Lemmy.ml is acting as a proxy instance for Hexbear and should be defederated by any instances that defederate from Hexbear

Armok: God of Blood@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 158 points –

The mods of all the major communities there remove comments criticism Hexbear and usually follow it up with a ban. It's absolutely clear what is happening and it shouldn't be allowed to continue.

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Welcome to federation, where basically every instance is a proxy to all others.

Btw you are also free to block any instance yourself.

Unfortunately blocking an instance only blocks posts on that instance, not users from it, which is the main issue people have with those instances.

Yeah it's a very common misconception, I find it weird that people are still having it though when 0.19 is widely available.

Maybe they're just saying it as a way to be dismissive of the issue, this kind of stuff happens often when people report or call to attention malicious instances or malicious users.

Honestly I think it's just people that haven't thought very deeply about the nature of communities they're supporting.

nor how letting a large, poorly moderated instance run wild can negatively affect discourse on the entire platform. Before Hexbear was defed'd on lemmy.ca, Lemmy was damn near unusable on many threads because of the spam and trolling. Blocking them doesn't stop them from bothering those who haven't and it affects the platform as a whole.

Blocking is not a real solution, it is putting a blanket over the problem and pretending it went away. People who suggest you do that are suggesting you enable bad faith actors by ignoring their behavior, as opposed to reporting it and/or making others aware so they can report it. We all need to work better to make the platform and spaces on it better, if no one works at it, nothing gets better.

Exactly! Letting problematic instances poison the well leads to a net negative to the platform.

My unpopular opinion: Federating with everyone by default is not sustainable.

It's inevitable that the lemmyverse will shatter, and everyone will be better for it.

Instances will develop their own policies around moderation and behaviour, and federate with other instances with compatible policies.

Basically, federation only works if everyone is acting in good faith. It wouldn't take much for a single entity acting in bad faith to fuck the entire fediverse presently.

Presently admits are blacklisting the bad faith instances. That's going to change so admins whitelist compatible instances.

Exactly. Without rules and enforcement, you just get a cesspit. Anarchy just doesn't work.

Perhaps more accurately, anarchy only works if everyone's objectives are similar or at least compatible.

Like it would be nice to live in a town where you don't need to lock your doors, but it only takes one asshole to make that untenable.

It only taking one asshole is why it doesn't work. You just never going to have no assholes. So you need a justice system, and a way of policing the policing of it.

I think thays a good compromise. if you then have an issie with a particular user you can block them individually.

I use Connect for Android, and when I block an instance it blocks the users too. Their comments are still here, but sort of spoiler tagged.

Yes but surely you can understand that even votes from these poorly moderated instances are distorting the discourse elsewhere in the lemmyverse.

Just because you can't see it does not mean the problem is solved.

So we wanna defederate to steer votes in a certain way? Worrying so much about votes is such redditor behavior.

I would challenge you to think about how votes can influence the culture of a community.

You're correct in that worrying about how many upvotes you can accumulate is very reddit.

I'm not really talking about karma accumulation, but rather the way votes can influence visibility of comments. When done methodically, this promotes some ideas over others, and presents an illusion that "everyone else thinks so". This is a very, very powerful way to influence a community.

We are hard wired to absorb the opinions of those around us. Sure you can disagree with other group members, but even that is an acknowledgement that the alternative perspective you're disagreeing with is a popular one.

You could absolutely influence people's opinions on lemmy just with a hacked instance that manipulated votes on comments by just a few dozen points.

You make valid points. Apologies for the Reddit accusation.

But the one thing that comes to mind is that this kind of Communist, like in lemmy.ml, is not big enough to cause this sway.

Sure, the instance is massive, but most users don't hold those same beliefs. Most people go to it as the "default" instance. So I really don't think they have the numbers to cause this issue.

Sure. This thread is talking about lemmy.ml, but I'm talking about the current state of the lemmyverse.

I've posted this elsewhere in this thread but my unpopular opinion is that federation by default is not sustainable.

Presently admins federate with everyone and blacklist those which are problematic.

It's inevitable that in the near future someone with a rudimentary understanding of hosting will be able to spin up a dozen instances, each with a few thousand bot accounts, intent on upvoting every "genocide Joe biden" comment.

The fediverse will shatter. Admins will realise they need policies to guide their own moderation, and acknowledge that they can only federate with specific instances with compatible moderation.

