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.
This whole lemmy tankie dev thing has been discussed ad nauseam here for the past year or so. Not sure what solutions you suggest, but if I were to filter my software by who's an asshole dev and who's not, that list will end up really short.
As far as the ml instance goes, I don't agree that we should start defederating left and right with any and all undesirables, but to each their own. At least people now will be in the know, and it might take some weight off lemmy.world
I've only been on Lemmy a month, and this shit is already exhausting. Isn't a main point of this whole fediverse thing that you can just block entire instances as well as users? Why is this even an ongoing topic that spans multiple communities?
You can do exactly that. OP wants everyone to do it.
I'm new here, so pardon my lack of understanding. But if this lemmy_.ml place is engaging in such disagreed upon behavior by so many people, why hasn't it been banned so I'm not even seeing it in the first place? I've recently learned there are whole lemmy servers ignored or banned by most other civil lemmy servers due to their bad behavior, why not ml?
If this really has been going on for over a year, and so many communities are against it, why is it not banned?
Who would "ban" Lemmy.ml? There isn't a "master instance" over all, each instance is an island.
Lemmy.world is currently discussing whether or not to sever ties with Lemmy.ml, just like Literature.cafe alreay did.
Lemmy.world has already defederated from Lemmygrad and Hexbear, the 2 largest Marxist instances, so Lemmy.ml is the last major Marxist-friendly instance that Lemmy.world interacts with.
For clarity, Lemmy.ml is seen very positively by some servers, and negatively by others. You are getting viewpoints largely from Lemmy.world, whereas other communities like db0, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, Blahaj.zone, or otherwise may have different or opposite stances.
That's the beauty and messiness of federation.
Please bear in mind that I'm a lemmy.ml user (though not a tankie, nor marxist, nor even socialist.)
Look at OP. How many lines are about smearing someone for their politics and beliefs (Even the subject line covers ONLY that), and how many are about the need to improve moderation practices at .ml (precious few, not even the subject line).
IMO that's one reason. The discussion rarely ends up being about moderation practices even when that's the stated goal. It ends up being about not liking someone's views.
The other reasons - you can personally block that instance if you choose, but for it to be hidden from EVERYONE on an instance, the admins of the instances need to make that decision. (To defederate.) There are lots of potential reasons not to do so, and I think many of them boil down to not throwing out the baby with the bathwater since there are plenty of users on ml like me who are not tankies and are just having the same discussions we'd have anywhere.
I got a 3 day ban from one single community at .ml within my first couple days here for using the term "whataboutism" - I suspect it was an automod action. I wasn't really happy about it, but eh? shrug
I have the same answer for folks now that I did when social media was somehow full of US conservatives claiming they could no longer speak their minds on social media. No one is obligated to give me or you or anyone a platform. If Lemmy.ml is that much of a shithole, it will eventually get defederated broadly, and everyone who isn't a tankie will stop using it.
The occasional thread like this, or someone complaining that my opinion is invalid because I'm an ml user (has happened maybe three times) are the only times I ever think about it really.
This would make a ton of sense if your choice of Lemmy instance were not just that; a choice. It's not a characteristic innate to your being that you're born with or something.
You can choose to associate with whatever instance you want and swap it up with another account somewhere else if you want at any time (you can prob keep the same username if you want too).
Unless it is already taken on the new instance, you absolutely can. Usernames are namespaced similar to email addresses. So,
example@lemmy.worldandexample@lemmy.mlare considered two different users. This means that there is no technical reason preventing it.Tankie is a pejorative. We should stop using that - I am not sure what the best replacement is, authoritarian? Fascist?
OP seems to believe that the unfair admin/mod practices stem from their political beliefs. e.g., going against their very own Code of Conduct, the amins in question used subversive database manipulation practices to eliminate the mod-log explanations for their actions, and also preemptively banned various people from communities that they had never (even so much as once) commented in, in the past. The latter is EXTREME, and the former is disingenuous.
Oh, but the admin is an authority-loving fascist, hence it suddenly all makes sense: "service to stated principles that serve the community good" give way to "whoever has the power to accomplish things does whatever they want", in that world-view. So they are not entirely as disconnected as you might wish in a purely mathematical & theoretical world. This is the real world, where it gets messy, and EVERYTHING gets political. But okay, what if OP made a poorly-written post - b/c their heart jumped out ahead of their brain - what then? It doesn't mean that it's not true, or a good thing to do, even then, and moreover what to do about it now? Re-word it if you like and write and post a new one? But this is the one that we have. Yeah, again, irl gets messy sometimes.
You missed some stuff yourself btw. As individual people block you - by which I do not just mean personally but your entire instance of choice - increasingly you will find yourself speaking to an echo chamber consisting of fascists + those who are more neutral towards authoritarianism. You will reply to people, and wonder why so few ever reply back to you - but it won't be b/c they don't like you (well maybe some, I dunno:-P), and rather they won't even see your replies unless they happen to visit that section of the comments for some other reason. They can do so, but they will not be notified so they will not be made aware of your desire to communicate.
