Is lemmy.ml just a tankie recruitment zone?

flibbertigibbet@feddit.de to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – -21 points –
The woke left! - Lemmy
lemmy.ml

The shear amount of tankiness over on lemmy.ml is making me seriously consider leaving the platform.

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rather than leaving the platform, find or host yourself an instance that blocks the tankie instances... I'm loving sh.itjust.works so far, which blocks lemmygrad.ml - that's the beauty of federation

tfw kbin doesn't block any instances and just watching the drama of different instances block each other 🍿

doesn’t Kbin.social block lemmygrad?

I haven’t really cared to check, but I thought it was the only thing it’s defederated from.

Hello fellow kbinner... kbinnite... kbinmate... what's the word we're calling each other again? Anyway, I feel the same way.
One of the main reasons why I didn't choose lemmy was explicitly because the kind of red authoritarian crowd they seemed to attract. Sure, there's gonna be people like that on kbin as well, but so far it's been pretty decent from my point of view.
Ngl, the drama is pretty nice when you're not involved in it 🍿

kbinmate is funny. the two I've been seeing people use are kbinauts and kbeans. I prefer kbinaut. My decision to join kbin was actually based on the ui; I'm not exactly a fan of the way lemmy is set up. but the weird mod situation over at lemmy.ml also kinda pushed me to kbin.

kbinger? kbinotreddit?

I actually started on the lemmy side of things but the politics and drama on beehaw and lemmy.ml just drove me away. It was also crazy to me the devs of lemmy.ml were openly denying genocide and other atrocities (and it some instances almost cheering for that stuff) but beehaw refused to defederate with them. And then what would you know, beehaw defederates from.. wait what? lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works?? confused_will_smith.jpg

anyways, the drama and politics are stupid and will drive away new users from joining. the main dev at kbin has been very proactive at answering bug and feature request tickets. Me and some others set up some new kbin instances to help share the load and a few of us devs are hoping to help out ernest with the dev work he has for kbin

This is happening on lemmy.ml I can cope with there being instances for tankies, what's bothering me is one of the main instances pretending their not so that they can push straight up recruitment shit at people who don't know.

It doesn't have to be a main instance if enough people come into the other instances, and there's plenty of content elsewhere. I don't interact with lemmy.ml at all personally.

the ml in lemmy.ml stands for Marxist-Leninist...

Oh wow someone finally explained it! Thanks!

it was more of a joke but... yeah I think that might actually have been the intent lol

It unfortunately is very much the intent, but they don't want to say that up front because no one would join.

Well it’s not like they’re based in Mali. Had to have been intentional for that reason.

Mali was the first African country to give away a tld for free. That's probably why it was used.

Yeah, it's a bit of a conundrum. Lemmygrad is the most egregious part of it and easy to block thankfully.
But I agree with some of the other posters that lemmy.ml is still pretty bad in terms of what gets allowed and who gets modetated. Luckily, this still is not an unsolvable problem in a federated world. Of course lemmy.ml could also just be blocked, but many instances will probably be reluctant to do that, as it also hosts some of the bigger communities currently. But we can make an effort to prioritize non lemmy.ml communities over their counterpart, a different meme community over memes@lemmy.ml etc, and if consensus is strong enough and enough communities shift, lemmy.ml could theoretically find itself in a position where it will have to clean up their moderation practices or risk wider defederation.

lemmy.ml is federated with most other instances (yes, including lemmygrad.ml). I would say the content on lemmy.ml is pretty indicative of the norm across the fediverse. my feed is diverse enough to remain interesting to me without many extreme examples of any sort.

various instances will have different vibes and different local content. find instances that you jive with and you are golden. if those instances generally play nice with the network at large, then their content will be available widely. if not, then just center your experience around the local content on those instances.

federation makes.the best of all worlds avaliable to you.

Follow the link, that's happening on lemmy.ml not lemmygrad.ml.

???... and? you have got to self filter the stuff you don't want to see if its that triggering for you. block posters, communities and, if needed, switch instances to something you prefer. there are other instances that offer a more "curated" experience. last resort... set up your own instance - you can be your own god king.

personally I have no issue seeing things i disaree with. If it goes past my personal line, I block.

