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/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 hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
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I fucking hate tankies, but.
The problem i have, every time this conversation happens, is that cutting them out doesn’t solve anything, and that I don’t want to be coddled.
The 2 main issues we have, as lemmy at large, is that there are some wildly uneven standards enforced across instances and that we have no say about that. There was that hugbox instance that would ban people for being rude and yeeted itself into the void, there was hexbear that got de-federated for its mods actively encouraging being subversive (despite its users receiving intolerable psychic damage after 5 minutes in any lib space where people are free to call them names, or was that lemmygrad?) and now we’re talking about removing lemmy.ml for the fact that its mods are somehow sentient pieces of actual shit.
And while I agree to all of those reasons, I don’t think defederating is the answer.
Every time we fragment the fediverse we make it overall worse.
Average users don’t even understand what they’re looking at when it comes to decentralized networks, let alone can they understand that there’s politicking between instances and such. If I were told “you can make an account on instance x or y, but they don’t talk to eachother so if you want to see stuff on instance y you can’t make an account on instance x” as a rando, I would go back to reddit, the only reason I didn’t is that i really hate the app and I am tech/net savvy enough to handle this.
I am a tad more radical when it comes to speech than most, and I accept that, but I do believe that these people have no power so long as they can’t abuse moderation, so the answer to the question “how do we handle open propagandists”, to me, is to create perhaps a “moderation neutrality charter” and making it very clear which instances subscribe to it, having each instance’s moderation team maybe be required to weigh in on appeals to bans from other instances to ensure a certain amount of balance.
That would take care of that real quick. They can subscribe to the charter and start abiding by neutral moderation standards agreed to across the board by some democratic standard, or they can defederate themselves.
That’s actually something twitter does right with the idea of community notes, that for the note to be published it needs to be agreed on by multiple parties that don’t usually agree in those votes, to ensure there is a bipartisan agreement.
I know this is perhaps too lofty for a ragtag group of essentially microblogging self-hosters, but a man can dream.
Tankie mods don’t moderate in good faith though, to do so would entirely undermine their political objectives. That’s kind of the point of the thread here – to defederate so that the tankies aren’t deciding what people can or cannot see and say.
I don’t see how the charter idea would actually help with that but maybe I’m not understanding the mechanics of how other mods “weigh in” on ban appeals from other instances.
If more people would just block that instance and it’s childish admins/mods, this wouldn’t be a problem. If people think it’s exaggerating to call out the clowns at .ml, I’d definitely urge you to look into the posts/comments the remove and their reasoning.
Most are violations of Rule 1 where there is clearly no violation.
Others are removed simply for being “liberal” or “blue MAGA” which neither are violations of any rule, and the latter is just a childish nonsensical insult. Which IS against the rules.
Having said this- it’s their instance and their community to do with as they please. If the freedom to disagree violates their emotional safe-space and hurts their feelings- then they don’t deserve your traffic and interaction. They have no intention to help grow lemmy, because it’s easy to see by their example that choir preaching only appeals to the choir.
Just block them and forget they exist.
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.
Did that months ago; defederated completely when they turned into Lemmygrad-lite. At first I missed some more active FOSS communities, but since then, others on different instances have become more active.
programming.devhas a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on.mlso maybe check out what they’ve got.If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else, nurture it, and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about
.ml, and you probably won’t be the last.Related: I genuinely feel that
mlbeing the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.Edit: Oh yeah. Didn’t recognize your username at first, but I was looking at the modlog the other day from my LW account, and saw a bunch of individual community bans from Dessalines and wondered what was up. Figured it was something exactly like this, and it was. Thanks for sharing.
Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.
I had actually considered Lemmy before The Great Reddit Exodus. Lemmy.ml turned me off from that.
Now we have Kbin (you can make it, my love!) and Lemmy.world, and I feel much better.
I… don’t think Kbin.social is going to make it. Even if it comes back, too much trust has been lost. Ernst should have stuck to just working on his coding project, not also administering his own instance, b/c that carries with it a certain level of “always-on” responsibility - e.g. I have unfortunately had to block Kbin.social lately, b/c nearly all (>>99%) of the spam that I currently see on the Fediverse was coming from the communities on it. Since I blocked it, I think I’ve seen like 1 single spam post for the past month.
So Kbin.social is turning people away too, for different reasons.