This event is happening, like it or not, and one way or another. This OP at least gives us the chance to talk about it, before things go too far and even this much communication becomes impossible. i.e., the Western world is offering you this lifeboat, to let you know what is coming. Truth Social surely does far worse, and when Elon took over Twitter and renamed it to X, he didn't warn people, and instead just started removing and banning at will/whim. But the rest of the Fediverse isn't going to remain associated with fascism just b/c some innocent people have an account on Lemmy.ml.
Btw, in your Settings under "Import/Export Settings" there is a large button Export that can make a JSON file, and in a new account you can Import it, for easy transfer of your settings. You'd lose all your past comments/replies/up-/downvotes, but if you also transfer your iconic avatar and keep the same name, many people may not even notice.
I am sorry that this is upsetting to you.
Because the Lemmy user base is still relatively small, so the drama in one corner takes up a nontrivial amount of the total area. If it were the size of reddit or tiktok, you wouldn't pay threads like these any mind.
It’s all over because it’s a pervasive problem, and it’s obviously off putting to a lot of people.
And it’s especially a problem when there are random communities peppered in your feed that you simply can’t participate in randomly, even though they may be the largest of their kind.
Ive been banned from communities I have yet to participate in, for no reason, and without any responses from mods when I ask what happened.
It’s making it so the entire platform becomes toxic unless you actively persevere through their unfair practices.
It’s important to me because I really liked Reddit back in the day, and before that the disperate forums that existed all over. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are interested in those same things, but are put off when they inevitably say something “liberal” in a meme space and are attacked for it. It’s toxic and it is counter to growth.
Not to mention how blatant an echo chamber it creates, and how naive users can be indoctrinated to misinformation without even a hint of counter discussion being allowed.
Edit: desperate to disperate
OP has been here two months, and they were shocked to find out an instance literally named after Karl Marx and John Lennin would pretend to be on the left but support authoritarian governments...
And they assume since they just "discovered" it, no one else knows.
... John Lennin?
"Imagine no private ownership of the means of production, I wonder if you can"
It's crazy to think about, but even after all these years, people insist he was bigger than Jesus
Imagine all the Pol Pot...
John Lennon
Vladimir Lenin
John Lennin. Rofl Mao
It's as if people are joining and learning things.
Been here an almost year and literally just learned that from the above post.
It’s not named after Lemmy from Motörhead?
They probably mean the
.mlpart.That's why I included this section in my post:
I had to block a handful of bad actors, maybe around 15, and don't have much issue now. As usual it's a very small, very vocal minority that's doing most of the shitting in the pool. Unfortunately many are also mods of communities like politics@lemmy.ml, so generally not subscribing to stuff there is a good policy too.
Yeah, like linus is a known cunt to work with, i'll still update my kernel regularly though
Not defending his behavior but I would note that he has been actively seeking to remedy his cunty-ness after becoming aware of how problematic it was and the problematic people that it attracted.
It's the Vampire Castle phenomenon of online leftist spaces. One dev and instance admin of Lemmy has problematic personal beliefs, so now we aren't allowed to be on Lemmy anymore because it's failed an ideological purity test that OP decided for the rest of us. In other news, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is a hardcore Ayn Rand style freemarket libertarian, so I guess we should all ditch wikipedia and each buy a 400 pound Encyclopedia Britannica set. Because that'll show him to believe things I think are terrible.
Yeah, I honestly give very few shits about the political opinions of the lemmy devs as long as it doesn't taint the project itself -and if it did at some point in the future, forking an open-source project is stupidly easy.
I even donate a smidge of money to the development effort via librepay - man does need it to live after all.
Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.
I'll add that they're also generally quite pleasant when I see them on Lemmy. And I haven't seen either of them involved in being ban-happy. Some will argue otherwise based upon misconstruing the relationship between FLOSS devs and FLOSS consumers as a business/customer relationship (expecting customer service and product manager input on software that's donated free of charge). But, I think that those folks are just not yet familiar with how FLOSS development works.
I had my first ever comment, in decades of forums/reddit usage, get mod deleted because I was critical of China and the USSR. It was a fairly mild criticism. That action turned me off the whole instance.
Sad that you chose an .ml community to come back to. You can't talk about Russia or China at all without getting deleted there, unless it's saying that Tienamen Square never happened or something like that.
They learn from who they are worshipping. Exactly how the CCP control the narratives.
Same here, but they tried to claim I called a Steam Deck a "Rice Burner" as a racist insult when I randomly chose "rice" as the title for this meme to fill the mandatory title block.
Like, bro? Even if that was my intent, which it wasn't even a term I had ever seen applied to a computer, it doesn't make sense.
I looked at your downvotes because I see you at -2... Wear this like a badge of honor!
Most of the downvotes I see are lemmy.ml users. Which I find funny. Rice exists in so many countries outside of china, but because it reminds them of China it's instantly bad since you're using is negatively. It's absurd.
LMAO!! Thank you! I've got them blocked but the fact they're even voting me down is silly. It wasn't even an insult because if I was even mentioning "ricing" it was the better of two options.
wow, you can see who up/downvoted a post? how do I do that?
Host your own lemmy instance. Or use Kbin(shows up as likes).
For some reason they decided that even though other activitypub services can see it just fine, lemmy will not show these things to normal users.
Regarding lemmy.ml: yes, you should avoid it. It does not make sense to create politically-neutral communities on a politically-oriented instance.
