The administration of lemmy.ml routinely abuses its rule 1 anti-bigotry policy to conduct political censorship, deleting documented facts regarding the ukraine invasion, holodomor, and xinjiang abuses under false pretexts of imperialist propaganda, misinformation, and nazism while leaving pro-Kremlin talking points untouched.
Verifiable public moderation logs prove this systemic shielding of state propaganda, down to moderators inverting standard geopolitical context, such as noting that fringe extremist units do not make an entire democratic nation fascist, to ban dissenters under the explicit excuse of being a Nazi.
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=25800386 and https://lemmy.world/modlog/446?page=1&actionType=All&userId=20355358.
The Europe community moderator (https://lemmy.world/u/geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml), who focuses exclusively on criticizing the West and never Russia or China, banned me as a Nazi.
I decided to block the lemmy.ml instance entirely to avoid any further interaction.
I see that there are dozens of relevant posts; you can find the relevant report posts here
- https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
- https://lemmy.world/post/5697017
- https://lemmy.world/post/50302822
- https://lemmy.world/post/13238608
- https://lemmy.world/post/43978041
Log screenshots
You arent really a lemming until you’ve told Cowbee to go fuck himself.
yeah everyone knows this
No, many people know this; but there are virgin minds born every day. Consider XKCD’s classic Ten Thousand. Part of the vigilance means doing the documentation, and on a social media platform, that means periodic updates as content. Few people take up arms on a fight that nobody can see.
This person is doing good work 😋, even if the conclusion is unsurprising.
Fucking Christ. We aren’t on .ml but you wouldn’t know it from the number of people absolutely obsessed with them. Just ignore it if you don’t like it. Join a de-federated instance, block the communities, whatever. Bitching here has absolutely no impact.
Counterpoint - if we were on .ML these people would be blocked - they’re exercising their freedom.
We’re not on Reddit, Facebook, or X and you’ll find whole communities of haters for those sites, too.
Believe it or not, negativity tends to spread further than positivity in general as we are a risk-averse species, and it’s one of the documented harms of social media in general. You’re probably gonna find some version of this style of bitching no matter where ya go, it’s a human thing.
I’m more curious how .ml users feel about that mod’s idea that rape is an acceptable action to do in certain contexts, for example if a woman served in a Western military.
I can understand all their political positions and opinions but that one seems beyond the pale.
My opinion is that geneva_convenience has been going off the deep end, getting worse and worse lately, and definitely should be removed as a mod, honestly just banned. He’s an edgelord who’s taking things to unreasonable extremes and trying to pick fights with everyone.
That’s nothing unusual for a user who excused pedophilia and posted a fascist dogwhistle.
This is why everyone needs to defederate from that shithole. Only everyone that had the balls to, already has. The rest of the chickenshit admins are too afraid of losing their fucked up pseudo-authoritarian wannabe-communist content to make a move.
Buddy, that instance is run by the Lemmy devs. I agree, but I also think we’re cooked.
They have zero authority outside of their own shithole. Fuck those losers.
There’s always piefed or mbin. But until they start making our lives miserable with their code, I’m fine here.
I mean. You can also just go to their front page and read the “about this instance” paragraph where they clarify that they support a specific political ideology and will not tolerate dissent.
They explicitly built a walled garden. Don’t be surprised they maintain the walls. There are other instances.
Not from Voyager iirc, which also iirc is by far the most used third party app? Also, for multiple years that what is Lemmy.ml link did not work - it pointed to a post, which I think a later version of Lemmy.ml allowed communities to be made private, and then they never bothered to check what would happen for anyone not logged into a ML account, so it would just give like a 404 not found error for everyone else.
Agreed that it’s not impossible to find out who they are - just that ML makes an exceedingly poor representation of the Threadiverse to people coming over here from Reddit. So when they see “death to the USA”, and they are… you know, in the USA, they often nope right out and not only never come back, they spread the word to anyone who will listen that that is what “we” here who use Lemmy are.