Mbin seems healthy though?:-)
I want to use Mbin, but all Mbin instances are federated with tankie instances, including hexbear.
And Mbin doesn’t make it easy to see user/community instance.
If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably wont’ be the last.
Maybe we should open a thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about this
TIL that community existed. thanks!
It should be noted that the (visibility of) community bans are a result of better enforcement of site bans in 0.19.4, which for now is implemented by sending out community bans for local communities when a user gets instance banned: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4464
Prior to this, when a user got instance banned from .ml, they were also implicitly banned from .ml communities, but this was only known to the instance they were banned on. As a result, users were still able to post, comment, and vote on those communities, but it would be visible only on that user’s instance, not federated anywhere else. Visibility of this ban was exclusively on the banning instance’s modlog.
Tankies warming up to call you and Lemmy.World fascists in 3, 2, 1…
Tankies: The word ‘tankie’ is meaningless because it gets overused by disingenuous people on the right.
Also tankies: Everyone who criticizes my position is right-wing.
As others have said, the only option available currently is to leave the instance and re-create your beloved communities elsewhere. The Lemmy.ml Admins also happen to be the ones actively developing the Lemmy code base, and they’re not gonna change because they feel entitled to do whatever they want, and technically, they can because they run the instance.
My best advice is to move on from the instance.
If you want to get away from the Lemmy codebase entirely I can vouch that mBin works quite nicely. I’ve been on fedia.io for months now and only once or twice hit some kind of technical problem, which was resolved quickly.
Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.
Lemmy.ml also has the funny quirk that it doesnt have a proper legal imprint or team list afaik. So we don’t have actual transparent information on who is on that instances admin team and who is not. Iirc only one of dessalines and nutomic is on that admin team anymore.
Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.
I hardly see what that would accomplish if we could.
People keep bringing up that because of the devs history with that instance, “surely it is the Lemmy devs themselves who are doing this”. Which hurts Lemmy’s reputation overall.
I guess some mod actions could be considered accidents or mistakes instead of bad actors. A transparent system would have a flow to allow the user to contact and get such a mistake rectified, or report a wrongful mod action to an admin.
But if the admin is a problem, then that needs more figuring out how to get one removed.
the only one who can remove an admin is a more senior admin, and they can already see behind the “mod” alias.
your point seems moot
This Dessalines?
Creeping the admin logs to find out who dared down vote him.
Lemmy.ml is a cancer on the Fediverse. If we want it to survive, we need to cut it off.
On your Lemmy instance, go to Settings -> Blocks and just block the entire instance. That’s what I did.
Doesn’t block their users though, only their communities.
I’m honestly fine with that, because outside of their home server, they cannot rely on their mods to protect them from arguments they don’t want to hear.
You’re fine with a murderous authoritarian government spreading disinformation where you socialize?
I’m fine with it as long as I don’t have to debate them on THEIR terms.
Go ahead and “debate” the CCP, enjoy.
Like I said, fine with me as long as it’s on neutral ground and they can’t just have an admin delete some of my arguments because they don’t like them.
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’]”
I do understand how the brigades can be annoying for sure, but I don’t mind arguing with tankies, – I think it’s actually really useful for exposing their propaganda for what it is. It helps expose normal people to counter arguments so that they might become a little more aware, rather than just seeing propaganda go unaddressed and being morel likely to assume it must then be true.
The only issue I have personally is if the mods are in on it too and delete your posts/comments because you start to make a bit too much sense.
I’ve defended lemmy.ml in the past when people have blamed the entire instance for the actions of a solitary, overzealous moderator, but this genuinely concerns me:
This must have been action taken at the instance admin level, considering all those communities have different moderators.
Is there any way to probe the modlog to see which account it was?
Gonna put this out there. Ended up in a thread on ML the other day. The poster/admin got a little unhinged, over 4 down votes. 4. Took to the admin panel to see who dared down vote him. Convinced he had been the victim of the tiniest not swarm ever.
It’s troubling behavior for anyone with power.
You gotta admit, it’s very suspicious to be massively downvoted (25, not 4) over an inconspicuous comment that merely highlights a few paragraphs of the linked article.
I know I would also be wondering if there was a pattern in the origin of those downvotes.
Downvotes are public on Lemmy fyi. There are interfaces that show who voted on a post or comment.
For admins, yes. I was pointing that out in the picture of the responses I posted. But not for General users.