Regarding Dessalines: The great thing about Lemmy is that I don't need to give a shit about the lead developer's politics, because he's not in control of how Lemmy is used, and if he ever tried some kind of heinous cross-instance power grab, it would get shut down before it got started.
Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦
One of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism is that a dictatorship is required to guide the proletariat to communist society (which would be completely stateless). So the dissonance is inherent in Leninist dogma 🤷
Dictatorship of the Proletariat. This is used in contrast with Capitalist Liberal Democracy, which Marx called the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. It doesn't refer to a literal Dictatorship as we commonly understand it, but instead to whichever class controls the state, Capitalists or Workers.
Lenin didn't invent the concept of the DotP, that was Marx, and was his way of advocating for violent revolution, which in Engels words is "the most authoritarian action one could take" in his essay On Authourity.
As for Communism being Stateless, yes, technically, but as a long result of elimination of contradictions. Marx didn't see the state as an "evil" so much as a tool that would eventually just be unnecessary, same as Money, not a temporary sacrifice for something eventually greater. This is outlined in Critique of the Gotha Programme.
All well and good, but the term dictatorship here still refers to a situation where the state apparatus has complete control over the means of production, in other words a total centralisation of power. Indeed in Marxism-Leninism the dictatorship takes the form of a vanguard party forming a single party state. Whichever way you look at it, practical power resides with a very small group of individuals.
The contrast with the eventual stateless communist society, in which power would be completely decentralised, is quite striking. It's not quite clear to me how Marxist-Leninist theory envisioned the transition from one to the other, although it seems to me there was a general feeling that central economic planning and industrialization would fairly quickly lead to the end of scarcity altogether, which in hindsight seems... very optimistic.
If you ask me, the ideals of communism mostly died around the same time as Lenin. Pretty much all communist states that have existed (and currently exist) are mainly interested in maintaining their own power structures rather than actually working their way towards the idealised communist society. Which pretty much just makes them dictatorships in the classical sense.
Yes, Marx and later Lenin argued for complete centralization of power in the hands of the proletariat, and in Lenin's case, an additional group of well-read proletarians dedicated to leading the revolution.
A common misconception is that a non-ML revolution wouldn't have a vanguard, Lenin is literally just referring to whoever is the most advanced and leading the revolution. A vanguard may be a group of Anarchists trying to lead the revolution, even if they don't use Democratic Centralism like Lenin did and advocates for in State and Revolution.
Marx also didn't believe there would one day be a state and the next it would collapse, same with Lenin. They believed that over time the Material Conditions would lessen the need for a state until it "whithered away" over time. It wouldn't be a relinquishing of power, but a shrinking.
Complete statelessness would have the same centralized power as Socialism, just without a state. This centralization becomes a decentralization, in that the Proletariat can democratically operate the Means of Production, which they cannot under Capitalism. If this sounds confusing, Marx makes this clear in Critique of the Gotha Programme. You refer to the state as an "other," distinct from the workers, when it is an extension of them and made up of them in Socialism, according to Marx. There would still be a government, just no means by which one class oppresses another.
Marx was not an Anarchist, who instead believe in free association and networks of mutual aid.
I don't believe Communism has died. It may seem that way if you see systems as static, and not as ever-changing and evolving along with humanity and technology.
As a fellow communist, I was always bewildered by this urge of many tankies to prove by all means, against any evidence, that China is socialist and ultimately good.
It's neither. China turned to markets, privatized many industries, and really did commit atrocities on Tiannamen square and in Xinjiang.
Doesn't mean socialism as a system is dysfunctional. United States are directly responsible for insane atrocities all over the world, and we don't need to deny that either.
We need to learn from the experience and strive for it not to happen again. Not close our eyes, scream "blah-blah-blah" and pretend it never happened.
China and the Soviet Union were responsible for acts of genocide, mass murdering/starving people, etc.
Doesn't mean this didn't happen in a capitalist world, and doesn't mean we should close our eyes on that to defend the good look of the system. If anything, this does the opposite. Problems need to be solved, not ignored.
Currently we are witnessing a capitalist genocide in Gaza were children are starving to death and the working class are powerless to stop this. But yea denial on both sides certainty is problematic, the issue is though "tankie" communists will argue propaganda as well as the libs and conservatives. We have been bombarded with fictitious narrative that its a real struggle to find comprehensive and honest reporting of previous events.
Last month I read a "tankies" recap on Tiannamen Square protests, it went as far as to say there was no massacre and quoted creditable journalist that had reported a peaceful evening on the night of the massacre, but I equally saw photos of piled up buddies, bloodied police officers and alike. There's also a conspiracy that the CIA staged the massacre or played some rule within it.
Ive also dealt with american denying the genocide in Vietnam, or Americas rule in creating North Korean.
Solidarity comrade
Tables are, like fascists, searching for dogmatic "easy" in a complex world. You know, like ignorant assholes.
Are there people that don't know that Lemmy is developed by Marxists, and their instance is run by Marxists? Thought that was common knowledge, that's why Lemmy exists in the first place, it was developed along Communist principles.
If you're new to Lemmy then it won't be common knowledge at all.
Could be, but again, Lemmy was made along Communist principles, it's safe to assume people interested in Communist principles are going to be here.