So instead of blacklisting bad instances, you need to change to whitelisting good ones.

Btw you are also free to block any instance yourself.

Not how the instance blocking feature works. it's a common misconception because people don't read the docs and just assume it does what they think it does. From the News Section on Join-Lemmy:

Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.

It's not an alternative or replacement to defederation, not even close. I'm really surprised this misconception still persists even after widespread adoption of 0.19.x across the Lemmy network.

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If they weren't such weasels and actually agrued back rather than just ban people like the spineless dimwit twats they are, I'd say the argument that they are easily filtered holds. But given they are just looking to propagate their shilling for Russia, trump (and they definitely do this) etc... fuck em!

Even outside of their space, when they "argue" it had generally been posting giant, random images that had little to no context followed by walls of emojis. Which is why my blocklist is mostly Hexbear users.

But you see, if I post the gigachad xi image in a comment I win the argument and my stalin posting friends give me an upvote

So edgy, my heart! Just too smart for me to understand

Please find a single example of Hexbear supporting Trump. Attacking Biden does not count

Jesus fucking christ, this has comments talking about trump living rent free in muh libs heads

https://hexbear.net/post/2090983

You're the same pack of fucking incels mixed in with the same russian shilling from 2016, that post was from an hour ago, took me seconds to find it

Are you incapable of reading into nuance at all? How could you possibly...

I really can't be bothered going and finding all the pretty fucking obvious examples of you shitheads either apologising or glorifying putin, or coming out with pure incel stuff, or platforming trump. Which makes sense given it seems to be the same campaign as before, and its pretty fucking obvious at this point, very sloppy... I've clearly hit a nerve lol. It'd be great if you all could change track at this point and stop platforming that odious cunt, don't worry I know there is unfortunately no option to stop shilling putin...

They asked for a single example. Find just one, a single one.

Assuming you're not paid or being forced to do this, you must know you're being used as a tool for the fascists you claim to despise. Platforming trump is support and I see there is no mention of the direct relationship to Putin in all the very loud refuting of this support...

I thought the Mueller report exonerated him. anyway it's not as though anybody's supporting Russia or Putin or Trump in these comments. we just know the Democrats are bad and aren't afraid to say it.

If you can't see how hexbear is mirroring trump rhetoric almost word for word then I don't know what to tell you.

They’re the new The_Donald, only they’re not even self aware enough to know they’re the bad guys.

I’m not sure which is worse.

Oh shit they're the new t_d? that's wild, can you link an example? just one?

Hmmm… brand new account- no content except to be contrarian to the topic…. I’ll entertain your bad-faith question….

Go to those communities. There’s my example. All of it.

Oh damn, what tipped you off? Was it the "hexbear" in my name? Link a single example. Go ahead, make me look like a fucking moron

Go ahead, make me look like a fucking moron

You don’t need my help.

You're right, I'm so dumb cause I can't find any examples of what you're talking about on hexbear. Could you please link a single example? Just one? Just one fucking example you coward?

Why would you find examples of something that calls out your own beliefs and opinions?

You’re not going to see it- you’re going to agree with it.

I'm asking you for a specific example because what you think is there doesn't exist. You could humiliate me right now by providing a specific example, literally just a single one. Why not do it? Why look this impotent?

Because the entire thing stance serves as an example. There’s been plenty of people here in the comments that have provided examples and screenshots that illustrate my exact point.

That you felt the need to create a new account to antagonize with bad faith questions only serves to prove the trolling nature of that cesspool. You clearly some want anyone looking at your comment history because you probably exemplify the purpose of this entire post

I’m done entertain your nonsense now.

Walk away.

PS- learn what impotent means, then stop using it incorrectly.

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If that's what's happening, you'll very easily be able to provide an example, rather than just asserting it.

This wasn't supposed to be hard. They said "and they definitely do this", so I was hoping they would share a post or comment that lead them to that conclusion.

Are they mirroring trump rhetoric. Or is trump regurgitating talking points from his fascist idol. And ML are just so cultish, indoctrinated, anti West that they couldn't not attack the west. Even if Russia is more clearly in the wrong on this issue.

It's more likely than them actually supporting trump. Honestly I think the only possible way you could say they support trump. Is that they understand that trump would destroy Western society and they approve of that. No matter who gets hurt in the process. Well actually when it comes to leninists it's all about hurting people in the process really.

