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.
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.dev has a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on .ml so 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 ml being 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.
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.
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?
People are naive if they think the .ml admins and devs don't intend to keep their thumb on the Lemmy scale. More instances need to take this threat seriously and defederate from .ml, and possibly even fork the Lemmy repos for when the devs inevitably decide they want to start building quiet exploits into the code. There are serious cyber security implications here that people are sleeping on
I've been banned from .ml for being a 'racist' for being anti-Xi, despite the fact that I am Chinese, and pointed out my ethnicity as such in the discussion. I guess antisemitic Jews aren't the only weird accusation getting thrown about nowadays.
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.
As a marxist, I'm myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism. And I don't even understand how people can stay with "Stalin was not so bad", knowing that he never planned to apply the last state of the Communist theory, and even if it did, massacre are not acceptable (sounds obvious), same applying with China and their open market.
In my country (France), Stalinism isn't a thing, all communists are against what happend in USSR, and most are anti-china.
The mods of the non-political subs need to move elsewhere, eventually after that the content will just be tankie bullshit and everyone can just defederate them.
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.
Thanks for spreading the word. We get these complaints every few weeks. More people need to be educated and move away from these instances to make the Threadiverse a better place.
Sad to see. Feels like Lemmy has no bright future with people in charge of it thinking russia's and China's government is good and ban difference of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs.
Not only do they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology, they often do it in such a way that it is untraceable by other mods. I'm not sure how they accomplish that, nor is the admin who messaged me letting me know that it was happening and he couldn't figure out how. Anyways, my solution has been to completely block that instance, and delete my account there. If they want to exist in a little untruthful echo chamber, then so be it, but I don't need to be a part of it. I recommend you do the same thing.
I've had this happen to me, I was chatting in a thread with some guy about IP theft and plagiarism at universities- a legitimate discussion about a current topic- and all my comments were suddenly deleted for "xenophobia". I let it go but its still really jarring and annoying.
Whenever this topic comes up, I find myself wondering what these folks do all day. Not in a Boomer "don't these people have jobs?!?" way, but more ... what is it like to be them? Do they just sit in front of the computer looking for conversations to disrupt? What is their daily existence? Because I find their volume and dedication to what they do fascinating. Cancerous and absurd, but also fascinating.
Your example is just one of many I've seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.
I don't know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there's no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in "raids" on other instances.
Its about time people bring up the .ml tankie problem. Lemmygrad was defederated but .ml was ignored due to basically being their PR instance.
This is the main reason I have stuck to kbin social despite it having a lot of spam and errors and why I am now on Mbin.
Unfortunately, lemmy.ml is run by lemmy's actual developers and will likely remain one of the most popular instances. Best thing to do is block the instance and host new communities on other instances.
Thanks for calling this out. I will stop posting content to lemmy.ml. What is the next best alternative to lemmy.world? I have nothing against lemmy.world, but would like to spread out content to different sites.
I am one of the removed comments and just found out about it here. Does the Lemmy standard really not send direct messages to users when one of their messages was removed? If it was an actual Rule 1 violation (which of course, it wasn't) I'd like to know.
The thing is, the Fediverse, link the original concept of the Internet is flexible and can survive losing nodes - it just routes around and issue. If there are problems it can mutate and survive.
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.
This is the best solution - the answers are in our hands. Communities only thrive because the users are.posting and interacting on it. If the Mod goes inactive or an instances goes down, we can switch to a new community. That then gains the momentum and goes on to thrive. It's survival of the fittest and why having more than one community on a topic (especially big topics) is a feature not a bug because it gives the network flexibility and resilience.
So if there's an issue with lemmy.ml, boycott it - unsubscribe, give the other communities on more agreeable instances your time and they will grow and prosper. If there isn't a relevant alternative start one.
Thanks for illustrating that I was banned from not just one community I don’t participate in aside from upvoting, but several that I have never even visited. All for “Rule 4,” which as far as I can tell is spamming ads, which I have never done. I’ve tried to message the mods of those communities, but haven’t gotten any kind of response.
It’s really disappointing that this is how Lemmy seems to work. As a new user, I had to actively persevere through the .ml bullshit to understand that lemmy as a whole is not like that. But it’s almost impossible to be a progressive (but not full blown anti-western communist) on an awful lot of this platform.
It really does the other large instances a disservice that those mod/admin practices are so commonplace.
I know the answer is to defederate/block them, but I genuinely find the news and posts interesting, and .ml was one of the instances that I was first looking into, because I literally didn’t understand how the fediverse worked but kept hearing “just pick an instance, there no wrong choice since you have access to all the other instances.”
But even those posts about topics I am educated in and care about, it all just literally seems to be a vessel for a specific type of (dis/mis)information in the comments, which actively preys on the gullible and shuts out even moderately different views.
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...
As you say OP, the solution here is to use the fediverse model as intended and use different instances/communities. It sucks because it fragments the community, but that’s the way it is. I’ve long held the opinion that I’m grateful to the lemmy developers for building this whole thing that we all get to enjoy, but their approach to administering an instance is reprehensible and actively damaging to the relatively free and open exchange of ideas that should happen on the fediverse.
