will get site banned for sure.

instances apart from national ones should be more specialized to avoid this.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Tankies want to talk a bunch of big shit. Then when you shut them down with a single comment they cry like babies and run for the mod buttons.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

This post is bait guys. Are we really just going to let this be our community.

brigading ensues

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Getting banned by tankies is a badge of honor

Wear it proudly

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

It's more like a participation trophy IMO.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Well, the community's rule is specifically not to make political jokes in the https://lemmy.ml/c/nonpolitical_memes subreddit.

So removing the comment seems acceptable. Banning like this is certainly ridiculous. On the other hand the modlog shows this user "Dasus" to be a serial troll, who got himself banned on many communities.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

This was not a common item in 1996 Russia, I think. In the 1990s, TV-based games weren't catching on in the East nearly as much because it was too difficult to create SECAM color video as opposed to NTSC or PAL. (This is part of why most of the East calls them "computer games", along with the rarity of non-computer consoles à la Pong or Magnavox Odyssey. The only ones I know to have been called "video games" were imported arcade cabinets in trailers that would travel from town to town. Known as "videoherna" (video game room) in Czech, they were rare and loved by "weirdos". I imagine they were quite lucrative for the handful of people skilled at smuggling and repairing monitors without original parts.) Lucky kids would play on IBM-compatible PCs or Game Boys, less lucky ones on Atari 8-bit computers, ZX Spectrum clones or this:

This game is Nu pogodi from the Elektronika IM series, a legendary toy in the Eastern Bloc. Manufactured in 1986-1993, it used a chip design stolen from the 1981 Game & Watch Egg game. They didn't even update the clock to 24 hours, the preferred format in Eastern countries.

In the US, the state will find you for illegally copying Nintendo games.
In Soviet Russia, you'll find that the state has been illegally copying Nintendo games all along!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

In the 1990s, TV-based games weren’t catching on in the East nearly as much because it was too difficult to create SECAM color video as opposed to NTSC or PAL.

I'm really glad that the digital video era ended the standard fragmentation around the world.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Now if only codec patents could fuck all the way off.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

PAL and SECAM could be converted from one to the other pretty much losslessly with a small (but appropriately expensive) piece of industrial-grade equipment, the difference is just the encoding of color into composite (and broadcasters would internally use RGB anyway).

PAL/SECAM and NTSC were way more tricky as the number of lines (576/625 or 480/525) and refresh rate (25 or 29.97) differed. I think they first had to use film to skip/duplicate every 6th/5th frame and blur the lines; since the 1980s expensive and giant 2MB RAM frame buffers were available with logic that would dispatch missing/duplicate lines and fields accordingly. Today, every phone routinely scales and framebuffers video without batting an eye. Neither method is lossless though.

Czechoslovakia's public TV switched from SECAM to PAL in circa 1991. Most old color TVs could have conversion kits installed; post-1985 ones like my family's Tesla Color 462 were already made future-proof by including rudimentary (non-phase-correcting) PAL decoders. Between cca 1995-2010, virtually all TVs had SCART inputs that fully supported RGBA, bidirectional (TV<->VCR) stereo audio and composite PAL, SECAM or NTSC video, as well as control signals such as aspect ratio. (Yes, late 1990s European CRT TVs don't need RGB or NTSC mods, they have it all! Just the cable and connector is bulky and falls out often because we hadn't figured out twisted differential pairs in the 1970s.)

Still, TV here is broadcast at 25 f/s and 576i if in SD because of all the old content in that format. I'm furious YouTube never allowed 576i, scaling everything down to 480p with awful combing. But yeah, I'm glad we've settled on 1080p for modern content; frame rate conversion is less disruptive than scaling.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I loved games like those as a kid.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I had the original one!! Everyone dreamed of the Donkey Kong foldable one...

Super boring BTW.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

My father had the Soviet clone, and it's still in the attic in a beat-up original box. It no longer works, the chip was killed presumably by static electricity when someone touched the battery contacts... Early CMOS was super fragile, even low-frequency circuits like this.

Super boring BTW.

This was probably the best affordable electronic toy in the USSR. They could have beaten this if they released a Tetris handheld but they didn't have enough R&D time before the regime crumbled; it would likely never get approved either.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Man... I really wish Kbin was the one who took off instead. I know lots of people turned off by the fact that Lemmy has lots of suspicious folks like this.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But noooo lemmy.ml is not a problem.....

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago

Blocking that instance improved my Lemmy experience dramatically.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

Painfully on brand

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Socialism to authoritarianism in 3… 2… 1…

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago

It's so quick and easy when you start at the authoritarianism part already

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is the admin Spez by any chance?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

That would actually be funny

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

They seem to be banning anything anti Russia just based on your modlog, buy you also have a hard time following their rule2: be nice. So I can kinda see where they are comming from as well.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Tbf, "Rule" 2 has an unwritten clause at the end, it's actually "Be nice, unless you're a tankie shill then you have the power of the mods/admins enabling you being a giant fistula to ~~liberals~~ anyone who disagrees with you in any thread."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago

Yes, Rule2 look very much like a "agree or be banned"-rule.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Oh, I wasn't the one who was banned. I'm here to call out questionable use of moderation powers by the lemmy.ml admins. If the admin felt that the user violated instance rules, the recourse was to issue a site ban—which they did. Throwing in 20 community bans after that for the same time frame is petty and unnecessary.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago

My bad. Iäm not saying that lemmy.ml is acting in bad faith, their Rule 2 looks very much like a catch-all for anything they do not like. But the user in question could have used better wording.

20 community bans is indeed not warranted.