cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531
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.
All instances, except for the lightly moderated ones, have censorship issues from time to time. You can say one thing on one thread, and that same thing can get you banned in another thread on the same instance. This is an issue with the great degree of political polarization on Lemmy.
My point is that Lemmy is multipolar. It’s divided between the right-leaning instances like Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, the left-leaning instances like Lemmy.ml, slrpnk.net, blahaj.zone, and dbzer0, and the leftist instances like Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. Mods and admins on each instance are guilty of maintaining the “instance line.”
While I won’t repeat what got me banned, this is what got me banned from Political Memes on Lemmy.world, this isn’t just a Lemmy.ml thing. This is also when one of the moderators claimed they weren’t censoring anyone and were incredibly fair on a comment chain calling out their censorship, and refused to elaborate. They would not even tell me how I could edit my comments to comply with their rules.
What does this all mean?
Honestly, I think close to everyone knows that Marxists dominate Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad.ml, Hexbear.net, etc. I think close to everyone knows Liberals dominate Lemmy.world. I think everyone knows that anarchists dominate dbzer0, slrpnk.net, Hexbear.net, etc.
If your call to action is to defederate Lemmy.ml, then that’s just contributing to this polarization effect, as people would jump ship from .world and .ml to the other if it fits their views better. If your call to action is that people should move communities from Lemmy.ml to other instances, this has already happened a bit, this thread gets reposted very frequently. All it really seems to me is that you’re spreading drama.
What do I recommend?
Rather than trying to consolidate communities across instances, replicate communities as needed. Communities on Lemmy are more like hashtags for an instance, and instances are more like subreddits of old. Instances have their own cultures and values, so a Gaming thread on Hexbear, for example, is going to be different from a Lemmy.world Gaming thread, and that’s a good thing. All sorting can still let you see other instances, there’s no need to risk moderator dominance over communities by trying to consolidate on a single instance. Heck, this community is an example of that very process.
Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works don’t seem to have any noticeable political leanings (far right or far left) as far as I can tell. Why do you say they’re right leaning?
…What?
I consider myself a raging liberal, at least in the US. A socialist. But lemmy.world is so liberal it makes me feel like a Trumpster.
I guess I don’t feel at risk of getting globally banned like I would for disagreeing with the consensus like on .ml, but claiming .world is neutral is quite a sweeping statement.
There are definitely some bad actors on here who are trying to manipulate the election in Trump’s favor. The sort that claim to be leftists and come to every US politics-related thread (or even ones that aren’t related to the US until they make it so) with their list of talking points about why no one should vote for Harris, but conveniently have no answers for who deserves votes more.
Because anyone not exactly in line with his views is right leaning, that’s it. Tankies want to shame you into their ideology by calling you right leaning for thinking murder is bad, that’s basically all.
from the perspective of a south american, yes, .world is biased towards north america and europe.
That’s not really what I mean, I’m talking about leaning far right or left on the political spectrum. I think both of them are based in NA, so it would make sense they’re more focused there, just like midwest.social
I can DM you if you want, this is already spiraling far beyond my intentions of my original statement, that I think it’s better rather than to consolidate communities and overpower an instances mods and admins, to decentralize and replicate so there’s always a space for people, on an as-needed basis.
The short answer is that Lemmy.world is a very US-focused liberal instance, essentially the Democrats embodied in an instance.
Sh.itjust.works maintains NCD, MeanwhileOnGrad, and other generally pro-Liberalism, anti-Communist communities, hence why I say it leans right.
As always, you can absolutely find Anarchists and Communists on both Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, my point is more that the moderators and userbase generally consolidate around a given stance, my point isn’t that you can’t be a leftist on Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works.
World is kind of the vanilla instance.
Just.works is a “free speech” instance, I never see many communities hosted there, but a large amount of trolls make accounts there because just.works is unlikely to nuke an account.
Lately sh.itjust.works been more good about nuking spam and troll accounts, and they also have automated defenses set up to mitigate abuse.
I don’t fully understand but it turns out if you don’t think both Donald and Harris are equally fascist you are a classic liberal and pretty far to the right.
They’re not equally fascist.
It’s fascism lite vs fascism deluxe!
Right? The system is awful that lite is the best of the options that will actually happen. And yet here you are, every day campaigning for fascism deluxe by telling everyone who chooses lite that they are genocidal goose-steppers.
Harris wouldn’t support genocide if she knew it would cost her the election. There would be an arms embargo by now if it weren’t for her voters reassuring her; “No no, it’s okay! You can kill anyone you want and start WW3 and we’ll still vote for you.”
But calling you all genocidal goose-steppers isn’t fair. You’re just cynical. You fundamentally do not believe you can change anything.