But they may not know the history of it or why it was made before joining. I certainly didn't, it was more about a decentralised alternative to Reddit, I just joined and explored.
Perhaps the point is that those principles predate Communism by quite some time, and Communism added a lot of its own baggage on them.
Because Lemmy is usually marketed as the Fediverse alternative to Reddit, not as a communist platform.
Plenty of people try Lemmy then promptly leave when they realize it's run by "Marxists" (i.e. people pretending to Marxists as a facade for spreading CCP propaganda).
Great. now we have fediverse Stalin :D
The way comments and users are purged from ml would make Stalin proud!
That's not quite correct, they are Marxists Leninists, who are the more Authoritarian and reactionary counterparts.
All Marxist-Leninists are Marxists, not all Marxists are Marxist-Leninists.
It's accurate to describe them as Marxists still.
Good thing that Lemmy is an open source federation, then. It's not like Spaz on Reddit, where one dude can ruin the whole damn thing for everyone with a few bad choices.
You mean u/Spez, the former moderator of r/jailbait, who reduced mod transparency on all subreddits including porn reddits? Wonder why he needed to hide who the mods were after that scandal.
Also, fyi, to post adult content on most adult subreddits, you have to verify. The way reddit does this process is creepy to say the least, (OnlyFans at least requires an ID to verify your age) along with how they delete smaller porn subreddits that do not have those rules, including porn subreddits that are explicitly moderated by the content creators themselves. It's like porn pimping on reddit. It's genuinely very creepy especially if you believe the conspiracy that Ghilisaine Maxwell was an active subreddit poster on r/news. And if Spez or his alts are moderators on most of the big porn subs, then likely he is seeing hundreds if not thousands of images (some may be of minors bc of the way they do verification) daily through the verification process. That's- creepy. Like really creepy. Lemmy is better.
I'm glad that this is the controversy on Lemmy, and not things like Reddit had with r/JailBait.
I'm perfectly fine with just avoiding interactions with lemmy.ml communities. They can exist, even if I disagree with them. And if I wanted to participate, I'd probably be welcome so long as I follow the rules. Unlike r/Conservative, which required proving yourself to the mods to get a pass to enter or something...lol
But yes, it's definitely good to know what the .ml stands for, and to keep that in mind whenever one sees Lemmy.ml.
I would be fine with that too. If the instance was just tankie people talking tankie bullshit, like lemmygrad or hexbear, it would be easy to ignore. Unfortunately it's not that simple.
The problem is that lemmy.ml has a more privileged status in the fediverse: being the first Lemmy instance in existence it still holds quite a number of popular communities that are still frequented by people from the whole fediverse, and the tankies wield their power there as well. Like literally: make a disliked comment on /c/memes and you get banned from /c/Technology, /c/linux, /c/Progammer Humor, /c/Mechanical Keyboards,... and all your other favorite communities on lemmy.ml as well. This actually happened to me.
A second issue is that the mods make efforts to hide the censorship that they are doing, because they know it's not a good look. If you examine the modlog over there you'll see that the first half of the page is like a day's worth of moderation activities, and the second half covers 4 years. So where's the rest? The many controversial comment removals and bans that happened a few days ago on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, and who knows what else, have all been disappeared.
So yes, I think it is very important that people are being made aware of this and I also think a concerted effort should be made to move bona fide communities away from an instance ruled by bad faith actors.
Yeah, this sounds perfectly reasonable.
It's not like it was some grand conspiracy to make all those communities communist. It's just how Lemmy originated. As Lemmy grows, it's bound to get more communities on other instances, and if enough people hate the moderation on ML, then the other communities' growth will start to outpace the originals. It's not like Reddit where there are default subs (afaik).
I suspect there's way worse on the fediverse than Jailbait. There was a list posted a few months back of all the most defederated instance, and tankies didn't even get a look in. I didn't dare click them. Some of the domain names alone made me feel like I was going on a watchlist for even knowing about them.
I may not agree with the devs political view, but I think their work developing lemmy is excellent and made me subscribe to monthly donation on opencollective. Lemmy is an open source project where the devs have absolutely no say over how the software being used, as evidenced by so many lemmy instances defederating from lemmygrad and lemmy.ml. Their political belief won't affect other instance.
Most instances are federated with Lemmy.ml, it's Hexbear and Grad that .world and a few others have defederated from, among the major instances.
Yeah this is the origin of Lemmy. Reddit banned some far left subreddits years ago and so some Communists went and made Lemmy.
Just block the instance if it bothers you. Jeez.
I‘m glad that the fediverse resists excessive moderation and silencing of unwanted political opinions. I‘m not a fan of some of the things said or done on .ml but we wont do anything which is awesome. You can make your own instance and defederate, ban, block whoever you like.
To make my point clear, I made a large donation to the lemmy devs as I think they are doing awesome work. @dessalines@lemmy.ml especially is a tremendous help for the open source community.
But of course you‘re entitled to your opinion. Have a good day.
Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares.
It's one of those things where the very tankies you're talking about made it trivial for anyone not wanting to interact with them, their instance, or anyone in specific can just block whatever. And then there's the instances that defederate from .ml and/or grad, which is a decent amount of them.
