YSK: lemmy.ml is managed by tankies, and lead lemmy developer is a tankie
Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA "parentis_shotgun" on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
Here I am... Joined Lemmy.ml because it was supposed to be a security, privacy and FOSS focused community. Now people are probably going to block seeing my comments.
It's easy enough to switch instances, but which instance you joined is actually far less important than which communities you engage in. Rule of thumb: avoid any ...@lemmy.ml communities. Not because the communities are bad per se, but because the tankies have power there and they don't shy away from banning you from unrelated communities if you say something they don't like.
Ideally nobody who's not a tankie should create or join communities hosted on lemmy.ml anymore.
Yes, but... (And I know this wasn't your main point) We should still try to have instances get along and try to find some common ground. It's still annoying to migrate. If every instance admin was extremely opinionated and it made everyone jump ship between multiple instances it's still annoying.
(Admins are still free to run their instances the way they want to, I'm not saying they necessarily should change.)
Common ground can only be had with reasonable people you actually have common ground with. Personally I think it's a fool's errand to try to talk sense into the lemmy.ml admins.
The only solution I see is to salvage what we can from the bona fide communities that still reside on lemmy.ml and then put a big fence around it, so can have their toxic waste dump of an instance all to themselves.
I've switched instances three or four times when I was still getting my bearings on lemmy. I didn't really find it annoying. The only tedious part is resubscribing to the communities you were in, but there are tools for that.
Yep that's the line the developers put up there to lure people in. It's mildly disingenuous at best. Having to copy a line from a document titled "The Principles of Communism" just to sign up should've tipped you off that something was a bit weird.
Join an instance that has more lax federation standards and subscribe to the ml communities you care about, or get comfortable with defederation and people from other instances discarding your opinions. It's a choice you need to make.
Uh what? How is it weird to have a mild anti-bot task in a registration process? That's pretty normal.
If you're objecting to the content in the text, well that's just silly. A communist instance referencing communist writings is not "weird", that'd be entirely within the realm of reasonable expectation.
If you feel so threatened by the mere presence of communism in your bubble, maybe don't try to join an instance by and for them? How dare the dastardly communists be so happy and welcoming to everyone!
I was trying to point out the hypocrisy of branding your instance to be about privacy and security when tankie-glorified regimes don't respect that at all, and they're instead mildly pushing people in that direction. Why not use something from the EFF pages on those topics? Nice strawman, though.
I don't know that privacy and security are mutually exclusive to communism
Honestly, I joined Lemmy pretty early on... So I have no idea if I even had to type that, if I did, I have no recollection of it.