Btw, in case you were not aware, we are a tankie bar (see: Paradox of Intolerance).
Also, despite all the curation they perform within their garden, they won’t allow people to block the Lemmy.ml instance - so it’s not entirely a walled garden so much as it is a delivery system for the messages shared by Lemmy.ml users.
Not only that but they explicitly said years ago that they WANTED someone to go make a liberal instance for liberals to use and do their own thing. Which is what happened. Yet people continue to throw a fit that .ml maintains its policies. The entire point of lemmy is that you can choose the instance that works best for you! The entire reason many of the original people came to lemmy was that reddit banned Marxist-Leninist (what you would call “tankie”) communities. And even many just vaguely leftist spaces. So people made their own thing where no one person controls what is allowed and what isn’t. That’s what federation is all about. If you don’t like that there are instances that disagree with you on a fundamental level and ban you for your opinions then you don’t actually understand what the point of federation is to begin with. I mean ML is in the name. What did you expect?
(edit to clarify I’m asking the OP not the commenter I am agreeing with the commenter.)
Recently there seems to be some of misunderstanding what the lemmy.ml instance is about, especially from newer users.
Lemmy.ml has always been a niche site, and it will most likely stay this way. We don’t have any intentions to turn it into a mainstream instance, or set a goal of getting as many users as possible. Our goal is simple: make an instance that people like to use. I would say that we have been successful in this, but obviously it is impossible to satisfy everyone.
The reason for this is that @dessalines and I are paid to develop Lemmy, while donations from lemmy.ml users only make up a negligible part of our income. Besides, having more users would force us to spend more time moderating, and less time for development. Lemmy works quite differently from big tech sites like Reddit in this regard: while they get more money with each extra user through advertising, for us it is the opposite. So we would much rather have a smaller, non-toxic, and friendly userbase, than a large one.
Part of the problem might be that lemmy.ml is described as “flagship instance”, which can certainly be interpreted to mean “mainstream” or “general purpose”. I struggle to come up with a better, more accurate description. If you can think of one, please comment here.
If you dont like the way lemmy.ml works, thats okay. Federation exists exactly to solve that problem, let different groups have their own instances, with their own rules and political views. You can see the list of existing instances, and instructions for setting up a new one on join-lemmy.org.
In particular, I would like to see someone (or a group of people) create a mainstream, or liberal instance. That should help to avoid further drama, and avoid attempts to turn lemmy.ml into something that it is not. @dessalines and I would certainly be willing to help with any technical problems that such an instance runs into, and include it on join-lemmy.org (just like any other instance that meets the code of conduct).
Which one do you have a problem with? The first rule?
That is the instance’s sidebar b██h. I followed your instructions and got there.
Ah, I see my instructions were not clear. You did great with the first step!
So the second step, I now realize the link isn’t “about this instance”, but it is actually labelled “what is lemmy.ml”. You can actually see it in your screenshot, right above the rules!
I’m very sorry for the confusion, I know it can be a complicated procedure.
Aww, look at the underhanded insults 😂
Here it is. Could you enlighten me with where it says that they “support a specific political ideology and will not tolerate dissent”?
Sadly, dumb shitheads like you have no capacity to read or question anything 😢
Literally calls out “western social media”
Lol stop being dense…fucking tankies man…
Learn to disagree without being rude or disrespectful.
It can be difficult sometimes, since western social media thrives on collective outrage, and they knowingly ingrain this into us for years. But please do adhere to this rule, and it will make this place much more enjoyable.
duhh, how dare these damn tankees say that western social media thrives on outrage 😤
Well, at least you can read subtext half the time. Probably explains why you read for calling everyone “shithead”.
Astonishing creativity, by the way. Simply incredible
still not answering the question
Probably explains why you read for calling everyone “shithead”.
Yeah, you’re not beating the allegations.
You should toddle off now. You are clearly in over your head. Go off and play now.