Sure. But unfortunately the country is so diseased with far-right radicals that even for people absolutely opposed to Gaza as a primary motivation, such as Uncommitted (you going to call them genocidal as well?), she is still the least bad option.
But that’s kinda my point, though. Anybody with radical ideas like “Donald will make this worse,” will fail .ml purity testing, regardless of their stance on economics. And so much so that you’ll call them a goose-stepper.
Again, like I said, calling y’all genocidal goose-steppers wasn’t fair of me to do. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. I was mad.
Your cynicism is a tragedy. You can only imagine two outcomes. Either everything gets worse under Trump or things stay as bad as they are right now under Harris. There’s no other options in your mind. You are too cynical to imagine anything else.
And so you attack anyone who refuses to vote for genocide and then get offended when they strike back. Did it occur to you that I was lashing out because other .world posters were dogpiling on me in various threads and attacking me? Or do my feelings not matter?
Neither .world nor .shitjustworks are “right leaning” they just hate the tankies most vocally lmao. Neither would it make too much sense to call a tankie “left” leaning given their raging hard on for authoritarianism. I also think most of Blahaj would be offended by being lumped in with them.
Lemmy.world is extremely liberal, I wouldn’t classify it as left-leaning. Both .world and sh.itjust.works are generally liberal, maintaining MeanwhileOnGrad leads to more right-wing people. I did not say far-right, or even right-wing, but right-leaning.
Marxists are absolutely left wing, not sure what your point is here. Marx and Engels were both called “authoritarian” by their contemporaries so much that Engels wrote On Authority. I don’t think it makes sense to separate Marxism from Leftism, and redefine leftism as Anarchism.
And you expect me to take anything you say after that seriously
By the standards of US and Canadian politics, yeah we’re to the left of center. But “center” has been dragged to the right so far that it’s prompting this whole argument. The Overton window had shifted so far that liberalism - which, in a current context, supports relatively unregulated capitalism and trickle down economics - there’s a whole swath of political ideologies that’s basically nonexistent within our modern day electoral politics. I’m somewhere in the anarchist range and choose to engage with electoral politics - if they chose to participate within the context of a FPTP voting system with two options, we’d find ourselves voting for the same candidate despite our likely highly differing political beliefs. In many countries that left wing is less smashed, the range of political discourse is much wider.
Shit just works is to the left side of, but comfortably within, the current Canadian Overton window. In a global sense, the instance is kinda to the right, in the same way that Bernie Sanders is moderate by western European standards.
When I say Leftist, I am using the typical definition, anti-Capitalist. Socialism, Communism, Syndicalism, Anarchism, and all their myriad forms.
When I say right, I am using the typical definition, supportive of Capitalism. Social Democrats, Liberals, American Libertarians, fascists, and all their myriad forms.
Considering Lemmy is an international site, it doesn’t make sense to use the Overton Window. If we went by, say, the American Overton Window, but another user lived in, say, Spain, there’s a significant difference there. That’s why I am using the standard definitions, and not going off of any one country’s Overton Window.
For two of the words this is not a typical definition. Social democrats do not code as “right” anywhere in the world. And liberals are only “right” when viewed through a partisan US-progressive lens, or else perhaps in southern Europe (where the word is mostly an economic term). Elsewhere they would be closer to left or center. This whole discussion illustrates the limited usefulness of the left-right axis at describing ideas.
Except in Portugal, where the conservative party calls themselves Social Democrats.
True but that is a proper name, not the generic definition. Russia’s Liberal Democrats are ultranationalists.
Are you trying to say that wherever Social Democrats are found, they are the most left available? That may track, but again, Social Democrats want to “harness Capitalism,” it isn’t pro-Socialism nor anti-Capitalism, hence my categorization.
Liberalism is the ideological framework for Capitalism, this is, again, supportive of Capitalism and against Socialism.
This is a bit reductive. I accept that liberalism and capitalism are closely intertwined in the historical reading. But the fact is that capitalism won the economic battle, for better and (I agree) for worse. Attempts to replace it completely, in an interconnected world, invariably end in disaster or (China) in a reversion to capitalism. Just look at the list of them. To me this whole question feels like a disconnected high-school philosophy debate.
I don’t think this is a good place to have this convo, but I firmly disagree with what you’ve said here. I understand if you don’t want to, but if you want to discuss this further you can shoot me a DM.
Hang on now. Fascists are historically the “third position” (which is why both the left and the right got together in about 1939 to stomp their collective shit in.) They’re neither “right” nor “left.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Position
Fascism is described as both “Capitalism in decay” and as “Imperialism turned inward.” It served and serves the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie against the Proletariat and Lumpenproletariat, and historically arises when the Petite Bourgeoisie is facing proletarianization. That’s why the most violently MAGA are small business owners and the like, and why they think immigrants are the ones proletarianizing them.
