Following the news that Lemmy world has decided to defederate from hexbear without consulting their community and before hexbear even federated with anyone, I'd like to make this announcement to settle things once and for all about us "scary tankies" who apparently don't tolerate free expression or whatever.
Lemmygrad has been around since the very beginning of Lemmy as a project, we are one of the oldest instance with lemmy.ml.
In that time, we have never defederated from anyone except in three cases:
- troll instances (usually inactive and unmoderated, with free account requests, that trolls used back in the day to bypass their bans). We usually refederate if they start being moderated again.
- outright fascist instances such as exploding heads or powerballs or whatever before the admin deleted it (which you're welcome, it's because there's communists on Lemmy that there's so few fascists)
- and, the fringe case, the couple specifically NSFW instances that we instantly defederated from because we don't want to host porn on our database and our rule 5 prohibits porn anywhere on Lemmygrad.
Otherwise, we have no reason to defederate from anyone. Holier-than-thou liberals can be difficult and irritating, I'm not denying that or implying we're somehow above it all, but to defederate would imply we are scared of what they have to say. We're not, because what they have to say is stuff we've all seen for ourselves and used to believe too.
You can see our blocklist here for yourself: https://lemmygrad.ml/instances, we only block around 40 instances, which might seem like a lot, but then compare to lemmy world which blocks 141 instances, or beehaw which blocks 765 instances.
Nobody is born a communist. Nobody is born a liberal either, but we become one through the self-reproduction of culture. From our earliest age we're exposed to liberalism (the ideology of capitalism) to the point that we integrate it. Did you have a model UN in school and vote for class presidents?
So really we can't be scared of anti-communist arguments because we've heard them all before. It's especially weird when people say we "buy into old propaganda" around Stalin or whatever, when anywhere you look, Soviet historiography in academia amounts to little more than "Stalin was paranoid and acted like the Tsar but called himself a communist". Like we went to public school too lol, we had a unit on the USSR lol.
Anyway, all defederations that happened on Lemmygrad come from other instances themselves, most of them pre-emptively defederating us before they even saw a single post from us. If beehaw, or shitjustworks, or lemmy dot whatever wanted to refederate, they could do it instantly and we'd be federated again.
And on that topic, let's talk about bans. We don't ban people who ask questions in good faith. But we will instantly ban anyone who comes to Lemmygrad solely to troll, as all online forums have done since time immemorial.
Likewise on blocklist issues, we poll our community very often for their input and allow them to propose changes. You can look at our !lemmygrad_court@lemmygrad.ml to see some things we've included the community on. We try to practice democratic centralism where applicable.
It goes even further; we allow communities and posts that some both on Lemmygrad or outside might disagree with, on the principle that we see ourselves as a more generalistic ML instance. We allow users to have their own community and moderate it however they want (respecting sitewide rules), and generally the removal of a community goes through an admin chat and might even go to a community feedback session. We have meme communities, we have religious communities, we have shitposting communities, and we also have serious discussion communities. And a plethora of personal communities for users who want to post in their own space like a blog.
We also have exactly 6 rules and no lengthy code of conduct or other documents one needs to read to participate here. This is helped by the fact that as we're all communists and more specifically mainly marxist-leninists, most of us already behave the expected way around comrades and don't need to be told how to conduct themselves.
So let me ask this; who is really censoring who here?
Hopefully a few libs will read this, and actually read it.
This part in particular is just something it would be nice to get through lib's heads. We didn't pop fully formed out of the earth one day, we were all libs at some point in our lives, before realising that liberalism doesn't actually explain anything, and is more in the business of explaining away things, and using distraction and simplification instead of proper understanding of a situation.
When they come in here with their "Stalin bad man, million billion dead" or "Kim Jong Un evil dictator!" or whatever, they don't understand that we also used to believe those lies, before becoming better educated on the subject and actually examining a different point of view from our own. Hopefully they choose to do a bit of that too.
The problem is that they think we're QAnon style conspiracy theorists. They won't even entertain the idea that all of this stuff that they've been told their whole lives is bullshit. Even when you present the CIA doc where they planned it. The lies are just too big to comprehend, even though they are pretty well documented.
It was pretty funny on that lemmy world thread when some people said "Criticising NATO is playing right into Russia's propaganda".
A. You'd have to explain why NATO Propaganda is more desirable than Russia's propaganda.
B. You'd have to explain why we have to buy into this NATO Propaganda to the point where we can't say things that align, even if by pure luck, with Russia's line.
C. You'd have to explain why, when communists have been against NATO since its inception, we suddenly can't talk about it because someone else picks up the same line.
D. You'd have to explain why I give a fuck about Russia and Ukraine fighting some 3000km away. Putin isn't at your doorstep he can't hurt you.
E. You'd finally have to explain why Ukraine could not defend itself if NATO didn't exist. Could the US magically not send ammo if it's not through nato? Do they think these weapons and vehicles materialize out of thin air in the NATO factory?
But they will never find any real explanation beyond "Putler bad mmkay" because there's none. It's all deflection. They stan for NATO (whose achievements include irreparably destroying Ukraine with cluster bombs and depleted uranium ammo, invading Libya and bombing Yugoslavia) and they will find any bad faith argument to defend their beliefs. It's not rational or sensible, it's belief.
Also with that thread, we've actually got several people requesting accounts on lemmygrad. We accept them.
Lurkers think more than the libs who post regularly I say, at least there are dozens of us!
This is extremely frustrating because there are real conspiracies that the "conspiracy theories" distract from. Just like you were saying, most of it is well documented, probably because the US built its intelligence agencies using Nazi intelligence officers.
I miss conspiracy theory spaces before QAnon showed up I ain't even gonna bullshit
I hate to break it to you but those 'older' conspiracy theories were all based on racism, usually antisemitism. Dig enough into them and it is just rehashing Theosophy. Check out DeCamp's Lost Continents for an accessable history. I don't have my home library right now but there was a collection of academic essays published around 2012 that lamented the crackpots who show up to lectures and also included the POV of someone who was drawn into it. My working theory is that conspiracy theories are so popular because we don't teach a real explaination of the world, we teach a myth and an easily falsified model about liberal democracy and capitalism/"free markets", because teaching historical materialism in 'the West' is verboten.
Bear with me now, this is going to get meta-conspiratorial: I wouldn't be surprised to find that the people doing the real conspiracies spread the fake conspiracies to distract people and to make it seem that 'conspiracy theorists' are always wrong. Makes it very easy for people to dismiss claims about 'hidden' atrocities (even if they're not even hidden).
My understanding of the modern form of the term "conspiracy theory" is that it was consciously developed to be a term that shuts down all conversation and immediately makes a person think that the case being presented is so inconceivable so as to be dismissable without thought. IIRC this modern use came about after the JFK assassination, the circumstances of which had many people asking very serious questions.
They need to use conspiracy theory style logic to keep us in the "crazy conspiracy theorist" zone though. By using sound logical arguments and showing that we are not conspiracy theorists, we can reach those who are actually willing to listen. That's why I'm saying I hope they actually read this stuff.
The ones who come here to just "own the tankies" or whatever are beyond help. We should dunk on them nonstop. But some of them come here prepared to dunk on a "crazy conspiracy nutter" and then realise that we aren't like that, and hopefully start to examine what we're actually saying.