Not even gonna check what this is a reply to, even if you agree with me you suck for saying this lmao
You must be new around here. This is old news and a reason a lot of places block ml
It’s important to document their behavior anyway, because not al places block ml.
I knew that lemmy.ml is tankies, but removing comments/posts that don’t serve their agenda is new to me.
They’ve always done this. “Rule 1” Is pretty much a .ml meme catch all for “you aren’t allowed to use facts here. Agree or be removed”
One of my first experiences in the Fediverse was mentioning the Uyghur genocide and having my comment promptly removed by the .ml admins. They’ve been doing this all the time.
In large part that is what the word “tankie” means - denial of reality, instead substituting their own, which can only be done inside of a controlled echo chamber. Tankie is no way is synonymous with Communist.
Think MAGA but on the left - it’s otherwise identical in terms of behaviors, merely different talking points.
You may find this illustrative:
A lot of instances are curated, they’re the supreme mods after all. Some delay your posts until they can curate them, and some just remove them. It’s the way it be.
This isn’t said and understood enough. Instances on the Fediverse aren’t free-for-all, apolitical places without ideology. Some try to be (with varying success) but being active in the Fediverse and especially running an instance is in itself a fairly ideological and political act. So chances are instances reflect their owners’ ideology. And that is great because one has places to be if an instance doesn’t suit them, unlike corpo platdorms where one ideology drives most of them.
The only thing that bugs me about it is that the largest instances can control what most people see.
The great thing about lemmy’s design is that that’s not really true. I’m seeing this criticism of .ml despite being on .ml, because most of the posts that I see on lemmy are not on my home instance. At least half the time, I’m having discussions outside of my “home turf.”
When you have a space that agrees on certain base assumptions, it becomes easier to have more in depth and thoughtful discussions, because you don’t have to focus on just proving or advocating for those basic assumptions over and over again, and watching every word you say to make sure it can’t be twisted or misinterpreted to paint you in a negative light. By contrast, sharing a space with ideological opponents often means people tend to dig in and just make snipes at each other, everybody’s just grandstanding and trying to get owns in, and the level of discussion is brought down to name-calling and accusations.
At the same time, yes, echo chambers are a concern. If you’re never exposed to opposing viewpoints, obviously that’s not great either. We can see that happen on any number of subreddits. And if we were on different subreddits instead of on different instances, I wouldn’t be seeing this criticism, and you wouldn’t be seeing my response to it.
The way the fediverse is designed inherently addresses both of those concerns. You can have a space where the discussions assume a shared ideology allowing for in depth discussions, but then you’re also federated with other spaces with different shared assumptions. The “tankie” creators of lemmy designed it this way on purpose, for that reason. To allow minority views (including but not limited to their own) to have spaces for discussion, without becoming isolated. To allow for higher level discussions with shared assumptions while also allowing for interactions between groups with different assumptions.
This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies, and that is not in spite of what the .ml’s admins want, they literally designed it that way on purpose.
The only censorship that really matters on the fediverse is defederation.
This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies
Literally nobody has ever claimed that users on Lemmy.ml are not allowed to see content on other instances - this is not merely a strawman argument but an absolutely ridiculous one.
Please don’t bother to reply to this if this is the level of content that your messages will contain.
For anyone else that is curious, the complaint is about the lack of transparency in describing what content is vs. is not allowed - a community of people discussing FOSS comes nowhere close to mentioning that you are not allowed to come close to criticizing Russia, China, or North Korea - e.g. it is not allowed to state that Ukraine is not the aggressor and that rather Russia is, or to state that Uyghurs are being killed by China.
I really really really really really really really really wish that Lemmy would implement a true instance block so that I did not have to spend time reading such comments as this. But for some reason that option is denied to me. Go figure.
It’s not really a strawman in that I never claimed anyone said it. It’s just that people talk about “censorship” and “echo chambers” and “they have to remove things to keep their users brainwashed” or whatever nonsense, ignoring the fact that the structure of the fediverse, as designed by the .ml admins, makes that more or less impossible.