They may be assholes (though they tend not to be in interpersonal ways, only in their political views), but they're assholes nobody has to interact with for very long.
You're beating a dead horse with this one
That horse fucking deserves it though. He knows what he did.
Yeah honestly let's make an example out of that horse
I mean, we should probably care at least enough to make sure they're not smuggling in any backdoors that would allow them take over the entire Lemmyverse.
I know it's open source so that's somewhat difficult to accomplish but not impossible (see the recent stealth attack on SSH/OpenSSL). At the very least, it requires people from outside their echo chamber to regularly review commits being made made before admins begin rolling out new updates.
That's a valid point, imo.
But there supposedly are people doing just that. Been too long since I ran across it here, but when the last big version change happened, some of the instance running folks looked over the code, and found nothing hinky. I know my asshole cousin has his own instance, and he said he scanned through it a little out of curiosity and "it ain't the prettiest" was the worst he had to say about it. Which, second hand info like that is like toilet paper, but it serves okay for a casual conversation like this.
I would hope so, since it's THEIR hardware it's running on (or in case it's rented, responsible for).
But as long as they don't put anything iffy into the code and leave their political opinions separate from that, they can certainly run their own instance however they please. That's the whole point of Lemmy after all.
The 730 people who upvoted this post do care.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don't want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them. I understand that awareness of why people want alternatives is important for those alternatives to have a chance at attracting users, and being discovered in the first place. I just have yet to actually see these alternatives receive the care they (imo) require to justify switching to them.
The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody.
Maybe it's too soon to make such a judgement call, we'll see over the next few days as people get the chance to see this post.
Votes mean as much as the shit I just took.
I have Lemmy.ml blocked and I still see them in other communities all the time. Defederation is the best solution for dealing with an instance that's designed to spread propaganda.
And no this isn't a dead horse, there's are other discussions ongoing about defederating Lemmy.ml
Wait what? A communism advocate who also develops Free and Open Source Software, which is literally communist philosphy applied to computers?
I'm blown away
OP isn't taking issue with that. They're taking issue with the CPP/USSR apologetics.
Yeah, about a year ago when all the "wow, lemmy really feels like an edgy early internet discussion forum" threads were popping up, I think people forgot that those early forums were just eternal flame wars between communists and anarchists.
Communism didn't invent empathy, humanism, solidarity, freedom or free sharing; it probably grew from there, and other things like FOSS can grow from there without being communist.
It's not really communism. It's all about freedom to compete. The bazaar is a market after all.
Note: Reference to The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Worth at least knowing of in regard to open source history.
Do you know the political views of the developers of every piece of software you use? Why is Lemmy different?
Seriously
I am employed as a Software Engineer in the real estate sector. I'm also a commie. Many ultracapitalist assholes are using my software and they have no idea about my political views. I'm sure there are a lot more of us than one would normally think. It's just that most of us are tired of having the same discussions with the same arguments over and over and over and over again, so we just don't out ourselves 99% of the time :)
Because it's not just any political view, tankism is part of the ideologies that support regimes which unmistakably restrict the freedom of speech. This could be an issue for an internet forum.
It's actually not different from having a right wing billionaire buying a social media. It's very much the same thing, and most people on the fediverse are there to avoid this kind of political influences on the platform.
I had never heard so much about "tankies" before I joined Lemmy.
Before, I had heard it so sparingly that I couldn't remember what it meant.
Perhaps there may be something more to this correlation. Why are people with this worldview so common here? If it's not more common here than anywhere else, why is it brought up so much more frequently?
Lemmy was made by Marxists, along Communist principles, both the format and the devs attract Marxists and Anarchists.
There is a lot of conflict between leftists and liberals on Lemmy because there are close to no conservatives.
It's kind of like a Disco Elysium situation, even though non-Marxists can enjoy it and use it, there are going to be more Marxists enjoying it and using it as a proportion, and fewer conservatives.
Plenty of them aren't "people," they're simply anonymous accounts used to spread and promote propaganda. Some content generated by people, some from LLMs.
They're common here because they can run their disinformation campaigns without a corporation interfering. Tik Tok isn't the CCP's only attempt to influence people through social media.
And here's him praising an ethnic cleansing
Yeah. Please note that phtn.app dev refused to change the default instance. I have moved back to Voyager since.
Edit: this has been resolved now. Photon has changed default instance to lemmy.ee
I haven't announced it, yet, but I've been testing ph.lemmy.cafe for some time now if that's your cup of tea.
I never refused. In fact, it's already been changed to lemm.ee
They're going to change it soon.
Source: I asked them on matrix
He's not praising an ethnic cleansing. He elsewhere has claimed that the ethnic cleansing/concentration camp narrative is entirely western propaganda and isn't happening at all. Instead, it's some sort of... Incarceration, deradicalization, and rehabilitation program? Hell, I don't know.
Either way, he already does and says enough things to criticize, let's not make up more. It just makes us look just as dumb.
You will be surprised how much of the open source software out there is written and maintained by lefties and tankies.
Sadly conservatives seem to have either lower education and are not notorious for their sharing and selflessness.
Denying historical events and refusing to come to terms with their causes and repercussions is not a left or right problem.
