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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
Yeah, that may be so. Like there has to be a first person that breaks the barrier for that foreign instance's comm by subscribing to it before posts in that comm can show in the feed for other people belonging to that first person's instance. That seems like it would be an odd way of doing things imo, but clearly lemmy can be very odd, so that could be.
Still, I think that is a completely separate issue from what I'm talking about, as you can see with the lemmy privacy comm not existing according to hexbear. And what's more, is that certain people on hexbear are simply not visible to anyone on lemmygrad. I know of a few hexbear users who post comments all the time, but if I'm viewing the thread from lemmygrad, I never see their comments, even if I'm looking right at them in the same thread from hexbear in another browser tab. And if I try to go to their user page from lemmygrad, it just shows a "couldnt_find_user" error. If they make a post, no one on lemmygrad will know about it. If they post a comment and a ton of people reply, no one on lemmygrad will see any of that thread... despite hexbear and lemmygrad being federated. And this is vice versa too, with some lemmygrad users and their posts never showing up to people on hexbear.
If you go to hexbear's c/literature comm from hexbear, you see a bunch of fairly recent posts, and a long history of posting in that comm in general. However, if you view that comm from lemmygrad: https://lemmygrad.ml/c/literature@hexbear.net then all you will see is 4 posts... total. As if only 4 posts were ever made in that comm. Every other post in that comm of who knows how many hundreds simply aren't visible to people from lemmygrad. And I think that often there are posts that never show up to federated instances because I've seen this happen with other instances too.
In short: just because you're federated with an instance, don't assume you can see all the posts there and don't assume you can see all the users there because there are almost certainly a lot of each that are simply not visible to you or anyone from your instance. Edit: Also don't assume that anyone from another instance can see you just because you see them. They may not see your posts, comments or even be able to look at your user page (which will just give an error).
Is it because these users are banned or something?
No! It's not. I've double checked that to make sure. I did user searches of the modlogs of the respective instances, and I even DM'd an invisible person about it and they had no idea why they couldn't be seen from another instance. I'm almost positive it's just a bug. Some people are simply unlucky to be affected by it. So far as I know I've never been banned, but like I mentioned, anything I've posted (granted, it hasn't been much) with my lemmygrad account in the last 7 months, is not visible from my hexbear account. https://hexbear.net/u/MaeBorowski@lemmygrad.ml shows the last comment made was 7 months ago. https://lemmygrad.ml/u/MaeBorowski shows 8 days ago. But at least my user page isn't an error where nothing can be seen, which is the case for some others.