For anyone else that is curious, the complaint is about the lack of transparency in describing what content is vs. is not allowed
OK, fair enough, they could afford to clarify the rules somewhat. But I don’t really consider that a huge deal. I’ve been banned from communities on .world for things that aren’t enumerated in the rules too. I don’t see why rules have to cover every possible thing.
Why are you writing tankie in quotes?
Because I disagree with the term. The admins are not “tankies,” they are Marxist-Leninists.
What makes someone a “tankie” is that they “defend” certain states. In practice, “defending” often includes just refuting misinformation, for example, if I refute that “everyone in North Korea gets the same haircut” then I’m “defending” it and therefore a “tankie.” It can also mean acknowledging accomplishments, saying any good thing about any socialist state, like, “Cuba had a very successful literacy program,” which is just an objective historical fact. “Tankie” is supposed to mean someone who blindly supports everything a socialist state has ever done, in practice, it means someone who supports anything a socialist state has ever done.
Before it was “tankie” it was “pinko,” and before that “red.” That kind of red scare bullshit has allowed blatant misinformation to run rampant, because even rational people avoid pushing back on it for fear of being labelled a “tankie.” As stories about how all communists eat babies or whatnot run rampant, it has in turn hurt the reputation of both leftists and liberals, because it literally doesn’t matter how hard you try to distance yourself from the far-left, you’ll still get associated with it. Joe Biden got called a communist for Christ’s sake. To put it another way:
Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.
The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.
- Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds
That is why I put “tankie” in quotes.
and those other instances can also moderate and delete comments and posts for all other instances unless archived or crossposted. If a lemmy.world mod deletes a comment in a lemmy.world post, I won’t be able to see it from over here in db0
Tbf this is true for all instances - it is simply how the ActivityPub Protocol works. The home instance “owns” the content, so if e.g. a Lemmy.world user submits a post to a community on Lemmy.ml, then other LW users won’t be able to see it if it gets removed, but the same is true vice versa if a ML user submits a post to a community located on LW.
True. It’s definitely not a perfect, problem-solved thing. Merely an (significant?) improvement from the corporate status quo.
This. Just imagine if all of Lemmy was like one instance or another. The whole point of the fediverse is that there can be multiple instances, and you can just gravitate towards the ones that align with your own views.
Except it would be nice if the instances were honest about their rules, or at least that they would be described somewhere written down, rather than people having to continually find out the hard way (such as OP).
What part of “tankies” do you not understand?
It’s good to have this documented, thanks. It’s one thing for everyone to “know” they’re Tankies, it’s another to have compiled evidence and A/B examples like this to point to.
Was anyone hiding being a “tankie”? I mean I don’t really use the term I just call it Marxist-Leninist but if that’s what you want to call it I’m fine with that. I mean I’m clearly not trying to hide my political views if you look at my username. Not sure what you needed “evidence” for. But more power to ya i guess.
I mean, you shouldn’t. “XiJinpingStanAccount” is a glorious handle. I salute you, comrade.
lol thanks
There used to be several of such posts, in this very community iirc, though most ended up being removed for whatever reason, sometimes after being locked for toxicity in the comment section.
Particularly when those “try a Threadiverse instance at ‘random’” websites send people to Lemmy.ml (the main one sends people to either Lemmy.ml or hexbear.net ~90% of the time - btw that is not hyperbole, try it and see), people who joined here truly will not be made aware until after they arrive and almost inevitably find out the hard way.
I believe this is the secondary reason (after overall lack of content) that Lemmy’s active user community is not growing even as Reddit continues to degrade.
This is the main reason we have to get a fork up to feature parity with all the major clients. I don’t want to recommend Lemmy any more, I want to recommend some other threadiverse alternative that does the same thing.
PieFed is leagues ahead of Lemmy at this point. The main thing that it lacks iirc is a great search function like Lemmy has. Mind you, third-party app support is minimal, but that’s an issue with each one of those choosing whether or how fast to catch up, which will never end - the same as they do for Lemmy’s features also.
