Remote View

7mo ago

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.

810 comments

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.
- If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably wont’ be the last.
  Maybe we should open a thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about this
  
  TIL that community existed. thanks!
- Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.
  I had actually considered Lemmy before The Great Reddit Exodus. Lemmy.ml turned me off from that.
  Now we have Kbin (you can make it, my love!) and Lemmy.world, and I feel much better.
  
  I... don't think Kbin.social is going to make it. Even if it comes back, too much trust has been lost. Ernst should have stuck to just working on his coding project, not also administering his own instance, b/c that carries with it a certain level of "always-on" responsibility - e.g. I have unfortunately had to block Kbin.social lately, b/c nearly all (>>99%) of the spam that I currently see on the Fediverse was coming from the communities on it. Since I blocked it, I think I've seen like 1 single spam post for the past month.
  So Kbin.social is turning people away too, for different reasons.
  Mbin seems healthy though?:-)
  
  Kbin, please come back to me
  
  I really want Kbin to succeed, but Ernest seems to see the project as something he checks on once every few months and then ignores, but he still seems to want to be the only one who gets to make decisions. I get that he has stuff going on in his life, but the solution to all these problem starts with communicating and working with the community, not disappearing for months at a time and refusing to work with the people who try to help him. You just can't have a successful project with an approach like that.
- Is it possible to see who is behind a mod action? I've figured something like world news on ml has some compromised fascist actors as mods but if it's the main creator doing this then that's crazy
  
  There's an instance level setting to hide moderator names from unauthenticated and/or non-mod users. They probably have that enabled. Those actions federate, though, so the mod names won't be hidden if viewed from an instance that doesn't hide the mod names.
- It should be noted that the (visibility of) community bans are a result of better enforcement of site bans in 0.19.4, which for now is implemented by sending out community bans for local communities when a user gets instance banned: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4464
  Prior to this, when a user got instance banned from .ml, they were also implicitly banned from .ml communities, but this was only known to the instance they were banned on. As a result, users were still able to post, comment, and vote on those communities, but it would be visible only on that user's instance, not federated anywhere else. Visibility of this ban was exclusively on the banning instance's modlog.
  fyi @SpaceCadet@feddit.nl
- programming.dev has a lot of communities
  Is there a way to search for/browse communities on a single instance?
  
  I use https://lemmyverse.net/
  You can search for all communities of all instances, or click in a specific instance.
  https://lemmyverse.net/instance/programming.dev/communities
  
  You can in Tesseract, but AFAIK, that's the only UI that lets you browse remote instances. Otherwise, you gotta go to it directly, browse communities, and copy/paste the URL into your instance and search for it.
- Happy cakeday.
  
  Shit, so it is (depending on tiemzone) lol Thanks!

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.
- A hexbear in that thread is literally claiming that "the soldiers did everything they could to avoid hurting him" when there's a photo of him lying dead on the street after the tanks have gone through. They don't think it's fine, they're saying it didn't happen (curious)
  
  Was it actually him? I was under the impression that history did not relate what happened to him afterwards, nor who he was. That's not to say the CCP did not murder a couple of thousand people during the crackdown regardless, because they did, but I have never seen a verifiable claim that a picture of any particular corpse actually was the Tank Man. There are numerous theories I've seen floated over the years alleging what may have happened to him afterwards ranging from him being caught and imprisoned, executed, living anonymously in China, or fleeing to Taiwan. All of them are unverified and, of course, mutually exclusive.
  The tank operators absolutely did attempt to (and succeeded at) avoid running him over. That much is plainly visible in the video. Whatever happened after the video ended is undocumented and pure conjecture. Plenty of well documented atrocities actually were committed that day, before and after that moment, so there's not much sense in inventing new ones and bickering over details we haven't actually got.
  
  Of tank man? The guy in the famous photo?
  Where's the picture of this? I've never heard that before. It doesn't appear in his Wikipedia page, it just says there nobody knows what happened to him after.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man
  
  That photo (I've seen it circulate on the internet myself) is a photoshop. Every reputable source says that no one knows what happened to that man, and we have no evidence whatsoever of him getting run over.
  
  He is bundled off to the left by other protestors, nobody knows what happened to him, there is no photo of him dead.
  