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I'm all for defederating Hexbear, but lemmy.ml is absolutely huge compared to Hexbear. To motivate the community to do that you'd need quite a bit of proof. Or at least something rather compelling. Do you have any proof of what you're referring to?

Asking for proof of what is an open secret on lemmy seems disingenuous.

I think that instances like hexbear, lemmygrad, and lemmy.ml are very bad advocates for Lemmy and will most likely end up damaging it more than anything else, keeping the "normies" out.

They argue in Bad faith, say the most radical stuff they can think of, and purge anything bad said about totalitarian regimes they idolize. China, Russia, Iran, all considered victims of the evil west..

  • Uyghur camps > not happening
  • Tiannamen square > Just some peaceful protests
  • invasion of Ukraine > NATO forced Russia to do it

I was banned from lemmy.ml for posting a meme about the fact that gay characters are removed from movies in China. Not even by a mod. By an admin. I'm not remotely surprised they're pro-shitheap in general

There is an admin on lemmy.ml that seems to be banning anyone who says anything negative about China. If I'm thinking of the right person, they are also a large contributor to the Lemmy codebase. That person is why I stopped donating to the Lemmy devs.

This kind of stuff is making me consider stopping my donations to the Lemmy project, and instead donating to the Sublinks drop-in replacement developed by the programming.dev instance admins

Hey, I'm the founder of Sublinks. It's a huge collaboration of several major Lemmy instances like lemmy world, beehaw, discuss.online, programming.dev, and quite a few others that wish not to be named until the release.

Some admins are directly working on the project while others are providing other types of support. @Ategon@programming.dev is certainly a major contributor and has helped develop the new front end in many major ways. You can follow some progress updates here: !sublinks@discuss.online

We have several different teams of developers:

  1. API / Java
  2. Front-end / JS/CSS/HTML
  3. Federation / GoLang
  4. Libraries / JS
  5. Requirements gathering and organization
  6. Design & Graphics - UI/UX
  7. Lemmy to Sublinks migration tools

There is an active community on Matrix where all of us chat: https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks:discuss.online if anyone is interested in joining. We also have weekly touch bases to discuss progress and next steps. There are tons of people contributing.

We are currently taking donations only through Github: https://github.com/sponsors/sublinks if you're truly interested. We're all working on this part-time in our free time and making fantastic progress.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Hexbear loves to dogpile as well. I've seen a couple of raiding threads linking to other threads in Lemmy.ml making fun of whoever. But in reality they're just directing people over there to shit on someone. At least, that's what I saw last year, so I'm very distrusting of them.

That and the Lemmy.ml AMA thread where one admin was all buddy buddy with Hexabear users during their federation.

I abandoned an old account because Hexbear bullies followed me around and downvoted everything. Come to think of it, I haven't posted a single thing since then, and I had a bunch of posts with hundreds of votes.

This literally cannot be true, because hexbear accounts cannot downvote.

Check my history, I called them out for the NATO one today and they threw all sorts of random shit at me that was off the central point, just looking for a mistake in my wording.

Yep. They were claiming that Putin invaded Ukraine to stop fascists. And that they were liberators. I was like, why would one fascist care what other fascists do? In the US, our fascist, wealthy Republicans largely supported Hitler till pearl harbor. But I did agree with them that the Soviet Union absolutely liberated many countries against their will post WWII. And that those countries still hold it against them to this day.

The gulags were mentioned and they were like, but but but America jails more! To which I told them that was bad. But the West doesn't kill millions of prisoners the way they did. And all for political dissent, reminding them of just two weeks ago when Putin had Navalny killed for political dissent.

The absurd thing is, I'm one hundred percent down for Marxism. And largely agree politically with his theory plus some modernization. So technically we would agree on a lot of things there. It's just the Engles and Lenin bullshit I disagree with, and has shown to have failed. Or caused their downfall historically. But they are primarily leninists, dedicated ideologically to authoritarians and strongmen above all reality.

How can you agree with Marx and not with Engels? Engels practically did a large chunk of the philosophical heavy lifting for Marxism.

I know right, it's almost like they're two different people. gasp Wait a minute they are!

Also, I wouldn't call might makes right heavy philosophical lifting. There are less objectionable bits that Engles contributed. But some of the worst bits that led to the authoritarianism and brutality common in Marxist leninist structures is pretty strongly attached to him.