Unfortunately PieFed by default also shadow-censors people’s contributions, plus other anti-social media type features, which doesn’t affect someone running their own instance (for that purpose PieFed is unquestionably far superior) but does affect anyone posting to communities located on an instance running PieFed where that opt-out feature is left enabled - including users currently on Lemmy, Mbin, Mastodon, Friendica, nodeBB, etc. Many planned migrations - both user accounts and whole communities - were cancelled as a result.
Therefore a new fork was born - not of Lemmy but of PieFed - called PyLova. Last I checked it has even more features than PieFed, though PieFed recently borrowed many (though not all) of them.
Lemmy, as far as the bleeding edge of new features is concerned, has been left behind in the dust, and seems unlikely to ever catch up (writing in the Rust language I hear is quite slow). And PieFed and even more PyLova are running circles around it.
There’s also Mbin, which few people use except those who want to access both threaded conversations and user microblogging style content from the same account on the Fediverse.
Piefed?
And mbin. They have like 4 or 5 servers accepting new people. I think it’s good to have multiple different softwares going on the fediverse.
Recommend some instance that defederates the Tankie Triad. Problem solved?
And beside that, maybe choose an instance that is running PieFed, PyLova or mBin?
There are no major Lemmy instances that defederate from Lemmy.ml in particular.
Lemmy.zip comes the closest, not fully defederating but something similar. I forget if programming.dev does similarly as well. (Edit: ah, I forgot - only 2 of the 3 tankie triad instances are thus blocked by default, so here too there are zero major instances that block Lemmy.ml in particular.)
There’s also PieFed.zip by the same excellent admin team as Lemmy.zip. So Lemmy.zip and PieFed.zip are excellent general-purpose recommendations to offer to people. (Edit: despite how they don’t block the triad - but at least PieFed.zip allows individual users to do so, if they wish. And after they figure out how, and that there is a need for such, which nobody it seems will officially recommend to them.)
Piefed is not without it’s issues (mainly that rimu has the social skills of a grapefruit) but it’s wild how violently .ml users hate it. I know they’re from the dev instance so some bias is understandable, but holy cow some of the shit that gets made up to scare people away from it is absurd.
I feel the mbin devs must be watching the shitshow from within a popcorn filled bunker, just praying nobody remembers they exist long enough to drag them into it.
Yeah the vast majority of criticism is completely made-up, and even after it was proven to be falsehoods nobody seemed to recant (that I saw anyway). Instead, people continue to point to the debunked conspiracy theories despite the months and months that have passed since then. It really underscores the point about how an echo chamber functions - facts truly do not matter in the slightest to some people.
And it’s especially odd given how PieFed has more recently shot itself in the foot by shadow-censoring offered upvotes, but people still cite the long-debunked conspiracy theories rather than such an actual reason for criticism of the software.
Tribal. Sad(ge). Bad.
I don’t want Lemmy to be in the conversation at all. I want to just be able to recommend Pylova or Piefed
People need to start realizing that users like you are flamebaiting to get banned and then make hate threads about .ml
You spout right wing propaganda while insulting users and then whine about “tankies” when you get banned.
Some of the .ml users be lying though.
Does anyone need evidence? Their leadership sucks, and we all know, or should know it.
Yeah. If you’re not familiar with !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works, they have people submitting posts pretty similar to yours for lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml there.
can someone explain why the .ml people hate piefed so much?
Stated answer: bc it is “opinionated”.
This is actually true - it already has been and is getting more strongly biased against “social media” type of content (as opposed to more serious, less emotional discussions) all the time. e.g. lately it will reject additional votes beyond a daily quota, which is applied even to people on Lemmy (or Mbin, Friendica, nodeBB, Mastodon, etc.) - for the stated reason that votes are not meant to make people feel good and instead that somehow is indicative of “vote manipulation”, when you, you know, upvote content that you would like to see more of.