  This loony bullshit is why tankies go full useful idiot and parrot shit most of them know isn't true. The right-wing disinfo about Tianamen square - or any other communist atrocity - is so widespread. Tankies think that the most ultra counter-narrative will somehow combat that even if its just as loony.
  
  A hexbear in that thread is literally claiming that “the soldiers did everything they could to avoid hurting him”
  ah the trolly problem defence
- Crushing people with tanks
  Just a heads up, while it is established that the CCCP killed tons of people on that day, the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia and mostly considered inaccurate news reporting.
  The famous "tank man" photo shows a guy standing in front of a tank in order to prevent them from moving tanks to another part where the protesters had gone. We have no evidence that he was driven over by that tank.
  
  Those "academics" are wrong.
  We know this because there are photos of bodies and bicycles smeared into a paste [Source. Warning Blood/Gore].
  And because people who were there literally said that's what happened:
  "The shooting was going on and people were still running to try and block the tanks, which were travelling at high speed, some positioning buses in the road. But the tanks crushed the buses and people, they didn’t care. People’s bodies were merged, moulded to their bicycles. They were flat.” [Source: Shao Jiang to The Mirror]
  The CCP has desperately tried to cleanse the most brutal images and interviews of the massacre from the Internet, but even 30 years on they can't completely scrub it clean. There's a reason The Pillar of Shame monument is designed as it is.
  
  the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia
  There are photos of people clearly crushed by tanks?
- Imo, when tankies get that bad, they might as well be nazis.

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?
- I can't see those, specifically, but a similar pattern of mass community bans after even remotely criticizing an authoritarian regime is completely on brand for Dessalines.
  
  I don't have record of the comment that triggered these, but when it's something like civility, it's usually just a comment removal and maybe a single community ban.
  
  Imagine that - a white dude who appropriates the moniker of an actual slave revolutionary as a symbol for his "cause" might be cringe and unhinged.
  
  See https://lemmy.world/comment/10467647
  It seems this is just a new feature in the upcoming relase (the communities ban).
- Gonna put this out there. Ended up in a thread on ML the other day. The poster/admin got a little unhinged, over 4 down votes. 4. Took to the admin panel to see who dared down vote him. Convinced he had been the victim of the tiniest not swarm ever.
  
  It's troubling behavior for anyone with power.
  
  Lol, is that why they removed scores from the API? 😆
  
  Downvotes are public on Lemmy fyi. There are interfaces that show who voted on a post or comment.
  
  You gotta admit, it's very suspicious to be massively downvoted (25, not 4) over an inconspicuous comment that merely highlights a few paragraphs of the linked article.
  I know I would also be wondering if there was a pattern in the origin of those downvotes.
- I would imagine that if an admin is doing this the modlog could simply be faked, you wouldn't be able to trust anything that the instance is reporting to the outside world.
- Only admins can do site bans. What you're seeing is a hacky/temporary feature of the upcoming Lemmy v19.4, of which lemmyml is running the pre-release: when an admin bans someone from the site (temp or otherwise), it also automatically bans them from any community they have ever participated in. Lemmyml has always been the "beta" instance for new releases.
  
  Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the heads up.
- This is actually more evidence that the Lemmy devs run a modified version of the code which gives them the ability to, eg do things like dole out mass community bans. There is also some evidence that they selectively federate the mod log as well. It all points to the obvious conclusion that these people can and will abuse their power in any way they can.
  
  I'm pretty sure any admin could do that with their Lemmy server, couldn't they?
  
  I have had comments removed and could never see why. Now I just block their instances.
  They roleplay as communist censors since that's all they can afford to do from their positions.
- They specifically obfuscate which mods take what actions so you can't appeal or even defend.
  
  Tbh, also harass a mod. People get quite worked out when being moderated, and being a mod is enough work without people chasing you to argue with you or straight up harass you, I suppose. At least, I can see plenty of good reasons to hide the moderator name.

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
- Yep. Something needs to change if we want Lemmy to be something besides a place for Soviet simps to hide from criticism. Authoritarianism cannot be tolerated.
  
  if we want Lemmy to be something besides a place for Soviet simps to hide from criticism
  There is definitely a place for Soviet simps in the Fediverse, it's just in a corner all by itself. That's the beauty of the Fediverse.
  