Are there any particular texts from Engels that you disagree with? I would be interested to know where you think the split is. From my reading, Engels was mostly involved in the philosophical and scientific side of the development of dialectical materialism and it's application into Marxism. Eg. "Dialectics of Nature", "The German ideology", "Feuerbach and the end of German classical philosophy","anti-duhring" etc. I'm not sure where the apparent "brutality" is coming from here?

But they are primarily leninists, dedicated ideologically to authoritarians and strongmen above all reality.

Why does that mean they should be banned? Is speech that we agree with the only permitted speech?

Just because you think they're wrong doesn't mean they should be banned. Banning them makes it look like we're afraid of people reading their points, which gives them power and credibility

I have not commented on whether or not I think they should. Frankly I'm ambivalent. Considering many of the others that have been defederated. I think it's kind of hypocritical that Lemmy.ml hasn't. Personally though I don't have need or desire to defederate them. It's pretty easy, if annoying to poke holes in their arguments where important.

However it's important to remember that each server is answerable to it's community and ownership. If world defederated from lemmy.ml you'd be unaffected. And seeing the disdain lemmy.ml has for many types of speech. I'm not overly motivated to make any case to keep them around either. Offering them what they deny others.

Considering many of the others that have been defederated. I think it's kind of hypocritical that Lemmy.ml hasn't.

So what? If it was wrong to defederate from those other instances then this can be wrong as well

However it's important to remember that each server is answerable to it's community and ownership

Or, more accurately, answerable to the appearance of a community and ownership. All of the major instances are heavily astroturfed by various state and corporate entities. Which includes both the United States/West and China/Russia. World is western aligned and ML is not. It's a proxy war in cyberspace, same as occurs on reddit and Twitter and elsewhere. The solution to such a proxy war is not to cede all ground to the West - such action would not promote truth or critical thought

It could be. It's not. But it could have been.

And do you have any proof of that? I've not seen anything of the like. I'm Marxist myself. Just not Leninist. I have no major issues on world. I tend to get downvoted about equally from capitalist to leninist. Up voted too. I've not noticed any anti-left trend. Anti ml? Sure. But they are not left in any meaningful sense beyond nominally. Authoritarians always ape populist political trends. In order to take advantage of society. Hitler did it, Lenin and Stalin did too. Though, unlike Hitler, I believe Lenin actually genuinely wanted a good outcome. Despite his bad ideology.

People should have free speech, governments shouldn't have the ability to degrade our platform with shills and LLMs, especially if they're spreading propaganda for dictatorships.

governments shouldn't have the ability to degrade our platform with shills and LLMs

I agree, but that is exactly what the United States and the West does.

China, Russia, and Iran do it as well, of course.

"The west" has been caught flat-footed in the modern disinformation game, they have nothing comparable.

That may have been true in 2014.

It is no longer true in 2024

Said the anonymous account without citing any source.

Literally everyone on this site is an anonymous account. Why would you possibly think that is a relevant point? Plus your account is less than 30 days old, so if we're going to start questioning users' motives and origins then perhaps we should start with you

And I watch congressional hearings with intelligence agency leaders. They have affirmed that our messaging (propaganda) efforts on the internet have greatly improved since 2016. Which is evident just from comparing Reddit today to reddit in 2015

The most powerful country in the world is just a little guy! It doesn't even know what it's doing, it's just a little guy!!

Are you serious with this shit? If you want to see someone steeped in propaganda, take your head out of the bowl of kool-aid and look in a mirror.

Insulting me because you have no reasonable response?

My response was plenty reasonable given your unreasonable claim that somehow the most powerful country in the word with the most sophisticated media machine got "caught flat-footed" in the modern disinformation game. They were heavily astroturfing reddit as far back as 2013 and have probably been at it for longer: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html

You know, unless you think the eglin air force base were just superfans of reddit. That's just reddit, now imagine more important platforms.

A sophisticated media machine that can't even hide the real location of it's shill accounts? And you're the one mocking me?

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I would like to see proof of how a community doing its own thing of sharing their radical views on their instance is damaging.

I haven't seen any rampant behavior of lemmy.ml users going to other instances and dogpiling certain posts or comment section. That may be defederation worthy.

The denial of having seen it yourself, is something I don't believe. Therefore I don't believe you made your reply in good faith.