The trick though is that it doesn’t bother telling people this, in anything remotely resembling a transparent manner, so it is a type of shadow-censoring people’s offered contributions. Also, this anti-feature, forced over the objections of most people in the community, is enabled by default, and was barely announced, leading multiple instance admins to express surprise at the new behavior of their machines after the relevant update. Several migrations of people and entire communities to PieFed were cancelled as a result.
Real answer: tribal Lemmy love somehow must imply hatred of any “competition”.
People made a bunch of shit up, it got disproven, but nobody seemed to relent and people still spread the disinformation about it. Like saying that things were “hard-coded”, when not only was that not the case, but (unlike the shadow-censoring mentioned above) they were even opt-in, i.e. disabled by default.
There are several valid reasons to prefer Lemmy over PieFed - like a more polished UI, and a superb search functionality, or just being too lazy to move once already established. But some people like to create drama, it would seem, and don’t care whether their battle cries are based on actual facts or not.
tyvm for the insight.
what a strange world we live in.
Yep. I highly suggest anyone with a beef against these wannabe-communist douchebags post your stories there.
Thanks, I will check
Sure. There’s also !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com, but that’s more-generalized to discussion over whether-or-not something is mod or admin abuse of power, and doesn’t deal specifically with those instances.
I’d stay away from that shithole. The mods/admins there are incredibly biased and protect known trolls from being called out.
uh, fyi, the mod from PTB bans people for saying ‘vote’. he lets deluded ML people talk shit about how fucked up the US is, then when you reply “well fucking vote” they call you electoralists and ban you.
no where in the rules, just banned. ironic, I’d normally report such behavior to power trippin bastards but lol
Yeah. That entire instance has gone to shit. I have them blocked as well. They’re essentially a .ml wannabe instance.
Daily reminder to block every instance ending in @lemmy.ml
All the content you see there has been censored out of any criticism to china/Russia/north Korea. If you don’t look at the content that passed their censorship filter, their censorship loses all its power. Look at and support communities of other instances instead.
And every user from that instance. Let them preach to their own choir. None of us need to hear that shit.
I think there is only one lemmy.ml instance, any community@lemmy.ml is a community on that one instance. But pretty much yeah.
I think it’s common knowledge at this point that it’s a deranged commie instance
They aren’t truly communists. They are leftist MAGA. Russia, China, and North Korea are nowhere close to either communist or socialist.
Correct about the deranged part tho - no notes there.
accidental trvke
Theory doesn’t work in real life.
Some of what they deleted is just taking out the trash.
If you want to challenge them without getting deleted, ask them why Russia doesn’t conduct themselves more like China when it comes to foreign aggressions.
Who cares? Join a different server and move on, that’s the beauty of the fediverse.
The issue is you can block the .ml instance, but not their users from bleeding into other instances. On top of that .ml is a default instance, and a lot of the times trying to get people to join the fediverse, the first thing I hear from them is, no thanks it’s filled with tankies.
Basically it’d be like trying to get people to join truth social because there are sane people on it but you’ve got maga and the orange shit turd posting crazy shit on it. Lemmy has a stain attached to it in the form of two tankie devs and a tankie instance they run.
Who also absolutely refuse to separate funding for future development of the Lemmy software vs. operating costs of the Lemmy.ml instance.
Also if you study its modlog, the amount of time they spend each day curating that content is high, to say the least. Not every dollar (or ruble or whatever) spent goes towards the latter, but it seems that a goodly portion of it does.
The devs themselves are the very ones tying the development of Lemmy with the operation of Lemmy.ml - this is not hidden in the slightest.
Yeah. But .ml douchebacs still come to other instances to run their Putin-sucking mouths. It’s like whack-a-mole trying to block them all.
And don’t forget the alts they make on other instances, which they then proudly mention in certain spaces (like on lemmygrad) how they evade such instance bans and user blocks.
They are very proud of their ability to remain not only ungovernable, but people who willfully remain insensitive to others needs as well.
Good point.
