Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ...

As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.

I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.

This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:

Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say?

When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.

Proof:

So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance."

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there's nobody to discuss anything with.

I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

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810 comments

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.
- When people ask about generalist instance recommendations, here's my list
  lemm.ee is the second most active instance and avoids joining Lemmy.world which is already too big (you can join LW if you really want)
  sh.itjust.works works, if you don't mind the name
  if you are based in Europe, discuss.tchncs.de is very well managed (they have other services at https://tchncs.de/)
  if you are based in North America, lemmy.ca is nice
  reddthat.com is cool if you don't want downvotes
  That's pretty much it. Other instances are either topic-based or regional, but then people have to look them up on lemmyverse or fedidb
- I see absolutely no reason why you couldn't be a Dev and an admin, in a decentralized platform. If this was a single-server platform, maybe. But here, how does the moderation policy of lemmy.ml affects anything but posts over there?
  Also, beehaw has a very politicized banning policy, would you say that is unacceptable? I see it as perfectly fine and I would be fine as well if they were to contribute to Lemmy code (unless they try to build their policies into the code and therefore enforce them everywhere - which is something we know the Lemmy devs are not doing).
- and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading
  I'd say more than a little. I always suggest they look at the instance rules and also who the instance blocks to make sure they're OK following those rules and being blocked from that content before picking. Part of why I picked SDF was that they block no other servers.
  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.
  Why? They explicitly haven't baked any of their moderation/administration preferences into the code and have rejected suggestions that they should bake things along those lines into the code. If they decide to, that sounds like an awfully good reason for a fork. You don't have to love the devs and their politics to use the software they developed, though you should probably be on board if you want to use the instance that they run.

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