Not all of lemmy.ml is a cesspool filled with poisonous cretins, but they (tankies) control the instance at conversational, moderation and administration level. So it will not change, only get worse.

Just like we see with the MAGAts... Once you start drinking your own coolaid.. the sky is the limit.

The denial of having seen it yourself, is something I don't believe.

If it's so rampant that you find it unbelievable I haven't seen it, then it must be very easy to prove. Can you please provide a proof?

but they (tankies) control the instance...

It's their instance. That's not proper grounds for defederation in my opinion, when the damage is contained within their instance.

As I stated in my preface, no thank you.

And if it is contained in their instance.. it does not matter that the borders are guarded by deFederation.

No worries. I never expected you to have the proof anyways, but I wanted readers to be aware that you don't.

That's fair. I think most people can make up their own minds looking at the thread, posts contents and then their own experience in the .ml scape compared to the rest of Lemmy.

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I blacked out irrelevant information.

This is less about the instance as a whole. The !worldnews@lemmy.ml mods are notoriously terrible. It's best to just avoid the community altogether.

Instead of defederating all of lemmy.ml, just blocking that one comm could be an option

Lmao I've also been banned by rimjob from World News over the stupidest shit. And yes, he did cite some bullshit even thought I was clearly within the rules and arguing in good faith. How dare someone stand their ground against Bruce Almighty from World News! Not surprised.

I had a bunch of reasonable posts deleted from World News. I just blocked it but defederating would be way better because then we can rebuild a healthier news community somewhere else.

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ml and Hexbear definitely don't have the same users. Their comments look very different. Hexbear is far more extreme in every way.

Hexbear is mostly just trolls in my experience. They like to brigade any discussion involving Russia, China, Ukraine, etc.

Lemmy.ml is full of tankies that will also go out of their way to defend Russia and China but they aren't just blatant trolls which is the difference.

Having controversial opinions isn't the problem, trolling and brigading are

This is also my take. Hex will troll you but ML folks actually think that you are an evil person because you don't agree with them on some minor point.

actually think that you are an evil person because you don’t agree with them on some minor point.

Right, this is the major issue for me. I am here for the community. This site doesn't have half the content that Reddit has. We're here on principle with each other. If you aren't trying to make some kind of a connection with me as a person, if you get lost in some singular bullshit nonsense comment I wrote at 10AM on an idle Tuesday, if you start to attribute beliefs and opinions to me that I don't have, if you're not willing to reconcile and coexist, then I have no interest in engaging with you. Makes it real hard to engage with some folks - especially Hexbear.

I wonder who they were trolling and brigading in the years of their existence prior to them federating with anyone...

I would need pretty convincing evidence to believe that the major .ml communities don't have at least one mod each with a Hexbear alt.

At some time we have to deal with this.

Keep in mind that we like Lemmy for being a federated platform.

I don't think there is enough awareness at this point. And the way we do it here, it has to come from the community. The people and mods have to become aware and make a decision to move their participation and the communities to another instance. I don't see a way around that. This will take some time, patience and effort.

I've started to do my part and unsubscribed from !Fediverse@lemmy.ml I'm now going through my list of subscriptions and find alternatives to other communities, so I don't contribute to the lemmy.ml communities being the larges ones any more.

[Edit: Wow. I've replaced 32 communities, some with substantially better alternatives, and I've found a few nice additional ones in the process. I still need recommendations for alternatives to: "Peertube", "Libre Culture", "Crawling the IndieWeb", "datahoarder", "Linux Phones", "postmarketOS", "osu!". I'm glad I did this. I think this is the way to make a change as a simple user. And now I'm not part of the problem anymore. It took me the better part of an hour, though.]

I'm just blocking the entire lemmy.ml instance. I've seen consistent problems from them, and nothing worth staying connected with.

Wish I could help you find alternative communities but I'm not sure about the ones you mentioned. They'll grow over time if Lemmy survives.

It’s what I did. I’m not missing a thing.

Thx. I found the most important communities to me. I'm glad most of them have an alternative and those are going strong. I can live with losing a few minor ones.

Concerning "blocking them": I'm not sure. I was a strong opponent to the whole defederation and "safe-space" thing last year. Where especially beehaw.org decided to do their own thing and rigorously defederate, often preemptively and without talking to people. I think such behaviour splits the community and disconnects people. I really don't like all the drama, falling out with each other and particularism. And I think all the feud is a sure way to kill the platform before it even took off with the general public... Honestly, I'm slowly changing my mind. Give me some more time.