Most Reddit posts referring to lemmy direct people to lemmy.ml it's effectively the landing page of the platform and if that landing page is being used to recruit people into a shitty authoritarian ideology then that taints the entire platform.

because, for a long time, it was most stable/reliable instance around. thats no longer the case. I can promise you most recommendations out there in the aether right now are not for .ml for many, many reasons and the devs encourage this.

if an instance pulls stupid shit, I move instances. lemmy makes it possible to free yourself from the exact type of authoritarian oppression you just mentioned.

Maybe someone should create lemmy.winks - that was also a slightly shitty adventure if I remember right...

Is lemmy.ml just a tankie recruitment zone?

Yes. Check out the comments on this meta post. They ban people for "orientalism" and "sinophobia," meaning "talking poorly about China." I was banned because I criticised the Lemmy developer and owner of Lemmy.ml, Dessalines, for denying the Uyghur genocide. Check out the exchange below. You'll notice that many of the comments and users support China, claim no genocide is occurring, deny the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and even claim China is a democracy. Dessalines has been curating a communist community over there for years. He's just careful to hide that during signup.

That said, just because one instance is terrible doesn't mean all other instances are terrible. kbin.social is awesome. Lemmy.world is awesome. There are lots of instances you can interact with which have nothing to do with communism.

Dude just straight whataboutism'd mass rape. Christ, did I dodge a bullet.

Do you have a screenshot of them denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre? I'm not saying that they did not say that, I'm just curious what amount of gymnastics does it take to deny that.

Sadly not, but they removed this comment of mine four days ago, which discussed the TSM. You can find it in the modlog (lemmy.ml/modlog).

Removed Comment > "China has 1.4 billion people. Do you really think they have the ability and/or need to “squash” protests and prevent any protest from ever happening? No. They have a healthy democracy where people are involved in voicing their opinions, and protesting if it ever comes to that. Please stop ingesting so much xenophobic propaganda and learn more about the countries of which you speak." [quote text of the user to which I was replying]

First, China literally "squashed" hundreds of protesting students in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. I encourage you to read the harrowing accounts of survivors about how the military used tanks to grind bodies into the ground and then hose them into the sewers. Secondly, China is currently committing ethnic genocide of millions of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Lastly, China isn't a democracy. Elections in China occur under a political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with all candidate nominations pre-approved by the CCP. CCP regulations require members of the People's Congresses, People's Governments, and People's Courts to implement CCP recommendations (including nominations). It blows my mind to find someone who speaks so confidently about something they know so little. If you're so confident in your proposition, why don't you fly over to China and try a little protest about Xi. I've been to China many times. They made the rules clear to me: if I involved myself in anything political I was liable for life in prison or even execution. by @JasSmith

I consider myself a centrist. I think Leninists and Maoists both have good ideas. :)

The way things are on there I can't even tell if this is just a joke.

Oh my god, a LIBERAL!!

Edit: For those who don't know, this is a Disco Elysium reference.

i mean its literally .ml so im not sure exactly what you were expecting? except for most of the reddfugees being directed there, the core demographic is tankies. just use an instance more alligned with your values instead; i use slrpnk.net because well im an Anarcho-Solarist.

and if the tankie content really impacts your enjoyment of lemmy, just block offending users or communities.

What does the Republic of Mali, in Africa, have to do with a mostly Asian ideology?

Yeah it's the TLD for Mali. But I imagine Lemmy Devs chose it for Marxism-Leninism. The same way .io is for the British Indian Ocean Territory but is heavily used by tech companies.

i mean its literally .ml so im not sure exactly what you were expecting?

fairly sure that isn't as obvious for most people as you think it is

People as deep into the ideology as people on here are think the dog whistles are signposts.

I'm on another instance but it's making me rather uncomfortable that a lot of the traffic is happening on an instance that seems like it's 90 CCP members and Russian trolls.

yeah thas just the consequence of that instance being linked in a lot of exodus posts... not much we can change but i assume itll equalize out as lemmy grows and people spread out to other instances. ofc that a lot of the communities are on .ml sucks but that too may change with future developments such as multi-community implementations.

Reddit had a huge amount of tankies that only lived on a handful of isolated subreddits.
It makes sense that they'd flock to the Lemmy where the FDQN literally stands for Marxist/Leninist.

Reddit had a huge amount of tankies that only lived on a handful of isolated subreddits.

