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Discussion about lemmy.ml admins abusing Fediverse moderation tools (with proof)

lemmy.world Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem - Lemmy.World

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, t...

https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

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.

39 comments

  • 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:-).

    • Well worth doing once in a while. Though only when you are feeling extra "tough". I just did and saw a lot of hateful comments I'm glad are gone, but also 2 (both from lemmy.ml) that look perfectly on topic. At least we can find out what our moderators are doing.

    • 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(tm).

        ( 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(tm) )

        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? )

        _ /\ _

  • You're not kidding. All social media right now is plagued by extremists who only seem to know how to fight. Even when they lack any real purpose for it they go looking for one.

    • And not by random accident either - companies put in HUGE investments into designing blinking, flashing, candied-looking... everything, in order to foster "engagement". Dark Mirror has several episodes illustrating various aspects, trying to warn people.

      In the olden days there was a phrase that "sex sells". Well it turns out, only up to a point - whereas kittens & puppies sell even moar, and getting people angry is an appetite that seems inexhaustible.

      And that does not even begin to touch on how certain actors would very much like to exaggerate certain of those effects, to their own potential benefits. e.g., the likes of anti-vaxxers + never-Hillary-ers got Trump elected, and while both of those movements maybe (probably even) started organically, they definitely have also had their fans flamed both by outside groups and the poorly constructed echo chambers of social media.

      This is just the way of the world, and fighting against it, like death & entropy, is an absolute necessity yet difficult.

      So if that is how they want to be, then fine. But we still need to do our part to call it out like it is, and to warn others away, or else the Fediverse as a whole suffers. I almost quit the Fediverse myself a few months ago, though fortunately v.0.19.3 came out and I simply blocked lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net instead, and now I am as happy as a clam:-).

    • well can someone suggest a instance? And is there a way to transfer my communities to another account
      • lemm.ee is the second most active instance and avoids joining Lemmy.world which is already too big
      • reddthat.com is cool if you don't want downvotes
      • 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

      That's pretty much it.

      For the transfer of communities, there is a tab in the user settings to export your settings (including subscriptions) to a JSON file. You can then import it to your new account.

      • That's pretty much it.

        Rude.

        Dbzer0, for pirates, mushrooms, etc.

      • For people that want an instance-level block for the Big 3 Axis powers - hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and Lemmy.ml - are you aware of anything that could be recommended?

        I also went through all the top ones at https://lemmyverse.net/ and very few to nothing is defederated from lemmy.ml (though yffit is defederated by Lemmy.ml...:-P).

        Kbin.social might have been, but I'm not certain and it's been down for several days. Possibly an Mbin one could be but that also has enormous implications for apps chosen and the interface in general.

        So what I'm trying to think of is a Lemmy instance to recommend to people, even irl to consider joining the Fediverse, bc otherwise I'm hesitant to recommend us at this point, given all the absolute shit that I would be exposing them too by default, until they learn how to block stuff. It's similar to Linux then in that unless I walk them through setting up an account and curating their experience, it's too overwhelming and they will just give up. For whatever reason, we collectively have decided that we are okay with this really terrible situation that heavy curation is mandatory... even as we also claim that we want the Fediverse to grow.

    • your home instance doesnt necessarily need to be a behemoth as you can subscribe to all the same stuff. ive got a dozen or so users at moist.catsweat.com who primarily consume lemmy content

      • The one issue smaller instances have is that the All feed is much less populated as communities only show up if at least one user of the instance is subscribed to it.

        Not a dealbreaker of course, but something to be aware of.

    • I have hopped around a lot myself - @Blaze@reddthat.com is there a particular post to recommend reading in this regard?

      My suggestion at this point might be to:

      1. if you just want to read but not yet interact, log onto any one of them e.g. https://lemmy.world and poke around!:-)
      2. consider if there are any particular communities that you are interested in the most - e.g. https://programming.dev/c/programmer_humor, or https://sh.itjust.works/c/patientgamers, etc.
      3. for general-purpose ones - arguably the best approach - visit a site like https://lemmyverse.net/ to see those that have the most activity on them and might be closest to you.

      Do NOT get mislead though by the community / instance descriptions, e.g. midwest.social says that it is for "leftists in the Midwest USA", but what it means by "leftists" is not the common usage (especially for people in the Midwestern USA, who would interpret it like "progressive liberal" or some such) and rather more extreme forms such as full-on communism. Similarly, hexbear.net never bothers to enforce their own Code of Conduct (the only time they remember the human is when you say something they agree with - any other time the human is fair game to be dunked on!). But it is like watching Fox News: regardless of what they say, pretty quickly you get a sense that something is a bit "off" when you visit these places:-).

      lemmy.ml is much harder to get a read on though, hence the linked discussion. It does not say that it is leftist, or even has any instance description that I can see - they just call themselves "Lemmy" as if that is sufficient, with no disambiguation between it and the software that runs on it or any acknowledgement that the rest of the Fediverse exists. Ironically lemmygrad.ml is doing better these days at more accurately portraying what it is about, with a communist flag and manifesto - that honesty is appreciated, by me at least, as it shows an intellectual capacity to realize that other viewpoints exist and thus to distinguish self vs. nonself, unlike what lemmy.ml does (not).

      I think there are some tools to transfer accounts but I have never used them so I don't know where to find them - sorry, but I hope knowing that at least helps you find them:-).

      • My comment above is pretty much my recommendation.

        I think there are some tools to transfer accounts but I have never used them so I don’t know where to find them - sorry, but I hope knowing that at least helps you find them:-).

        For the transfer of communities, there is a tab in the user settings to export your settings (including subscriptions) to a JSON file. You can then import it to your new account.

      • Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works

    • In your account settings there is an export function that will generate a file. Use that file in your new account to import your subscriptions.

  • Meanwhile .world heavily censors for israel but that's fine.

    Dont debunk beheaded babies and rapes on .world that is antisemitic. New York Times never lies guys!

    • Whether done by community mods or instance admins, it seems like similar thoughts should apply: starting new communities elsewhere (on different instances) increases freedom of choice, so that abuses in one area don't leave someone entirely out in the wasteland with no content.

      • This is why defederation with .ml is contradictory. Because it serves to amplify a liberal zionist echo chamber.

        Coincidentally virtually every person you hear whining about getting banned from .ml is someone defending the Genocide of Palestinians. And usually the real reason they got banned from .ml is because they went around screaming at everyone they were a Tankie.

        .ml very often features criticism about Russia and/or China without being removed. Case in point the Tienanmen square posts yesterday and today. But because it also allows viewpoints which .world users have never experienced in their life they can't help it but start a shit-slinging contest in comment sections.

        Now those newer perspectives aren't per-se correct. Many times you will find Tankies. Had one guy try to deny the Uyghur concentration camps. But I didn't get banned for disagreeing with him because my replies didn't consist of "lmao ur a tankie".

39 comments