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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This is the fediverse and that is their instance. You just move to another instance and mute them if you are desatisfied with them.
Or post about it and build a case for defederating from them or more users to block them individually.
Exactly. Why are we federated with people who deny genocides? Fuck all of that
Exactly, not only did I block LML over this but I vote for defederating with them from my home instance.
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.
Tankies gonna tank. Just block their shit instance and move on with your life.
The issue at hand is there are way too many neutral / unrelated communities which are resident on .ml, and it’d be nice if we could manage to move some of them off.
You can. Create a new community and tell the most active people in the original about it. Once everyone posts in the new comm you’re done.
It’s not like it hasn’t been done before.
Rule 1: Crushing people with tanks is fine so long as it’s our side doing it.
Literal fucking tankies. I wonder if they will ever come to their senses. Oh well, it’s not as if there aren’t Nazi instances somewhere on fedi as well.
Imo, when tankies get that bad, they might as well be nazis.
A hexbear in that thread is literally claiming that “the soldiers did everything they could to avoid hurting him” when there’s a photo of him lying dead on the street after the tanks have gone through. They don’t think it’s fine, they’re saying it didn’t happen (curious)
Of tank man? The guy in the famous photo?
Where’s the picture of this? I’ve never heard that before. It doesn’t appear in his Wikipedia page, it just says there nobody knows what happened to him after.
Was it actually him? I was under the impression that history did not relate what happened to him afterwards, nor who he was. That’s not to say the CCP did not murder a couple of thousand people during the crackdown regardless, because they did, but I have never seen a verifiable claim that a picture of any particular corpse actually was the Tank Man. There are numerous theories I’ve seen floated over the years alleging what may have happened to him afterwards ranging from him being caught and imprisoned, executed, living anonymously in China, or fleeing to Taiwan. All of them are unverified and, of course, mutually exclusive.
The tank operators absolutely did attempt to (and succeeded at) avoid running him over. That much is plainly visible in the video. Whatever happened after the video ended is undocumented and pure conjecture. Plenty of well documented atrocities actually were committed that day, before and after that moment, so there’s not much sense in inventing new ones and bickering over details we haven’t actually got.
A hexbear in that thread is literally claiming that “the soldiers did everything they could to avoid hurting him”
ah the trolly problem defence
Inaccurate - the tankie pulling the switch would be smiling
And there would be more people on the track.
He is bundled off to the left by other protestors, nobody knows what happened to him, there is no photo of him dead.
Crushing people with tanks
Just a heads up, while it is established that the CCCP killed tons of people on that day, the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia and mostly considered inaccurate news reporting.
The famous “tank man” photo shows a guy standing in front of a tank in order to prevent them from moving tanks to another part where the protesters had gone. We have no evidence that he was driven over by that tank.
the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia
There are photos of people clearly crushed by tanks?
No but the red paste is most likely explained by the tanks that were verifiably there. They could have crushed people with other machinery but they had tanks.
Those “academics” are wrong.
We know this because there are photos of bodies and bicycles smeared into a paste [Source. Warning Blood/Gore].
And because people who were there literally said that’s what happened:
"The shooting was going on and people were still running to try and block the tanks, which were travelling at high speed, some positioning buses in the road. But the tanks crushed the buses and people, they didn’t care. People’s bodies were merged, moulded to their bicycles. They were flat.” [Source: Shao Jiang to The Mirror]
The CCP has desperately tried to cleanse the most brutal images and interviews of the massacre from the Internet, but even 30 years on they can’t completely scrub it clean. There’s a reason The Pillar of Shame monument is designed as it is.
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.
Lemmy.world heavily censors criticism of israel over at /politics and /news
.ml is far less tankie than .world.
Linkerbaan spreading more lies. Glad I have you tagged as “shill” so it’s easy to recognize you.
At the start of the Genocide debunking any israeli lie was absolutely forbidden over at /world. Muh beheaded babies. Muh mass rapes. Oh wait you still can’t mention that israel lied about the mass rapes because israel themselves hasn’t admitted they lied about it yet. Despite the overwhelming evidence that israel lied about it. If you do you get permabanned for “antisemitism”.
MBFC only by the way, gotta make sure the site says that UNRWA = Hamas to be reliable!
The place is ran by Liberal Zionists.
go back to reddit if you want to live in the bubble of “America does nothing wrong”
Pretty sure they are creating alt accounts on non-tankie instances.
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.
You just made me realize that I have been banned from some of the communities over there while never having posted on them, mods are reading conversations in other communities and preemptively banning people…
Ah reminds me of good ol’ reddit
Oh, boy. Back to the old Reddit patterns. How long before they start using bots to preemptively ban anyone who has ever posted on certain communities regardless of context as a time saving measure, because that was a thing on Reddit as well?
Any idea which subs are banning like that already?
I think all instances need to defederate. This is totally inexcusable. We shouldn’t be attached and well connected to a CCP-controlled (influenced or directly) community. This is propaganda, pure and simple.
It’s not a problem to have dissenting opinions to widely held beliefs, but it is a problem to have those injected constantly into our streams while all opposition is silently erased and curated to artifically support state-sponsored CCP propaganda.
made a community rn !de_ml@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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
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.
Tankies are modding many communities here as well. The solution is to fight them tooth and nail.