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.
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.
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.
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/linux@lemmy.world is the same as c/linux@someotherinstance.com. 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
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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?
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.
Very true, I saw a post about censorship posted on !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world that happened in !comics@lemmy.ml (instead of another instance with the same subject community) possibly because of this reason OP mentioned. This complaint post was also deleted from the community because it was violating the rules which I suppose it was since this was the reason:
The title of the post in the picture above was the reason given by the comics mod:
My unpopular opinion however is that simply de-federating won't help as it just promotes those instances into becoming louder echo chambers. I think the simpler solution would be to have a dedicated community for mod abuse (I'm aware of !modabuse@lemmy.world but .world blocked /c/piracy so...) , so users can be aware of said issues and create or migrate to different communities as we see fit. Besides, users can simply block entire instances for themselves. Please don't comment on the paradox of tolerance as I just mentioned blocking for oneself already.
P.S.
Devs please make it easier to browse the modlog, having to press the next button is bafflingly tedious. I had to resort to editing the url to browse faster, add a jump to by time/date or something.
I agree with the facts here but have a slightly different conclusion. This is a problem that exists on many similar platforms like Reddit, etc. If you give mods or admins unlimited power over their users, it is an almost foregone conclusion that it will be abused in some circumstances. While Lemmy.ml is perhaps the perfect storm of a bad example, I’ve seen examples of abuses of mod power from almost every community on both Lemmy and Reddit.
So how do we fix it? Migrating to different communities or instances can sometimes help, but the potential for abuse remains. Having more options for active communities and making migration easier is a step in the right direction. Despite its flaws, Lemmy is an improvement in this respect because its federated nature allows more choice in who has power over you, but the problem remains.
In my view the internet has always worked best when problems are solved democratically rather than autocratically. Content aggregators already allow for this to some extent in what content is presented, but moderation remains quite undemocratic. I think it may be that a new platform with new innovations to make moderation decisions more driven by community consensus instead of owners or founders of communities will be needed. Exactly what this will look like, I don’t know, but some brainstorming might be in order for the next evolution in social media.
How about something like elections? A community could vote to change its "base instance" to another instance. Example, ask lemmy community vote to change from .ml to .world.
It's possible to do this by just not posting in the "old community", so maybe community cloning and community hopping could be the solution.
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.
And thus the inherent dichotomy of a decentralised social network is revealed: social networks require the network effect for good senses of communities which means one instance will end up hosting most of the bigger communities, therefore true decentralisation can't occur on Lemmy but it's a step in the right direction.
I’ve commented there on a /news community with sourced points to make my argument and was basically told to shut the F up and had my comments deleted.
So I blocked the community.
I’m not sure how to deal with extremist mods any other way. Their instance, their community, and other than defederating and putting a lot of effort into restarting and growing any valuable communities on another instance while keeping the undesirable .ml gang out, I’m not sure there is any other solution.
Sorry you stumbled into the wrong instance. Fortunately, other instances already offer alternative communities that are more active and moderated differently.
This could have been avoided if the UI included a warning about communities with problems. Like how PieFed does: https://piefed.social/post/89659
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.
That said, reasonable is in the eye of the beholder, and I see capitalism's apologists at this late hour (I'm suffering a reckless capitalist growth/metastasis caused heat dome as we speak along with 10s of millions of other Americans) as just as unreasonable as you see socialism proponents.
Modding abuse destroys communities, and that's wrong. But I don't demand all the communities I frequent spend their days agreeing with me, nor do I walk away unless the entire ethos/subject of the sub is to be against what I'm for. By that I mean, I can generally enjoy talking about a movie, for example, with a capitalism proponent because it isn't generally centrally relevant to the topic.
The point of discourse is discourse. An AI chatbot will be better at feeding one's confirmation bias than any community made up of people ever can be.
I think the article is likely entirely true. One of the difficulties I have, as a regular reader not highly educated in Asian politics and history, is that I know Western governments do lie in order to protect their interests. Not only that, many of their rules allow them to lie. There are gag orders, and levels of secret classifications, and ps-ops and we all know that exists.
I am pro free speech and pro protest rights. I think since China does not allow free speech it's likely the entire post is completely true. I really wish I could believe it completely. One thing that many Western pro-free speech countries don't understand is that lying frequently, even if it's sanctioned by the government and justified somehow, means they lose moral credibility with the truth of anything they say. Is it the truth this time... or is this one of the lies?
I still want to live in a world of free speech and women and LGBT people having rights and Western governments seem to be the best at doing this, but I just wish I could believe the article you linked without any doubt at all.
If it's really that bad on lemmy.ml, couldn't all the communities be replicated? I use lemmy.world and don't know if there's an option for me to block lemmy.ml unless I change federations. The plight of the poor and concentration of wealth among the upper classes has become very bad, and environmental problems will likely kill us all within 300 years (capitalism and democracy have environmentally failed) but I don't want to be a part of something in which mere discussion of different views results in banning and deletion of comments, even if I have very pro-poor people views.