I highly recommend reading the first chapter of Blackshirts and Reds by Dr. Michael Parenti, which covers the material conditions surrounding fascism and who it served.
Fascism has been described as a teacher telling a student to shut up in class too, just because someone says something doesn’t make it true.
Sure, so can you explain what you disagree with about what I have said, and why you believe fascism to not be left nor right? I am aware of “Third Positionists,” they serve Capitalists and arise from Capitalist decay.
Since you linked to another Wikipedia article, you should know that Wikipedia defines fascism as far-right:
And it also defines it as third position, as per the article I linked earlier. Again, some define fascism as “mommy said I can’t go to the party” so oooooohhhhh.
Fact of the matter is fascists, if you’ve ever talked to a real one, are neither capitalist nor communist (again, hence that whole “World War Two” fiasco they teamed up for.) Thus “third position.”
No, the article you linked says “The Third Position is a set of neo-fascist political ideologies”. It does not say that fascism in general is neither left or right. I’m not talking about the word “fascist” used as an insult.
Fascists paint themselves as being a third position that supercedes the left-right dichotomy, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually true. Everything about it is right-wing and it’s not actually as incompatible with capitalism as fascists claim. Every fascist regime has partnered up with capitalists, who often support them into power in the first place.
Cowbee is notorious for not actually answering questions, just throwing up the same articles to read and asking people to DM them to continue the conversation. Make what you will of that info - are deeds done in the light of logical discourse inherently “better” than those done in darkness, i.e. are facts that can stand up to scrutiny somehow more “correct” than those that can only be whispered in the dark to those most vulnerable individuals still living in the cave?
You’ll note that I did end up continuing the conversation publicly in this thread. I have only once actually taken a conversation into DMs, with Blaze, whom they can probably back me up on. When I say “feel free to DM if you have any questions” regarding theory I have linked, it’s because I don’t expect anyone to immediately buzz off and read a book or article and then get right back, it’s an open offer to continue the conversation at any point in time.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by not actually answering questions? In this thread you can see it’'s the exact opposite, I am curious what you mean by that.
Finally, when I make my arguments and leave links for supplemental reading, it isn’t a requirement to continue conversation. It’s supplemental, in case they have doubts or wish to learn more beyond a simple Lemmy thread. If it’s necessary reading, I usually quote a relevant paragraph and link the main work.
Being full of anticommunists who call anyone left of Biden a tankie makes an instance right wing in my eyes at least
They… don’t though? Unless you’re pretending saying “voting for [not the democratic candidate] is a vote for Trump” is now apparently right wing and not just a basic understanding of how first past the post works.
Like, your definition is both wrong in terms of what right wing means, and not even descriptive of either. They’re just not tankie shitholes so I guess that makes them look bad to you?
So accusing left wingers of being right wing is okay as far as you’re concerned if it’s about an election
Pointing out that from a left wing perspective, Biden and the Democrats are doing bad things and their supporters are right wing: wrong, not descriptive, belongs in a tankie shit hole.
K
That’s… not an accurate characterization.
I would have voted for Sanders in a heartbeat. And a lot of other (Americans) on my instance would too. The disdain is more targeted and nuanced than that. A whole lot of us on sh.it just.works have a reasonably solid understanding of the difference between communism and authoritarian communism, and are also often geopolitical nerds to one degree or another. This often leads to us doing our best to combat what we see as bullshit disinformation and misrepresentation when and where we see it.
The vitriol we have towards tankies is specifically a result of:
When looked at that way, it’s a lot closer to modern Iron Front ideology (anti-monarchy; anti-fascist; anti-authoritarian communist).
That’s… what? What?! WHAT!?
To anyone else reading, note the @lemmy.ml after their name. There are only so many times people of intelligence can hear the most batshit insane things on Lemmy without either willfully losing IQ points or else blocking the lemmy.ml instance.
Unfortunately, that does next to nothing, bc you’ll still see every single batshit insane comment like the above. Every. Single. One. And while it might be a bug, you can sometimes get replies from them too (while other times blissfully not).
Maybe I’ll make an account on Lemmy.cafe, which is the only instance I’ve ever heard of that has actually defederated from lemmy.ml. Though I’m holding out more hope for Sublinks, Piefed, and Mbin too to help address such issues.
Stay safe folks - election season is coming and there are some who want to fuck you up if at all possible (not necessarily the above comment, just in general), don’t let it happen!
So… blocking an instance as a user just hides the instances communities, if I’m remembering the implementation details right. It doesn’t block interaction with the instances users. Stupidly misleading.
You’ll still need to block the users one by one.
Sadly, I had quite the list going, but upon blocking the instance, decided to clean up all the individual ones from that instance. Oops. Surely a “block” would imply some sort of… I dunno, “blocking” action, one might expect?