Even regular users can see them through other federated services like kbin AFAIK. They show up under likes and dislikes.
I see downvotes
I can see them through the lemmy reader app I use.
Lol, is that why they removed scores from the API? 😆
They specifically obfuscate which mods take what actions so you can’t appeal or even defend.
Tbh, also harass a mod. People get quite worked out when being moderated, and being a mod is enough work without people chasing you to argue with you or straight up harass you, I suppose. At least, I can see plenty of good reasons to hide the moderator name.
To quote the reason why calling out mods by name is forbidden from a previous encounter I had with them: “removed for doxxing”
So yeah I think you’re giving them too much credit here
I am not sure I understood. You called some mod by name and they removed the comment? If that’s the case, I perfectly understand and agree with the decision tbh.
That said, this is a general argument, not referred to any particular mod. I think that many people get angry when their content is moderated and they might want to harass/argue/avenge against the mod who took that action.
You agree that tagging the username of a mod (wasn’t even one it was an admin) is doxxing? If so, you’re delusional.
Mod names are visible by default on my instance so if taking a look there and then mentioning the username you see there is doxxing good luck with the rest of your life. You can’t have a system where everyone can easily find out who performed a mod action and then claim you were “doxxed”
No sorry, you said name as in the person’s name, I did not understand “username”.
well in this particular case it wouldn’t have mattered, I used the username but the admin in question has their clear name set as the display name (which made the whole “doxxing” claim even funnier to me)
This is actually more evidence that the Lemmy devs run a modified version of the code which gives them the ability to, eg do things like dole out mass community bans. There is also some evidence that they selectively federate the mod log as well. It all points to the obvious conclusion that these people can and will abuse their power in any way they can.
I have had comments removed and could never see why. Now I just block their instances.
They roleplay as communist censors since that’s all they can afford to do from their positions.
I can’t see those, specifically, but a similar pattern of mass community bans after even remotely criticizing an authoritarian regime is completely on brand for Dessalines.
I don’t have record of the comment that triggered these, but when it’s something like civility, it’s usually just a comment removal and maybe a single community ban.
See https://lemmy.world/comment/10467647
It seems this is just a new feature in the upcoming relase (the communities ban).
Interesting.
Still, site bans for criticizing China is just as bad, if not worse as mass community banning.
Yes, but that fact is well known and at least this shows there was no particular intention to chastise the user - it was just a button press.
The punishment was easy, so the intent wasn’t as great. You know, the difference between a bullet to the head and repeated bashing with a rock. I’m sure in all these instances, the lack of effort was a relief to the target of the action.
Every point can be supported with an analogy bad enough
Imagine that - a white dude who appropriates the moniker of an actual slave revolutionary as a symbol for his “cause” might be cringe and unhinged.
go back to reddit if you want to live in the bubble of “America does nothing wrong”
The solution is… to abandon the notion that there’s some special utopia where we might reside.
There’s an idea that we all need to find or build some special platform which is going to be a home for all our communities and be transparent and balanced and free from corporate influence and perpetually shiny and awesome. It’s not only unachievable but probably not desirable either.
Instead, embrace the reality that the communities we want to engage with will be in different places on different platforms and each will have different issues.
There’s some niche communities on reddit, and yes that platform is run by a corporation but that doesn’t bother me when I’m only there to find a new recipe for snack that matches my diet requirements. I despise facebook but I do use their marketplace to sell junk my wife buys online. I’m aware of the privacy issues with telegram but that’s where I have a family chat group with my sisters. I recently discovered an XMPP channel about DIY bike maintenance which has been amazingly helpful, but I don’t like the XMPP clients I’ve tried. The forum on a torrent tracker I use is a great place to find new books to read but I need to use a VPN to access it.
My point is, the best part of the modern web is the disparate platforms we have available. Every platform has it’s own character, and caveats to be mindful of.
The kind of censorship you’re talking about is obviously repugnant, but the reality is that it’s just something to keep in mind when participating in lemmy.ml communities. You can refuse to participate there if you wish, but a mass-exodus on that basis just isn’t how things should work in 2024.
mass-exodus on that basis just isn’t how things should work in 2024.
Why not? You’ve made an assertion without any reason backing it up.
Nobody’s suggesting a mass exodus to a single lemmy server, but rather just a dispersal from .ml to the rest of the fediverse. There’s no reason it can’t or shouldn’t happen.