  It’s also a great place for AI training as you have total access to data you federate to your instance. Or for Cambridge-Analytica to track tankies
  
  Authoritarianism cannot be tolerated.
  Except when it suits your agenda, in that case it's not only tolerated, but actually encouraged! :)
- There are serious cyber security implications here that people are sleeping on
  No, there are not.
  At most, if they decide to kill the project by adding malicious code they can affect Lemmy itself. 99% of users don't run Lemmy (which is where the "quiet exploits" would run), and the frontend simply doesn't allow you to have a serious impact, unless you think they will stumble upon a browser 0-day and they decide to burn it by committing the exploit to an open source repo instead of selling it for millions (or use it elsewhere).
  What's with the fearmongering? Their stance is crystal clear since ever.
  possibly even fork the Lemmy repos
  Right, and who maintains the fork? Who, among the large population of external contributor, I mean?
  
  What do u mean their arnt any security issues here. Ive played enough 2b2t to know a backdoor makes u a literal fucking god. If u own all the servers u have everyone's ip, u can control everyone's interaction. U can can literally 1984 the entire federated history. Do u not see the issue here they could take control of your account post cp then report ur ip and get u locked up for long time.

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.
- I don't think any of this is even real to them. The same way that a majority of the white-nationalist 4-channers are just roleplaying and losing themselves in the storylines, as a species we tend to do that, we just get lost in a narrative because it explains how we feel.
  The tankies are doing the same exact thing. They're not impacting policy, they're not marching for anything, they're not taken seriously and it's just another in-club that has its own language and imagery and secret handshakes and a unifying message to rally behind (America bad!) and instead of turning that criticism into actionable plans for changing representation and making anything better, they put on WW2 Russian Tanker helmets and have erotic fantasies about a communist uprising that will never happen.

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.
My best advice is to move on from the instance.
- If you want to get away from the Lemmy codebase entirely I can vouch that mBin works quite nicely. I've been on fedia.io for months now and only once or twice hit some kind of technical problem, which was resolved quickly.
  
  MBIN FTW. KBIN has been "We are working on resolving the issues" for some days now. I hope Ernest is ok.
  I have a login for lemmy.ml, as I have several from when I was switching over from Reddit. I'm thinking from what I'm reading here, that it's not an instance I want to associate with.
  
  Are there mobile apps yet? Because if no that's one huge advantage Lemmy still has over Kbin/Mbin, and it's why I switched to Lemmy when Artemis started having issues (it went down completely since) instead of going back to Kbin.
  
  Don’t forget about piefed it’s amazing and lets you subscribe to posts and/or comments. Theres someone who contributed Lemmy API compatibility to use some Lemmy apps with Piefed instances. Its still very early but so far its extremely promising and the codebase is in python and the main developer is focused on ensuring it wasy to contribute. Check it out: https://piefed.social
  Code is on codeberg which is great too https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi
  
  Agree and just to add to this: the official list of mbin instances
- Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don't know who the banning mods are.
  Lemmy.ml also has the funny quirk that it doesnt have a proper legal imprint or team list afaik. So we don't have actual transparent information on who is on that instances admin team and who is not. Iirc only one of dessalines and nutomic is on that admin team anymore.
  
  This Dessalines?
  
  Creeping the admin logs to find out who dared down vote him.
  
  Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don't know who the banning mods are.
  I hardly see what that would accomplish if we could.

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.

as a communism sympathizing leftist, i hated these mods on reddit and i hate them here. the behavior is idiotic
- That's the most frustrating part. These "leftists" are the stupid kind who seem to care more about relitigating idiotic cold war drama than evolving or pushing forward leftist philosophy. It's straight up brain rot, mixed with obvious right wing agitprop disguised as leftist ideology. That fact that anyone other than trolls, spies and teenagers would engage with it is astounding.
  
  "leftists"
  They're not, that's just a cover for spreading CCP propaganda.
  
