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 [http://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
[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
[https://lemmy.ml/modlog] of the instance looks like:
[https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/6886b092-43d3-408b-ab57-2fa686f8a6c7.png]
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 [http://lemmy.ml] that I had ever
participated in. Proof:
[https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/9c52e470-645f-46ba-ac1d-0b7d8be17af3.png] 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 [http://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
[/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 [http://lemmy.ml] hosted communities in favor of
communities on more reasonable instances.
Lemmy.ml, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, has consistently been accused of improper Federation practices and many instances have decided to ban one or both of the latter by default, with many individual users having already gone further to block the former as well. However, many individual users on lemmy.ml seem unaware of the accusations of the practices of their admins, and some people go so far as to see lemmy.ml as a sort of default instance on the Fediverse.
This discussion promotes wider knowledge of the situation and what might be done about it in the future, in order to e.g. not turn away new potential Federation members (Fedizens?:-) that could otherwise associate what happens on that instance as something relating to the Fediverse as a whole.
Except when that process gets subverted by someone with admin access to the database, as the OP discussion mentions:-(. But when it works properly, absolutely yes:-).
I for one go there extremely rarely, and only to look up specific matters. It does not help that something (post or comment) could be removed by either a community moderator, on one instance, or an admin, on an entirely different instance. But I am glad that there are people that analyze it:-).
I used to be a mod of a small and then another medium-sized (for a niche) community on Reddit. Since coming to Kbin and then Lemmy, I have not volunteered to moderate anything. We need people to, but it’s an extremely depressing job.
It’s like politicians: we need them, but the role tends to attract the attentions of those least suited to get it done:-(. And the actual GOOD ones tend to not stay for long - perhaps a year or two, if they actually care about the community that they moderate:-|.
Russia invaded/desecrated/butchered Ukraina, & I remember what the vids showed of Mariupol ( sorry spelling ).
I made a comment on there to the effect that if Putin was the pusher of the war, then making things as politically-difficult for Putin in the election would be a Good Thing™.
( to me, the obvious implied-point is that it might have ended an immensely-wasting-of-life war that people other than Putin weren’t so interested in, and that, by definition, must therefore be a Good Thing™ )
Anybody who pushes Russia’s butchering of Ukraina as something which cannot be spoken-against, is fucking terrorist-at-heart.
Just my opinion, but there I’ve no right to such opinion.
The beauty of this?
It perfectly demonstrates how segregation-of-ideologies allows positive-feedback-loops, which produces extremism.
Left, right, political, religious, moneyarchist, legalist, nationalist, sexist/genderist, ALL ideologies are self-amplifying.
There’s a book on the US’s political-segregation ( “The Big Sort” ) & it looks like that mechanism, ideological-segregation, has only 1 outcome: butchery/war.
So, given the evidence, it looks like the whole world is going to be butchering everybody within a … decade or so.
Amplification, feedback-loop, polarization, and nothing is countering its controlling of the process of this world…
it’s got an outcome.
And if our world’s population won’t stop/prevent the “drunk driver” from force-crashing our “bus” with all our world’s peoples in it … well, then we get crashed/killed.
The Great Filter.
WHEN one has cancer, THEN is it right to KILL that cancer??
WHEN one is newly-infected with rabies, THEN is it valid to prime one’s immune-system to as violently as possible defend one’s life against rabies?
Or should we just make-nice, live in making-believing, & hope that our hopium works??
What Russia’s been doing to Ukraina, what Hamas got Israel to be doing against the Palestinians & all the journalists…
do we let rabies overrun our world’s life?
Will the US allow rabies to overrun its life?
( yes, obviously.
The others … likewise.
Therefore, Universe’s Natural Selection is looking to be … “pruning” our world from the worlds-in-Universe-with-civilized-life-on-them, this century … isn’t it? )
Checking up on the Mod Log regularly reveals exactly how petty and unhinged many mods on Fedi are. Suppression of political ideas is the main one.
One of the best features of lemmy. A bit of transparency is great.
Except when that process gets subverted by someone with admin access to the database, as the OP discussion mentions:-(. But when it works properly, absolutely yes:-).
I for one go there extremely rarely, and only to look up specific matters. It does not help that something (post or comment) could be removed by either a community moderator, on one instance, or an admin, on an entirely different instance. But I am glad that there are people that analyze it:-).
I used to be a mod of a small and then another medium-sized (for a niche) community on Reddit. Since coming to Kbin and then Lemmy, I have not volunteered to moderate anything. We need people to, but it’s an extremely depressing job.
It’s like politicians: we need them, but the role tends to attract the attentions of those least suited to get it done:-(. And the actual GOOD ones tend to not stay for long - perhaps a year or two, if they actually care about the community that they moderate:-|.
I’m banned-for-life from there.
Russia invaded/desecrated/butchered Ukraina, & I remember what the vids showed of Mariupol ( sorry spelling ).
I made a comment on there to the effect that if Putin was the pusher of the war, then making things as politically-difficult for Putin in the election would be a Good Thing™.
( to me, the obvious implied-point is that it might have ended an immensely-wasting-of-life war that people other than Putin weren’t so interested in, and that, by definition, must therefore be a Good Thing™ )
Anybody who pushes Russia’s butchering of Ukraina as something which cannot be spoken-against, is fucking terrorist-at-heart.
Just my opinion, but there I’ve no right to such opinion.
The beauty of this?
It perfectly demonstrates how segregation-of-ideologies allows positive-feedback-loops, which produces extremism.
Left, right, political, religious, moneyarchist, legalist, nationalist, sexist/genderist, ALL ideologies are self-amplifying.
There’s a book on the US’s political-segregation ( “The Big Sort” ) & it looks like that mechanism, ideological-segregation, has only 1 outcome: butchery/war.
So, given the evidence, it looks like the whole world is going to be butchering everybody within a … decade or so.
Amplification, feedback-loop, polarization, and nothing is countering its controlling of the process of this world…
it’s got an outcome.
And if our world’s population won’t stop/prevent the “drunk driver” from force-crashing our “bus” with all our world’s peoples in it … well, then we get crashed/killed.
The Great Filter.
WHEN one has cancer, THEN is it right to KILL that cancer??
WHEN one is newly-infected with rabies, THEN is it valid to prime one’s immune-system to as violently as possible defend one’s life against rabies?
Or should we just make-nice, live in making-believing, & hope that our hopium works??
What Russia’s been doing to Ukraina, what Hamas got Israel to be doing against the Palestinians & all the journalists…
do we let rabies overrun our world’s life?
Will the US allow rabies to overrun its life?
( yes, obviously.
The others … likewise.
Therefore, Universe’s Natural Selection is looking to be … “pruning” our world from the worlds-in-Universe-with-civilized-life-on-them, this century … isn’t it? )
_ /\ _