It’s as though you only read the last sentence of my comment
I’ve read it multiple times. None of it quite addresses why we can’t just move communities away from .ml en masse. From the votes I’m not the only one having trouble discerning your point.
Good lord. If you think lemmy votes are an indicator of solid reasoning I don’t know what to tell you.
Communities aren’t going to move away from lemmy.ml because no one cares enough about this issue.
You can dream that that’s how communities ought to work but they just don’t.
So your wall of text boiled down to ‘we can, but we won’t because nobody cares’. That’s pretty different from ‘that’s not how things should work in 2024’.
You can dream that that’s how communities ought to work but they just don’t.
Ironically, that’s how most of us ended up here on lemmy, we as a community decided to move off reddit.
We didn’t migrate “as a community”. All the same communities still exist on reddit.
Tankies make liberals uncomfortable because liberals believe they are the furthest left you can go before you become wrong and bad (forgetting that there are folks to their right on the political spectrum who think they are.
The worst thing for a tankie like me was running here to get away from the insane msn-pilled discourse, finding some actual leftists, only to have have leredditors chase me down sayin’ i am following them.
I mean shit I’m just trying to talk leftist ideals that haven’t been twisted into neoliberal business-school-bullshit talking points. I care bout the same shit yall do, i just don’t think the DNC is going to help us get there. That prospect does not make me happy, believe me.
Libs? If you are burning with desire to debate politics? I am begging… begging you to understand that the education in school and the news yesterday on the tv Aren’t. Acumen.(why would they be more credible than the commercials in between them?), and do not fear but embrace the idea/possibility that there’s an iota of a chance you might not actually be right.
Does this notion mean i am? No. But if you don’t think you might be wrong then you’ll likely never find out you are.
That’s not what’s happening here. Not all marxists are okay with covering up Tiananmen Square or supporting the CCP. I used to be part of a Trotskyist org and they wouldn’t be caught dead supporting either Stalin or the CCP. Anarchists certainly aren’t okay with it, and they are further left than you are. Stop pretending all your enemies are liberals.
Liberals aren’t my enemies though? I’m not pretending anything. Liberals are very high representation in lotsa comms and they are who i’m talking to seeing how this is a thread with a liberal complaining about me. Capice? Let’s not fight, let’s just chill today
Bro your the one supporting genocide denial, that’s the reason people are fighting you. Stop doing things like that and maybe “the liberals” and everyone else will leave you alone. In fact no one actually mentioned liberals until you did. You are the problem here.
lmao get back to me when the mods on lemmy.world stop deleting every comment that is critical of Biden. STFU. There is no recourse for mods on Lemmy and they can use their powers to delete any comments they want. The only recourse you have is to find a fediverse that caters to your weakass centrist views.
If anyone cares to check my comment history they’ll find a crapton of rebuttals to anti-biden comments that were NOT deleted by anyone.
So the pro-Biden comments are staying up? Exactly like I said ? lmao
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 saying their own COC
Do we want someone like that not only administrating the oldest Lemmy instance but developing the whole platform?
Over the past year on Lemmy I have witnessed a constant fight between people on hexbear, lemmygrad, and ml and people on communuties like tankiejerk, meanwhileongrad, and the like.
Both appear to constantly brigade and overmoderate their respective areas of control. Since my instance: sh.itjustworks, is some combination of defederated to hexbear and lemmygrad, I mostly just see threads like these complaining about tankies. I only assume the effort is being matched by those instances I don’t see to warrant this problem being so persistent.
So to me there’s so much active bad faith behavior between the camps I assume they all just have a paranoid view of the fediverse and are mostly just perpetuating a cycle of bad faith. Maybe that relationship is terminal if just people can’t handle each other.
I would have become a socialist way sooner if Tankies weren’t so prominent. ‘USSR good’ is not a great selling point.
Are you even a real socialist, then? If you aren’t excusing absolutely everything from an authoritarian country that calls themselves socialist but produces hundreds of billionaires?
Damn you raise a good point. Afterall capitalism is when the means of production is owned by small elite, and socialism is also that but like even more.
But you see that small socialist elite proclaims it’s doing it for the working class, therefore it’s okay now.
Don’t look at those prisons full of attempted trade unionists pls.
I am a socialist, but I will not simp for authoritarian technocrats
