I felt this might be worth the community discussing.
Happy for people both on and off-instance to weigh in, though it is about this instance's interaction.
It's made doubly fun by the fact that the main owners of the lemmy project are admins on there. (If I understand correctly)
Title was brought over during the cross post.
cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531
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:
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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:
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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.
Are we suggesting defederating everyone on lemmy.ml? Or just certain users that break feddit.uk's rules? Sorry I am not up to speed on how to defederate. I would say defederate single users (if you can) who break the rules but also track how many you need to defederate per instance to decide if it's just not worthwhile and instead defederate the whole instance. For example if you end up defederating 10 users a month then... meh... that's not so bad. But if you need to do 10 a day then fuck that. You decide what the appropriate numbers are, mine are hypothetical.
If they're not breaking our rules then forget about them. It's a losing battle to change their minds so just workaround them.
Having said that, I do also think we should stop calling them tankies as a pergorative. If we are complaining that they don't have basic respect for their users then we should probably set an example and not stoop to name calling.
Feel free to call me a removed 😜.
You're a removed. Happy?
I don't think anyone is suggesting anything, yet.
Personally, In see no need to defederate as their actions aren't having an impact on this instance. We usually defederate on the grounds of noncery and occasionally when an instance is full of toxic trolls (or temporarily if they are having technical problems that impact our server). I'd just suggest monitoring the situation for now.
And on the issue of popular communities being on there: it's the Fediverse, find a relevant instance or a general one (preferably not lemmy.world - we need to spread the love/load) and start a new one.
Today's lesson: don't talk Politics on tankie instances.
I refer you to my first sentence.