  Cold war drama is still alive and well. You could see it when people call freaking Bernie, or even more laughably Biden, a communist, or in the fall out of every country in the global south, from Latin America to the Middle East, from propped up divisions of countries in East Asia, to the poor former Soviet block of Eastern European countries looted in the wake of the fall of the USSR. Our present interference in South Korea, Taiwan, Cubs Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere are all relics of that time. The US has never really left the red scare mindset, and the global geopolitics of that era will reverberate for generations to come. It's why everyone celebrated when Kissinger died.
  Still, saying all that commie and socialist stuff, I still think lemmy.ml is too ban happy. I like that they don't defederate as fast as Lemmy.world, which I think is too eager on that front. But in terms of their posting moderation, I think lemmy.ml is way too heavy handed, and hence I don't like their moderation style at all. It's why I made sure not to choose either of those instances despite them being the biggest and most default. I do like having the choice, though, which is one big thing I like about the fediverse. There's no way to avoid that kind of shit on Reddit. I just wish people would split up the communities among different instances better, though.
  
  Some people just have daddy issues and need an image of a power figure to guide their life. It's obvious on the right, but I've seen various shades of it in the left as well.

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.
- We can defederate them now. Content will move as it reaches fewer eyes.
- Even the non political .ml communities are full of power-tripping, ban-happy, thread-nuking tyrants in my experience.

Thanks for shedding light on this! I will do my part and no longer post in communities tied to lemmy.ml!

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.
- What the fuck is the threadiverse. This is the Fediverse. Threads has added nothing and has no place here.
  
  Threadiverse is just a general term to refer to the parts of the Fediverse that behaves like forums (cause forums have threads). It has nothing to do with threads.net.
  
  thread as in threaded posts as opposed to other parts of the fediverse with another layout. it's not about the instance Threads, but the type of fediverse service allowing a lemmy/kbin type of conversation.
  
  They speak like a bot. Zuckerberg sending miles to infiltrate?

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.

Lemmy.ml is a cancer on the Fediverse. If we want it to survive, we need to cut it off.

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'm not sure how they accomplish that
  If they have database access, which they would have being the admins, they can do anything.
  
  The Lemmy devs are .ml admins to boot.
  
  Their mod actions usually do federate out, but their outgoing federation is a bit borked right now with some instances, perhaps due to the recent upgrade to Lemmy 0.19.4-rc.6. I believe they are at least aware of it now, though they have been basically non-responsive to the issue so far.
- So it seems they do indeed clean up the modlog... my bans are still in there, but all mod actions where they removed China critical comments are no longer there.
- It is extremely obvious that the .ml admins run a malicious version of the Lemmy code which gives them additional levers of control. This alone makes them a serious threat to the entire fediverse.
  
  It is not obvious, most likely not necessary and in any case completely unproven. Why are you so busy making stuff up in this thread?
- they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology
  That is EXACTLY what is done on lemmy.world.
  
  https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=1129088

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.
- I'll go out on a limb and guess China was mentioned somewhere
- Which community was that?
  
  world news lol, Thats probably why. It was a comment under an article on that topic and they went censor-crazy.

Tankies warming up to call you and Lemmy.World fascists in 3, 2, 1...

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.

I'm all for defederating from tankie instances. They suck.

Thanks for bringing this up, it's really needed.
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.
- That kind of makes me a bit more skeptical of Lemmy as a whole if I'm being honest. Not necessarily the instance owners, but the system as a whole.
  
  LW is already much more active than lemmy.ml (18k monthly active users vs 2.5k: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), so the system is working, people have left for a less politically biased instance
  
  We all have to wrestle with those ethics ourselves, but fwiw most of us have come down to the idea that writing code is one thing whereas administering an instance is something else altogether. People are working on other implementations of the ActivityPub protocol e.g. Kbin, its community fork Mbin, and things like sublinks that doesn't fully exist yet.
  
  Yeah, I've been eyeing kbin/mbin for a bit, which can actually federate with lemmy.
  
  👌
- I'm staring at the front page of lemmy.ml and I'm trying to find what's got people so worked up. It seems fairly simple to not go into a prolonged rant about how much you hate China when the content is just silly imgr memes.
  I mean, by all means, block it if you don't like the content. But why are you obsessed with the modlogs of an instance you blocked?

Decentralization is good for everyone.
- Tell that to the Chinese government lol

Everyone should defederate from .ml, and most have already got rid of hexbear and lemmygrad.
It's an absolute shit show of an instance, and the rest of us don't want to be subject to their nonsense.
I just wish the instance block prevented me from seeing their users as well.