You can be as communist as you want but pretending that events with photographic evidence didn't actually happen put you in the same category as moon landing deniers in my book.
Right wing free software users love from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs until you point out what it is.
Then you get whatever this lemmy-wide tantrum is.
I disagree with Dessalines about some stuff but the guy is a don.
I am exactly in the same boat. I might disagree with someone but the amount of work he put into it is admirable
Anyone else seeing the irony of objecting to ml politics being discussed on a platform built by a ml for discussing and organizing around ml politics?
To clarify, since this topic is something that I have experienced quite a lot over my two months here, now: I do not have any problem whatsoever with tankie/communist/leftist politics. I also don't have a problem with people discussing them.
What I do have a problem with is:
And I think it's ok to think that these practices are inherently bad for a social media platform, and working with others to advocate against those practices.
Not really, it's software which specifically allows people to defederate, so it's by design that you'd have splinters.
Right, which is why pointing this out is especially silly
You should know /politics and /news ban anyone critical of israel and Lemmy.world is ran by Zionists.
This is true.
Also, some other communities straight up ban you for being in any way critical of NATO/US.
Lemmy.world mods just banned returntoozma from /politics for not posting enough postive news about Biden hahaha.
Only Orange Man bad.
Known shill Linkerbaan defending Lemmy.ml with a whataboutism. Not very original.
I would like to see similar proof of this allegation as exists elsewhere in this thread for .ml communities. Can you substantiate your allegations?
It’s not that I don’t believe you necessarily, it’s that it is completely counter to my own experience, where it seems to be commonly accepted that Israel is committing ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and likely genocide.
Can you illustrate any comments that have been deleted/users who have been banned for critique of Israel?
What are you implying here? People don’t use Lemmy because of this guy’s politics? Do we know the politics of other developers?
Mods and admins have enormous power to shape what can be discussed using comment moderation tools, bans, and promoted content. At the very least you should be aware of what potential biases an admin has that may inform how they moderate.
Oh nice, thank you. I didn’t realize they were an admin and mod too. I thought just a developer.
Only of their own instance, they cant do this shit on other instances
Right, but Lemmy is open source. It can be forked.
Their political ideologies that are anti-capitalism are actually Lemmys greatest strength.
I don’t know that I’d agree that the political beliefs of the lemmy.ml admins are lemmys greatest strengths. Certainly federation amd open source contributions are core to lemmy but support of a specific nation’s policies and actions certainly is not.
We already have a capitalist, Lemmy. It's called Reddit.
Lemmy exists explicitly because of anti-capitalist sentiment, not despite it. Remember that politics is two separate spectrums, possibly more. Economic theory and governmetal theory are completely different things. My point is that it is their economic communism that birthed lemmy, and thier governmental theory is really not releveant to the software in the same way.
To be honest the issue is more about the power tripping than politics. Banning someone from the Arch Linux community because they disagree with you seems strange
And people believed they'd escape the days of power-tripping mods by exiting Reddit.
At least with the festive there are no alternatives.
I appreciate the mod log here because at least you can see the receipts
Like that new neame
That's the beauty of lemmy though - there is probably another community for the same thing on a different instance.
Yup. There were power tripping mods on Reddit, too. Except there, you'd be out of luck. On here, you can go to other instances, like communities on programming.dev or something.
Encourage users to create content on Lemmy communities hosted on non-tankie instances.
My problem with this ideology is while there are plenty of tankies on Lemmy, the term gets overapplied.
Some people think anyone to the left of Bill Kristol is a tankie.
Thanks for pointing this out. To some people, advocates for things like socialized healthcare are 'tankies'. Its hard to tell what people mean anymore by it, and one persons tankie might be another's centrist at this point.
Read fkn anything on lemmy.ml and this is obvious.
Edit: missed that your already mentioned it, I guess the lemmy.ml link might still be useful
A list of alternative communities to the lemmy.ml ones: https://lemmy.ml/post/16531126
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.
Why should I give a fuck
Surely the correct thing to do is move along if you don’t care.
We don’t care that you don’t care.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that topics like this made the rounds in several subs at the same time.
Block the instance if you've got a problem.
Somebody noticed a disturbing fact and wants to distribute the knowledge on multiple channels? I think I'll allow this.
Other than that, yes, let's lift&shift the good communities away from lemmy.ml and block it.
People on multiple subs are sick of their authoritarian propaganda, what a shock I'm so surprised oh wow
This community is called YouShouldKnow not YouShouldDoSomethingAboutThis
You have the info and you can care as much or as little as you like
I'd think it was outside actors trying to troll if this wasn't so common and predictable.
Here's a great article about this kind of overreactive purity drama in leftist spaces.
Exiting the Vampire Castle
The communists here in my country have a saying: "First we get to power, then we bicker"
Not a coincidence, since it’s the same group of users and they all link to one-another?
The only problem with blocking is that it doesn’t actually solve anything, just removes you from participating in conversations that are happening around you.
It’s also bad for new users who become afraid to participate.
I take issue with both the authoritarian left and authoritarian right: being an apologist for Soviet Russia as well as being an apologist for the USA is not OK in my opinion.
I find it futile to take a position on which is worse because that just gives space to be an apologist for one that's "less bad". I see this happening in this thread right now.