I don't know about others but this hasn't been my experience. From what I've noticed a lot of left or left-leaning subreddits have been taken over by tankie mods.
I'm much happier with how kbin/lemmy/mastodon/etc work, at least this way I can choose my left/hard-left/left-leaning communities that I wish to interact with without them being controlled by tankies or other authoritarian flavors.

Why does this comment, and the one it's responding to show, up in 3 places?

Edit: I'm actually seeing this elsewhere too. Maybe it's quirk of cross communication between instances?

i mean its literally .ml so im not sure exactly what you were expecting?

Machine learning

As others have said, come join us in kbin land :) There are some other kbin instances listed here on the project website if you want to sign up on one other than the main instance: https://kbin.pub/en

I just opened up user registrations on mine yesterday so it hasn't been added to that page yet.

I say come give it a try! It's cool that kbin has lemmy + kbin + mastodon integration. Kind of a one stop hub for all the content. I'm hoping down the line we can get matrix integration and some other fediverse stuff.

Well, I guess we should consider it as one of the trials of freedom. Either you live in a walled garden, or you have to be conscious about what you're interacting with and exercise critical thinking. If you don't want to be associated with genocide supporters - don't register on tankie instances, or even don't subscribe to any content from them. It should be a personal decision of every user (or instance maintainer for that matter - defederation is also an option, simply because instance maintainers are also people).
Another important thing is to speak up about it - to raise awareness, so to speak. It's perfectly reasonable to state what the worldview of tankie admins is - in threads like this, as well as on other platforms. I was considering lemmy.ml as Reddit replacement at first, but saw a comment on one of the Fediverse sites and digged more into this.

You can join /kbin. I joined kbin over Lemmy after researching the creators. From kbin, you can still interact with Lemmy instances but you won’t be on a platform owned by tankies.

Yeah, it's a bit of a conundrum. Lemmygrad is the most egregious part of it and easy to block thankfully.
But I agree with some of the other posters that lemmy.ml is still pretty bad in terms of what gets allowed and who gets modetated. Luckily, this still is not an unsolvable problem in a federated world. Of course lemmy.ml could also just be blocked, but many instances will probably be reluctant to do that, as it also hosts some of the bigger communities currently. But we can make an effort to prioritize non lemmy.ml communities over their counterpart, a different meme community over memes@lemmy.ml etc, and if consensus is strong enough and enough communities shift, lemmy.ml could theoretically find itself in a position where it will have to clean up their moderation practices or risk wider defederation.

Probably a good idea to fork Lemmy at some point.

Or just use KBin.

I have an account there too. Two problems for me there at the moment and they're both technical. I can't find a native mobile client for it (mobile web is ok but not ideal) and iirc it's written in PHP which is problematic. I think a reasonable answer is both.

Why is PHP problematic? It’s not a fantastic language, but it’s perfectly functional.

Source: 80% of my code base at work is in PHP

I guess just from my experience with system administration over a long time. I've seen many problems (security, maintainability) in implementations in PHP - maybe it's not the language but the projects which choose it? Anyway, that's the association it has for me.

Only Reddit neoliberal crybabies whine about "tankies". From what I can see it's mostly baseless accusations/smear campaign because as I said, they are crybabies who cannot deal with the real world. It's an open source project. His views are not relevant to the discussion and not particularly that uncommon outside of isolated Westerner bubbles. Spez the Reddit CEO was the moderator of a paedophile subreddit (jailbait) but nobody is up in arms about that or concerned about going back if the API changes are rolled back. Those people are as lost as old people who love FoxNews, Facebook or any other commercially charged propaganda vehicle.

These leftists you hate so much have done something good. They've seized the means of communication for you. It's open source and decentralised, it's up to you (the community) what to do with it. If you are hardstuck on this then I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but the dev ain't one.

It's not such a bad combination to be a tankie and an open source software developer.

It's a problem to be a tankie and an admin/mod for the flagship instance.

It's only a problem if you allow your personal worldview to affect your moderation.. a tendency that sadly most moderators have. I've found lemmy.ml to be one of the more permissive instances where viewpoints of all sides are permitted. Unfortunately many others (you know who you are) are in danger of becoming walled gardens and echo chambers.

There's a large overlap between people who are sympathetic to terrible dictators and people who would be happy to be dictators