I don't think there is a solution.
Effective moderation to protect vulnerable people needs more centralization. Avoiding the influence of bad-actor mods needs more decentralization. The two seem fairly mutually exclusive. Or rather, they trade off against each other.
With more users, having a fractured community wouldn't be a huge problem, because they could all have critical mass. But with the current user base that is generally not feasible, even for really popular topics.
Happened to me with an even bigger instance because of an asshole admin making shit up. A solution might be to divide up the host of the user comments versus the moderator agents versus receiver of the comments. If your host bans you, that's it, but if the receiver bans you, that only affects their users, and if a moderator agent group bans you, that only bans you from their distribution group of moderator agents but could be read by other groups.
If a community / group-of-moderator-agents-under-a-community-tag-for-a-particular-host bans you, you'd have to find another groups of moderator agents or accept all that are allowed by your host. Accepting all allowed by your host could only realistically exclude the worst offenders - spammers, doxxers, etc - so you'd really be incentivized to find a better block of moderator agents if you want to avoid certain types of comments. People who want to live in a bubble could live in a bubble but people who want to prioritize the greatest participation would try to find the most lenient host and the most lenient moderation agents, at least to their particular sensitivities.
It would be a truer federated model, but this is not lemmy as it is.
As being new to Lemmy, I do understand what you are saying. There is no balance of conversation - it's I'm taking my ball and going home type of thing.
That’s a con and a pro of decentralized net: if you don’t like the owner, pick another instance or create your own and be the king. Bad news is, every instance is controlled by couple regular folks who’re not responsible financially so they can imply their own rules and post and ban whatever they want.
Like the jungle: you gotta learn to survive and avoid the monkeys with rabies.
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.
Note that this is likely just an automated script to ensure all your comments are removed from lemmy.ml before being sitebanned, as sitebanning doesn't remove all content.
There's no need to defederate from Lemmy.ml. I rarely see their content on the front page of Lemmy.world. The other day someone complained that Lemmy.ml users were brigading a different thread. I counted three users with a ml domain...
We have different admins and mods, everything is working as intended. The issue is people bringing up tankies, communists, and China every three posts. Yes, we get it, the benevolent people who wrote us this software are communists. They allow us to have different mods and admins, there is no problem here.
Honestly, I wouldn't post to /c/worldnews@lemmy.ml even though I'm happy with how pro-Palestine those people are. The only community I look at Lemmy.ml is /c/linux@lemmy.ml. It's not their fault no one posts to the Lemmy.world instance.
I think it's time to start banning users who troll other instances and cross pollinate the fediverse with drama.
I agree with the sentiment of your post and I won't comment on the other posts that were banned but your image turns into hardcore gore half way through. Like hanged burned bodies and people leaking their brains.
Maybe it was removed for the wrong reason but it's not as innocent as you make it seem.
There's censorship just for having a different opinion. When you challenge someone's belief in any subject... or just simply have a disagreement, you're getting banned. Lemmy is following in the foot steps of Reddit in the sense that it appears that the left/progressives want to be segregated and keep the division. No dialogue, no meeting in the middle.. just ban anyone who threatens their bubble.
Hmmm... I just got here so I haven't seen it in action, but if true, far left mods abusing their power to censor and ban people they disagree with? Where have I Redd it before?
Use communities on lemm.ee which will have both left and right wing folk. Or if you want to avoid left altogether, Lemmy.world communities, and there are lots of them.
Lemm.ee is something we need to nurture. Great admins that try to avoid their personal biases.
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.
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.
This shit is incessant. You can always move your communities if it's a problem. People can defederate if it's a problem.
You can even create identical communities on other instances if you want. This isn't Reddit; you have to do things yourself if you've got a problem with it.
Once again the liberal "why isn't this place identical to Reddit:(((" posters are pissed that Lemmy isn't being astroturfed by American political parties and corporations.
You don't see even a bit of hypocrisy in that? Holy shit...
I have exactly the same complaint about lemmy.world - it's censuring everything that doesn't align with leftist views (and on the other hand, when I post on lemmy.ml it's usually not deleted).
Oh I know, I know, let me guess, they are censoring people because they are evil and authoritarian and are bad people, but you are censuring people because you are all democratic and for freedom and so on and anyway the ones that get censored are tankies and fascists and russian bots/propagandists?... https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2355607-our-blessed-homeland-their-barbarous-wastes
Join literally any other community if you're upset at their moderation, which again is only upsetting y'all because it doesn't align to Reddit and the US state department
When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies
You complain about the tankies' whataboutist replies "critical of the USA and the west" - yet your very first comment up there proves that you, too, were very quick to bring the west into a discussion about Tiananmen.
but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
You think the liberal hive mind here on lemmy.world is (somehow) more "reasonable" than the views held by tankies?
By what metrics are you measuring this (alleged) "reasonable-ness"?
Cant talk about shit nowadays that the left doesnt want to. Europe and Canada are being invaded by muslims and indians where they are already making demands without being citizens and creating social havoc.
Cant criticize Israel either.
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.