Should I defederate from both lemmy.world and lemmy.ml? Of course not. In fact, I find both to be more tolerable and cooperative than reddit today.
Do you find lemmy.world defending the USA wrongdoing to be of a comparable extent as lemmy.ml defending the authoritarian left regimes wrongdoing?
I feel like lemmy.world is still pretty left compared to reddit and very commonly criticizing all the stupid wars the USA have been into as well as its support for Israel in its current war.
Really loving the "What does it matter if they support genocide???" commenters in here. Really showing where their priorities are.
No problem. Of course, you can always change the instance to something else if you dislike the default.
Edit: the first time I tried Sync it replied to the top level post instead of what I actually replied to.
Everyone that has been on the Internet for more than a few days has an illinformed hot-take floating around. You can learn something for a perspective even if it's not based in fact. Read with compassion and you don't have to believe everything you read.
Indeed, but this is more about admins banning users from the entire instance because they don't share the same political views.
That's fair. I appreciate that every instance host has the right to moderate their community any way they want however moderation rules should be clear and consistent. Banning people for posting respectful criticism of communism is inconsistent with the rules of lemmy.ml
I've seen a few posts and comments made by 'tankies' (I had to look up this term, as I've never seen it outside of Lemmy) and I don't think there should be such a moral panic about them. It implies that everyone is so impressionable that they can't be exposed to a minority fringe political opinion without being instantly turned into a rabid and dangerous extremist.
See something you don't agree with? Ignore it. Downvote it. Block it if you really want to. So many people seem to come here just looking for a fight with other users or to get some general outrage out of their system, whether it's 'tankies' or 'anti-tankies'. Just relax. Lemmy is diverse and ever-expanding; there's loads of fun, interesting and positive stuff to see and talk about here.
I will mention that smaller, niche communities have way more harmonious and interesting discussions. This suggests to me that the majority of aggro comes from people who are just logging in and scrolling down the 'front page' for something to do. It's worth putting in a bit of effort to find specific topics you're interested in and then looking at the feed of your subscriptions. It's a much better experience for everyone.
Edited for bad grammarring.
The issue that caused this topic to arise wasn't of other people having opinions we didn't like. It wasn't even a case of arguing in bad faith, eg deflecting truth, or disguising real intentions by making arguments the owner doesn't believe for some other purpose (those are also bad, but generally don't get such a response).
The issue was specific moderator/instance-ownership censorship. People's posts were being removed without warning when they were making respectful, good-faith arguments - that disagreed with the politics of lemmy.ml. Worse, they were attempting to be stealthy about this removal so that no one victimized by this censorship was aware of it.
For reference, I'm gonna be a Biden voter. If someone posted "Biden is a piece of trash old man" then I'd disagree with them, but they'd have every right to put that opinion up.
Glad I don’t know wtf this is about.
To me it is weird that every day on lemmy I see new posts complaining about all tankies... but I never actually see any of the content they are complaining about. And outside of lemmy, I never see or hear the word 'tankies' used at all. I've asked a couple of people I know in real life if they ever seen discussions about it in their parts of the internet, and none of them people I've asked have ever heard the word before.
So... like I said, I find it weird. It's like some kind of lemmy boogieman.
they seep in occasionally but mostly keep to their own instances now afaik
that's because they're deleting posts. you don't see it until you are subjected to it
yeah, I'm pretty radically left as it is but I've seen a few tankie posts and boy are those threads to stay away from.
Yes please do tell me more how you're censored by Lemmy devs in a post on the top of Lemmy crybaby.
Well...that’s the great part of federation.its much harder to censor people because they can move to another instance and still reach tons of people. So…
Mods are tankies? Waow
Worse. Devs are tankies :D
Waow
Good thing I'm on sh.itjust.works
Maybe I should swap to an Mbin instance instead though... Eh, I like it here and I'm kinda lazy.
Maybe political repression and the mass killing of protestors and the internment of ethnic minorities has very little to do with a countries mode of production. Maybe you guys can advocate for an alternative mode of production without defending genocide and using the military to crack down on protests? And maybe liberals can do the same when Western Capitalist Countries do it?
please... :(
Or maybe not. You can't deny the intrinsic need to oppress the serfs in a feudalist system. Every economic downturn leads to a new wave of revolts and another cycle of state violence.
The '89 Tianamen protesters came out of state privatization reforms. And the state response (whether you believe that to be mass detainment and expulsion from Beijing or wholesale blood drenched slaughter of innocents) was necessary to continue the process unimpeded.
The focal point of the conflict is irrevocably tied to the propaganda.
Western Capitalists believe liberal democracy is working to deliver popular policy through nonviolent means. And that China was stripped and gutted of individual freedom under the Maoist revolution. An ongoing brutal genocide is necessary to keep state communist officials in place.
Eastern oriented Maoists believe China is upholding a popular Mass Line, and it is the Western Capitalists who hold their population in a police choke hold, squeezing the life out of a popular socialist revolt with every new generation.
What's the truth? Is popular governance happening in either country? Is it possible at all, or just a pretext for state violence?
Hard to say. But it's clear somebody is lying.
This whole endless debate always just feels like three Dean Brownings in a trench coat.
I mean... What is your point here? This is the internet no?