Also, at least on 0.19.3, I would not receive notifications from people on those instances. But now on 0.19.5, I do. So… there’s that fun little tidbit of knowledge: what little blocking there used to be, has become less so over time.
Oh well, at least this way I get to read the most batshit insane replies to things and laugh at them. Once someone is aware, it’s not really shocking, compared to a new user who would have no clue - e.g. they could be conversing with an actual PhD scientist on mander.xyz one moment and then somehow jump all the way to “no awkshually you should drink bleach, and follow up by drinking sunshine, bc (this one time at band camp?) I heard that kills the Rona”. Which sounds enormously exaggerated I know, but just remember: there are people out there eating raw meat and drinking unpasteurized milk without a care in the world, even in the face of the avian flu situation that seems to have made its way into just about every animal on earth including extremely remote polar bears and such.
Disinformation, unlike misinformation that is more often simply a mistake, is often designed to be outright deadly, to the unprepared (though less for the sake of the actual deaths, and more for how they would then catapult the issue into the media to receive feed-forward attention).
If you’re planning on leaving I won’t miss you passive aggressively using only neutral pronouns for me or calling me insane.
deleted by creator
This isn’t a binary thing, there’s plenty of centrist extremists and echo chambers for them
centrism isn’t extremism
You can totally have centrist extremists
Are you using “extremism” to mean “far from the status quo,” or “has absolute belief and violent justification for said belief?” Centrists can absolutely be the latter.
i think more the first
The others here are using it the second way, which I agree with. Centrism meaning the “status quo” can be violently and toxically upheld.
Taken from https://redsails.org/the-two-terrors/
Your profile has 10 posts/comments and has been around for a week…
Are you the original OP who just keeps making new accounts to spam this?
Or do you think 10 posts/comments over a week means you understand Lemmy and should reach out to teach “new users”?
You reply to wrong comment? Cowbee has a 10month account
Nah, I replied to OP and they deleted the comment.
Maybe that looks weird on some federated instances or apps tho.
If it looks like I’m replying to someone else, that would explain the down votes.
OPs post gets reposted pretty frequently, always by new accounts which tend to disappear a day or two later after some lazy posts.
I really do think it’s the same person who’s bans are in the screenshots.
It’s too random that a bunch of brand new accounts all find the post and quote it with perfectly formatting including all the pictures just to repost it the same place they found it.
Especially since the new account always claims they’re “helping new users” like they’ve been here forever.
Yeah it feels like it’s just posted once a week
You can aleady block instances if you personally wish, is my point. Everyone knows about Lemmy.ml having Marxists. My point is that rather than trying to move communities and keep them consolidated, embrace the differences between instances and be okay with Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml both having Linux communities, as an example.
I don’t share your fear of Marxism and Marxists, which is why I tend to avoid Lemmy.world communities.
You can block the instance, which blocks those communities, but that doesn’t block those users on them to be fair. That has to be done individually.
Personally I am comfortable ignoring individuals (and not painting everyone on an instance with the same brush) and would prefer metas/groups/whatever you’d like to refer to them as for my subscriptions, so I’m definitely not the target user of this post.
But just being clear, a user blocking an instance doesn’t block the users from that instance, so if that’s their goal, no, that’s not enough.
It blocks notifications of replies.
Sometimes I’ll notice a .ml responded to me, and if they seem decent I’ll reply back. But I’ll never get a notification and that’s almost always as far as it goes.
Which is fine. Lots of people can make one civil comment to rope someone in a conversation.
You will lose that ability as soon as Lemmy.world upgrades past 0.19.3. My instance likewise had 0.19.3 until like a week ago, and ever since it “upgraded” to 0.19.5, I get notifications now from users from blocked instances. The developers of Lemmy seem adamant that people are not allowed to ban whole entire instances, which I find… ironic for… reasons:-).
Defederation has it’s own uses, yes, but that also ironically makes it more difficult to avoid trolls. When you defederate from an instance for X reason, only the more irrational users are going to create alts to attack. Defederation is often over-used.
Not advocating for defederation, I’m just pointing out that blocking an instance isn’t going to achieve their goal.
Obviously defederation is too large scale. Ideally, there would be an option for people to block users from the instance when blocking an instance, or something like that.
This would avoid the exact scenario you mention because it would come down to the user level, so that troll would have to put in quite a bit more effort to get around that. Unfortunately, that’s not currently an option, along with some other features I’d love to see on Lemmy.
Again, I’m just pointing out that blocking an instance does not achieve their goal.
I agree with this most out of what you said. This gives users the most power to curate what they see, and lessens the likelyhood of troll accounts.
different people have different needs, for example an estonian instance would have a larger need to defederate with .ml than .world would, because of the years of soviet occupation.
Sure, my point is about community replication. Defederation has its own uses, my point is that community consolidation serves very few people.