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I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A
lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml]. It’s
been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s
say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s
colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they
didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who
dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of
China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, … As an example, there was a thread today
about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there
were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some
whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of
votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support. I
posted a comment in this thread linking to
“https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs
[https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs]” (WARNING:
graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely
known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed
for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I
noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist
and denialist comments were left in place. This is what the modlog
[https://lemmy.ml/modlog] of the instance looks like:
[https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/6886b092-43d3-408b-ab57-2fa686f8a6c7.png]
Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say? When I called them out on their one
sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a
community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] that I had ever
participated in. Proof:
[https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/9c52e470-645f-46ba-ac1d-0b7d8be17af3.png] So
many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the
fediverse, you can use another instance.” The problem with this reasoning is
that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml],
and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement
lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting
for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world
[/c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world] where there’s nobody to discuss
anything with. I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge
people to avoid lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] hosted communities in favor of
communities on more reasonable instances.
Everything I hate is now tankie. We must stop this by getting them to censor what we think is tankie
It's already happening when lemmy.world defederated from Hexbear. In general, there's no point in using Lemmy, which is still missing features from Reddit, unless you:
Subscribe to political ideology that's against the Reddit mainstream (eg socialism and open fascism)
Are into TOS-violating activities (piracy, shoplifting, buying drugs online, depraved pedo shit)
The people doing it for FOSS reasons are few in number, and the people doing it because they hate spez have crawled back to Reddit.
By defederating from Hexbear and Lemmygrad as well as being intolerant of that piracy comm means that lemmy.world will eventually slide towards fascism as its way of growing. In general, other Lemmy instances will either fade into irrelevance or adopt one of the two. If a Lemmy instance isn't spicy enough, it'll either orient itself towards socialism or towards fascism. Look at an instance like beehaw. They are openly contemptuous of the socialist instances, but since they, to their credit, also refuse to slide towards fascism, they have become irrelevant.
Why my antitankie space is full of fash, exhibit 8716287135
Oh, of course. Lemmy.world is the great net that specifically captures Radical Liberals with no specific, niche interests. It's a more terminally online Reddit.