I agree with your general point but

splits the community and disconnects people

They aren't people like you and I. They're paid shills at best and KremlinGPT at worst. I think to survive and flourish as a platform Lemmy will have to aggressively fight back against authoritarian disinformation. As it stands, I won't even admit to anyone that I use it because it so full of propaganda.

It is a bit more nuanced than that. There are normal people there, too. It's been one of the largest instances when the Reddit exodus happened. Some of the users chose the largest and the 'official' instance. And some of them are still there.

But lemmy.ml is operated by the same people who also run lemmygrad, some moderators seem to be the same. And unfortunately the whole Lemmy software platform is developed by "those" people.

I don't mind leaning a good amount to the left. I think a few socialist values would advance society and economy. Especially in places like the USA. And I've been called a communist for that. But being a tankie is beyond my comprehension. Why would anyone like Putin, defend the CCP and what they do to people. And I'm not overly bothered with the left vs right. It's the constant yelling, being super argumentative, doing brigading and spreading misinformation.

I think things are changing. I'm paying attention now to the usernames in the comments. And lemmy.ml isn't the dominating place anymore. Most of the usernames I see come from a broad range of instances. And that's a good thing. It's still a home to some big communities which needs to change, too. And I'm also waiting for a new software to come along, written by different people with a different motivation and agenda. In my opinion that's one of the next steps to emancipate ourselves. I mean if you don't like lemmy.ml you probably don't like the people making the decisions there. Which unfortunately are the same people who also write all of the Lemmy software. And their software development decisions reflect the same attitude. But also that's going to change. A few people are working on good alternatives which strive to listen to the community, invite people to participate and also finally implement proper moderation tools and a few other tweaks to foster good behaviour.

I like Lemmy. But this platform had a hard time from the start. And it's still struggling. Mixing technological difficulties and innate problems of growing a community with drama, bad decisions, waywardness and friction within the community on many different levels is just stupid and unnecessary. But I'm still waiting for progress and a bright future. I think Federation is one of the best approaches with some potential to make that happen.

I think the solid technological basis is what I'm a bit more concerned as of now. But apart from that I agree that it is us, the community who sets the tone and we decide who we want to listen to, nice people or people with behaviour disorders and an attitude. And it's a vicious circle. At some point a platform has an image and is bound to tip and attract more like-minded people and less normal ones. And the dynamics are there and we need to actively fight for a nice place.

Well said, I agree with all of that. I'm considerably more to the left as well, that's part of why I hate lemmy.ml, because they're preventing actual good growth and movement in that direction.

Hopefully Mbin or some other one of the new forks/platforms takes off soon. I'm ready to move if necessary, I love the idea of a healthy Fediverse and I hope some day I can recommend it to friends instead of being too embarrassed to admit I use it because of all the propaganda.

That's something I've recently realized. They think people dislike them because they're leftist, but that has very little to do with it. Some of their harshest critics are from the left.

They have no idea it's because of their authoritarian simping, and every time you call them out on it, they deflect. Frankly they more strongly support fascist regimes than their criticizers.

I think the paid shills know what's going on, they're told to act like leftists and probably don't actually hold those beliefs. They might be brainwashed to think the CCP/Kremlin is good.

So in my opinion they pretend people are "upset that they're leftist" in order to avoid people focusing on their actual motives.

Sure. I personally am waiting for PieFed to come along. They seem to know what's important to address and also have some good ideas how to tackle it.

I'm 100% ready to support that and focus my engagement there. I'm pretty sure just changing the software codebase isn't changing too much... But I'd like some more independence from the few people currently doing everything.

And that's also what I've done. I haven't recommended Lemmy to friends and family, yet. And I've refrained from running my own instance, too. Despite having the server ready for that.

Thanks I'll keep an eye on it. Sad to be eager to abandon ship already, but it's not surprising that the fediverse will have some growing pains. The core value and promise of healthy social media is still there and I love it.

I mean the great thing about this architecture is, we don't need to abandon ship. I'm deliberately waiting for something that will be compatible with it. And it'll be the same community. Just a different software with a few much needed things on top.

And I'm kind of passionate about it in the first place, because I like this place. And we have to pay attention not to fall out with each other about details. Sometimes it's just not easy.