I would have become a socialist way sooner if Tankies weren't so prominent. 'USSR good' is not a great selling point.

I moved from .ml because of this. Haven't had a ban since and can still interact with .ml communities

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.
Lemmy prevails.

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.
- Really depends on the topic.
  !movies@lemm.ee for instance is more active than !movies@lemmy.world
  !games@sh.itjust.works is a good alternative to !gaming@lemmy.world
  There is !til@lemmy.ca vs !todayilearned@lemmy.world
  But LW communities are mostly fine. The top priority on Lemmy is to get communities active, we can always migrate them later if needed.
  
  Good. Lemmy communities need to be as instance-agnostic as possible.
  
  we can always migrate them later if needed
  Can we? I'm not sure that community migration is that simple...
- I use lemmy.cafe now because it has defederated with lemmy.ml.
  As a lemmy.cafe user, I don't see any post/comment from lemmy.ml users at all.
  Communities on lemmy.cafe are invisible to lemmy.ml users, so I would recommend creating more communities there.

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.

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...

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.
Edit: mobile formatting fix
- Same. I've only ever made one post, and it wasn't to lemmy.ml, nor have I made a significant number of comments, yet I was banned first from the instance, then from the communities, for allegedly spamming. I asked in the Matrix chat linked in their sidebar, and they suggested I message dessalines, so I did. He rejected the message request.
  If this is their ideal of Lemmy, then Lemmy is dead on arrival.
- It really does the other large instances a disservice that those mod/admin practices are so commonplace.
  Agree.
  On the other hand nowadays now most of the communities are on LW (https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active) so at least it's a bit better compared to a year ago.
  
  It’s a good trend, but I still think it would behoove the admin of more reasonable instances to make it more obvious that there is a sizable and aggressive group of people with nearly unlimited (internet) power, and making it clear that they do not associate at all with those instances/individual practices.
  There is a huge dearth of naming and shaming bad actors, and it’s going to reach a size where people won’t do their research as I did, but will assume that all of the fediverse is run by authoritarian Communists and (not) engage based on that.
  And that wouldn’t be an unfair understanding, given who the creators of Lemmy are, who their disciples/mods are, and their influence across the platform.
  Lemmy really runs the risk of being “left wing Truth Social” otherwise.

this is why you fediblock lemmy ml and h*xbear
- Yeah, but for example !linux@lemmy.ml is the only reasonably active community on Linux, and one of the communities I frequent the most.
  
  If enough people block it and move on to another instance it won't be a problem.
  
  !linux@lemmy.world seems ok, I guess if any people move to it it will become even more active
  !linux@programming.dev could probably be a nice one too if people want to avoid hypercentralization on LW
- And lemmygrad.ml too, though most instances seem to do that by default now (yours has, as well as hexbear.net too:-).
- So just so I know, if I took your advice and blocked lemmy.ml, does that mean I'm also blocking comments from all lemmy.ml users on communities on other instances?
  
  In my version of software I still see lemmy.ml comments even though I've blocked the instance.
  They're clearly malicious, they should be defederated.
  
  I don't think that's the case. The v0.19.0 release notes say:
  Instance Blocks for Users
  Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.
  
  I use lemmy.cafe now because it has defederated with lemmy.ml.
  As a lemmy.cafe user, I don't see any post/comment from lemmy.ml users at all.
  
  Yup, I haven't seen one of them in weeks ever since one of their mods deleted a post of mine for supposedly being racist. Apparently, they can see what you write, but you won't see their comments.

Tankies are modding many communities here as well. The solution is to fight them tooth and nail.

.ml = Marxism-Leninism
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.
Hope that clears things up.
- Two-character TLDs are country codes
  
  I know that and that's why I said .ml could stand for the country of Mali. However, the .ml in lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml clearly stands for Marxism-Leninism, not Mali, the same way the .tv domain suffix often stands for television, not Tuvalu.

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.
- The threat is bigger than that though. These people control the code base and can easily just start running modified code to fuck with various aspects of federation to generally keep their finger on the scale of any instance which federates with them. At best they have shown they have no shame and cannot be trusted. If there is any means of abusing their power, it must be assumed that they will embrace it.
  
