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

  • BountifulEggnog [she/her]
    ·
    6 months ago

    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

    Honestly unhinged.

    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.

    What cold war drama? What right wing agitprop?

    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) [47]

    Doesn't post the proof, unfortunately. Fortunately, a bunch of other people are correcting them.

    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.

    Again literally no evidence that .ml has abused the federation algorithm or whatever.

    • Infamousblt [any]
      ·
      6 months ago

      Also it's open source so if you want to see what's in the code base just go fuckin look?

      And if you don't know how to read the code then shut the fuck up?

      Libs are deeply unserious

      • BountifulEggnog [she/her]
        ·
        6 months ago

        Yup, it would be so easy to show if something malicious was in the code. But for all the fear mongering they do, I haven't seen anyone show even a snippet of code.

      • jackmarxist [any]
        ·
        6 months ago

        He wanted to sound smart while knowing nothing about coding, open source and cybersecurity.

    • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
      ·
      6 months ago

      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.

      Love it when they start feeling themselves and just end up talking like a Netflix show character.

      Like what does this mean

      • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]
        ·
        6 months ago

        we have no shame (true) and that means we're untrustworthy for some reason

        also commies powerhungry and that's why...checks notes...we constantly fight for the powerless instead of selling out to a capitalist?

        we really need to study these tadpoles brainworms