Ah thanks for explaining. It would be fantastic to export settings and connect to current communities instead of starting from scratch

you can leave literally any time. there are dozens of instances, you don't need to stay on flagship instances. you might like truth.social, which runs mastodon's software, or gab.com which does the same.

I think saying that any group of humans “aren’t people” isn’t being respectful of others. Please stop.

Intentionally misunderstanding what I said at best, defending propaganda from genocidal authoritarians at worst.

I don’t care about the content of what you are talking about. The community rules say to be respectful of others. And you aren’t. I asked you to stop but you want to argue.

I don't think shills are people on here in the same way genuine users are, I stand by that. They're representing authoritarian governments, not themselves.

If you want people to be respectful of others, how about addressing shills who are defending the Kremlin's genocide in Ukraine? It would be respectful to Ukrainians to acknowledge all of their suffering and close the door on propaganda from their oppressors.

Implying that those who disagree with you are subhuman is right out of the fascism playbook and it's definitely not being respectful of others. You can hold that opinion and you can even broadcast it widely on the internet. The rules in this community says to be respectful of others and that by it's very definition is not. I'm not interested in arguing further, and I'm definitely not interesting in talking geopolitics with you. I want you to be respectful of others and if you can't, I'll remove the content and ban you from the community. If others are not being respectful, report them and I'll review that too.

Implying that those who disagree with you are subhuman

I'm not saying that and you know it. Why use a straw man argument instead of addressing what I said?

"Everyone I disagree with is a shill and all ideas I disagree with are propaganda"

Mocking me instead of responding to what I said is a good indicator you have no reasonable response.

It's a good indicator that what you said was worthy of mockery. Mockery is a reasonable response for someone who thinks everyone you disagree with is a shill and that all ideas that you disagree with are propaganda.

Well, they're a bit over the top and oversimplifying things in my opinion. But you're also not contributing anything of value. You could instead add your perspective if it's different. I mean I'd probably read it and it'd get us ...anywhere?...

I'm pointing out that they're dismissing all opposing views as propaganda from shills, which itself is not contributing anything or in fact contributing negative value because it reduces discussions down to "my opinion is the one real truth and anyone who disagrees is a shill". Pointing this out is my contribution, but for some reason this needs to be argued to the point of meaninglessness.

they're dismissing all opposing views as propaganda from shills

No I'm not, and you know it.

all ideas that you disagree with are propaganda.

all media is propaganda.

Moreover, it seems pretty clear to me that .ml intends to keep their finger on the scale as much as possible. Just saying "oh federation solves all the problems just block them" doesn't really fix the issue when there are a bunch of ways they can potentially run malicious versions of the code base to mess with how federation functions and hold onto their influence. For example, they are already refusing to federate their mod logs in some cases, and they've shown themselves to be completely shameless and hypocritical when it comes to banning any and all dissent. They simply cannot be trusted.

I personally believe that the broader fediverse should seriously consider taking serious steps to cut out .ml before they do something drastic to fuck it all up

They also manipulated the modlog on their site to not differentiate between removed by mod and removed by admin. So even When something is removed by Dessalines or Nutomic it'll still show as moderator and not admin in the mod log.

That your lies get any upvotes is quite sad, i thought people on lemmy were tech savvy. I'm not and even i can see that you're making this stuff up.

Maybe go back to .ml where people don’t need proof to support their arguments and just make wild sweeping accusations, but it’s been proven already that OP is correct.

You’re just wrong.

Where is the proof please? As far as i can see, the lemmy.world modlog is the outlier, not the lemmy.ml one.

Plenty of people have provided proof. You’re free to check all the threads here and find them yourself. At this point I’d just be repeating the same sources.

Do your own work. Don’t expect everyone to do it for you.

Sorry but i cannot find anything. If the proof for Draconic's claims is so obvious and plenty, please be so kind and link at least one bit to me. The only thing i could find that seems like some kind of "proof" is the screenshot @Draconic_NEO posted. How they got to take it i have no idea, not saying they drew it in paint, but here is what it looks like on my side (same mod actions):

Again, it’s not my job to provide evidence already provided.

no evidence has been provided though

You inability to agree with it doesn’t dismiss it. We’re done here. This is a waste of time.

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doesn’t really fix the issue when there are a bunch of ways they can potentially run malicious versions of the code base to mess with how federation functions and hold onto their influence.