  Sure, to an extent. ActivityPub is an independent protocol not controlled by lemmy or any lemmy devs, so there’s a layer of protection there. This is also a trick that can only be pulled once, because any other instances would likely defederate in response and ML would render itself irreparably untrustworthy. I don’t mean to downplay your concerns as they are valid, but I also don’t think it’s an existential threat.
  
  People are working on alternatives - Ernst started Kbin and then kinda got stuck in it but refused to allow others to help so a community fork Mbin was created, and sublinks will eventually exist as well. However, this stuff takes time. You can help by contributing code or funds or activity to one of those if you like.
  
  The people nodding the instance are generally different than the devs. Also, their code is open source.
  
  Lemmy is open source, anyone can fork it and start running "modified code". it's not like they have a monopoly on that
- That hides the problem instead of fixing it... and if it's a dev as well, the whole system isn't really safe
  
  I don’t agree with the “hiding the problem” notion because different instances are independently operated, and defederation is the by-design way to “fix” malignant instances (see the LW defed of hexbear and lemmygrad for exactly this kind of behavior).
  As for the whole system not being safe, I’d also disagree on that point as the entire lemmy server code is licensed under a copyleft license which allows anyone with a copy of the code to modify and distribute it. Ergo, hard forking lemmy is possible. Based on the github page, over 800 individuals already have forks of the server code. Any one of them, group of them, or some other individuals entirely, could pick up lemmy development and run with it if need be.
  
  Code is opensource, if they were to put a backdoor or anything that would be seen, and once detected, the code can be forked
  
  💯⚡️

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.

They will ban you for comments that are so inert it's impossible to even know what offended them, it's ridiculous.

Tankies gonna tank. Just block their shit instance and move on with your life.

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

I’ve been making fun of Lemmy.Ml for months, I’m glad to see I’m not the only one

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 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']"

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'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.
- That's just a regular ban. If you were shadowbanned, you would be able to vote but it wouldn't do anything. As far as I know, Lemmy doesn't have shadowbanning.
  
  Instance admins could easily patch it in for their local communities (just add a filter ignoring API actions like posting and voting for some users), but it's not official and probably won't ever be official behavior

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 against their own COC
Do we want someone like that not only administrating the oldest Lemmy instance but developing the whole platform?

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
- I think unlike on hexbear and lemmygrad, most lemmy.ml users simply don't know, and many communities hosted there are bona fide. I'm not throwing stones at them, it's the admins of the instance that I have a beef with.
  
  Stuff trickles down though, so that it's not solely the admins, even if a large number of the userbase are innocent.
  
  I'm throwing stones. Lemmy.ml is toxic and people managing communities there are partly to blame.
- The hexbears realized that EVERYONE blocks them. One particularly humorous youtube even did a "One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let's use hexbear as an example. Please follow along" gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.
  Since ml was generally sympathetic to tankies, if not full of the idiots, the hexbears basically just joined that en masse.
  But yeah. Caught a ban for racism/xenophobia because I questioned what positive benefit accelerationism would have for the Palestinian people. Reminded me way too much of attempting to interact with hexbear so I used that as an excuse to just start blocking any .ml community that I see in my feed. Not QUITE at the point of blocking the whole instance but... I expect to be there by the end of the month.
  
  i've noticed a butt load of lemmygrad names appearing as lemmy.ml these days. Seems they got tired of existing in their little de-federated bubble
  
  One particularly humorous youtube even did a “One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let’s use hexbear as an example. Please follow along” gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.
  Interesting, do you have a link to the video?

Chinese honey pot
- Ironically, .ml seems to be blocked in China.
  
  Pretty much any popular site they can't censor is like that.

For people who want to avoid all content from lemmy.ml, including posts and comments:
I use lemmy.cafe now because it has defederated with lemmy.ml.
As a lemmy.cafe user, I don't see any post/comment from lemmy.ml users at all.
Communities on lemmy.cafe are invisible to lemmy.ml users, so I would recommend creating more communities there.

I agree completely. Blocked the instance only now despite them becoming more and more annoying each month.

LW needs to defederate from LML so that they aren't being spoonfed users from the biggest instance.

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