Who cares. This is pointless drama.
My lemmy client is able to locally block anything I do not want to see. And I do not want to live in a bubble, so I didn't block .ml. There are many quality post and comments so I would advise against a premature defederation.
But what do I know
FYI, the second main dev, Nutomic, although he doesn't write as much, is in the same ideology, his avatar is Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.
During their AMA, 10 months ago, I directly asked them:
They intentionally ignored my questions and answered to other later questions with fewer points.
Eventually, 10 months later, my personal observation is that it seems that they keep their ideology tendencies to their home instance, which is fair enough since people are free to leave and block. And they don't seem to be developing some centralized International political oppression feature into Lemmy, like their role models may have, so far.
Don't forget that you can block an instance personally now.
Even if we all disagree with him politically, what, is anybody going to form the lemmy repo on GH and make a better version?
You mean a fork? Why not? A copyright assignment and relicensing dispute is what caused a LibreOffice to fork from OpenOffice. Forks is a great feature of FOSS and there are normal.
Best recent example I bumped into was OrcaSlicer it's a fork of a fork of a fork, merging in some of a fourth fork.
There is [Sublinks] (https://sublinks.org/) but I have no idea when it will be released.
I think the best we can do now is to move communities away from ml.
I don't know why the lemmy.ml admins don't just defederate from everyone but lemmygrad and hexbear. It's clear that only their extreme views are allowed and they must spend a lot of time banning "libs".
It would do everyone a favour really. We'd have less instance politics and hopefully more content, and make it the fediverse more attractive to the average person.
Then defederate from Lemmy.ml. Lemmy.ml is a FOSS and Privacy instance run by Marxists, the admins aren't interested in gatekeeping that from the rest of Lemmy, but if other instances don't like that then they can defederate.
I've added it to my blocked instances and I'd recommend others who have an issue with the way the communities on that instance are moderated and the way it's managed to do the same.
Fortunately there are alternative instances and communities that are less authoritarian with their moderation.
How is "defederat[ing] from everyone but lemmygrad and hexbear" not instance politics? Politics, at its core, is the way we distribute political goods, such as physical goods, access to information (including instance posts), and legitimacy, to name a few of the options. What is your definition of politics?
Maybe politics was the wrong word, what I mean is drama.
...and?
oh no!
We can't just oust them from developing sadly but we can spread the news that they are not a good person
Well you could fork and run your own blackjack and hooker emporium.
Your apparent antagonism towards the lead Lemmy developer is sensationalist and non-constructive. If you dislike their moderation then the solution is simple: leave their instances and communities. If your user does not reside on their instances then its admins cannot silence you. If you do not participate in their communities, then their moderators cannot silence you. If you do not wish to see their users then block their instances (though, I would still advise against this). Your argument is founded upon the premise that you don't like their opinions, so just don't listen. Don't taint the Lemmyverse's image with your false alarmism. Be the change that you wish to see. Start an instance with administrative rules that you think are better. Start a community with moderation rules that you think are better. If one finds that they are needing to resort to ad-homenim to gather support, then I would advise one to critically analyze their position and arguments.
EDIT (2024-06-07T19:25Z): From your other comments in this thread I see that you are advocating for the creation of new communities and for people to individually distance themselves from lemmy.ml, rather than defederation. I agree with this. I still disagree, however, with the approach and tone that you used in your post. I think the same end can and should be achieved without ad-homenim attacks.
Why is criticism never accepted?
Why is it "leave" instead of addressing the issues brought up?
Because of federation.
If this were an internal issue with Lemmy.ml, ie the people on Lemmy.ml are collectively in favor of change, then it's different. If people outside of Lemmy.ml want to change Lemmy.ml, doesn't it make more sense to just build up what you think is better, so you don't need Lemmy.ml at all?
Judging from other threads on the matter, a lot of people don't even know what "tankie" means.
So here's a pro tip: replace "tankie" with "dipshit" and the meaning remains the same.
Here's an idea, block .ml and SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY.
It feels like 30% of all Lemmy use is capitalists whining that they don't have a central anti leftist authority to block everyone they don't like, by linking the same two fucking posts from over at least 1 year ago or posts where they "argue" by shouting "fuck you Tankie" and it didn't go their way.
If you don't like how its run, leave. THATS THE WHOLE POINT. If you want a central authority thats gonna be strongly pro-capital, go back to Reddit. Either way:
SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.
Most activity is on .ml
And will continue to be until people shut the fuck up and populate other instances instead of trying to bully the people who built the damned thing off their own instance.
(This isn't directed at you) - If lemmy.ml hosts most activity, and continues to host most activity, despite your claims that nobody can have a differing opinion from 2 or 3 people without being banned, and is continuing to grow and host more of the activity.........The problem isn't the people who built the software or admin the server, maybe the problem is you.
I'm watching with interest what happens here. I left Reddit before for Voat for a while. It turned out that without policing (or maybe it was the type of policing) it turned into a toxic cesspit.
Policing of some kind is clearly import to human groups. In the real world, across the world and history, where is no law and order, you end up with war lords and drug lords, who setup their own rules. Take moderation away and online groups get consumed by trolls.
So I'm watching what happens with federated Lemmy with interest.