This is hysteria of Chinese spy balloon proportions 😂

I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

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Well, the discussion in this thread has convinced me to agree. It's also readily apparent that ml thinks any criticism against them is because they're leftist. They can't fathom that anyone could think they're an asshole or authoritarian apologist.

They don't think that, they aren't actually leftists and they know it. They're masquerading as leftists and using that as a cover for spreading authoritarian propaganda. It's intentional, they know precisely what they're doing.

If you try to talk to them about it they'll argue in bad faith and try to waste your time.

Seems like they werent such big fans of your post. It has been removed from their instance and your account was banned. Very interesting 🤔

You've got things backwards: OP was banned first and then posted this drama in reaction. The post isn’t visible on lemmy.ml because OP is banned.

I was banned from ml for merely suggesting that responding to someone with memes is childish and immature. So OP being banned from ml isn’t really the crime you might think it is.

Backwards or not- it doesn’t make what they said wrong.

I don't know what account of yours that was, so I guess I'll have to take your word for it, because it wasn't the account you're currently using.

No, it wasn’t. And I’ve much better things to do than to make up stories about a backwoods community on a mid-tier social network.

the evidence suggests otherwise

AFAICT this person is just making up random garbage up all over this thread. They have the means necessary to prove all of their claims if they're true, but so far have provided nothing.

and to what end? what is the purpose here? spreading spurious and undisprovable accusations is pointless when people can undermine them just by pointing out the nature of the accusation.

I don't know about that. I do see in their modlog that he has been banned multiple times. Allthough i cant find the exact time and date of his newest ban, it corresponds with the creation of this post, aka. 1 day ago from making this comment. But yeah, there is a possebility that he was banned right before or something like that 🤔

Checking the modlog, it looks like a moderator gave me a site ban for 14 days and a ban from the community where I made my comment for 30 days. I find it interesting that it lists my site ban as being from a moderator and not an admin.

They manipulated the modlog on their version to show all actions as coming from mod and not from admin, likely in attempt to hide how much is by admins as opposed to mods.

Edit: also appears they're manipulating the data itself because actions from lemmy.world's mods and admins are showing up under Nutomic's page so definitely something screwy going on there.

ModId field isn't enabled on these instances, it needs to be specifically enabled for these searches to work properly, thanks @Rooki@lemmy.world

Filtering by “ModId” must also be a config option: lemmy.world’s modlog page has a “Filter by mod” drop-box, but lemmy.ml’s and lemmy.sdf.org’s don’t.

I see, it would be nice to ask someone who knows for sure.

@Rooki@lemmy.world is this the case? Is the ModId field a custom config that needs to be enabled and/or is it a feature added specifically to Lemmy.world (If you don't know would you mind asking someone who might know and getting back to me then?)? If that is the case I'll edit my responses with this new information.

I will check the config and let you know. I dont think we have something custom. I think we have a config enabled

They have the option "Hide Mod Names" active. and LW not

Have you seen any other lemmy instance besides lemmy.world who has this field? I haven't (I checked feddit.uk, feddit.nl, feddit.de, lemm.ee, lemmy.sdf.org, lemmy.ca, lemmy.blahaj.zone). Are they all up to some shady stuff and lemmy.world is the only instance with an honest modlog?

Also i would like to know your thoughts on "Sunaurus' page", you somehow must have missed when i first asked you about it. Is he also manipulating the modlog data itself? What about "Ada's page"? I am sure i would find the same for admins of the other instances, but i feel like it would be on you to show something that supports your claims.

I checked the 12 most popular instances, and only lemmy.world and lemmynsfw.com seem to have ModId enabled, so perhaps the default config setting is to disable it. This is assuming that it’s a config thing at all, but the only other possibility would be that those two sites share forked code.

cc: @Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world

Rooki said that there's an option called "Hide Mod Names", it's likely a default value in the standard Lemmy package, likely the reason why it isn't on more instances. I'll ask the other instance admins I know about it later.

The lemmy.sdf.org modlog is the same, so this must be a configuration option.

Not everything is a McCarthyist conspiracy smdh.

If you scrolled just a little bit in that link you sent you would see that it isn't.

How did you create this screenshot? This is not what the modlog at lemmy.sdf.org looks like, it looks like this:

It's just one of the preconfigured Lemmy theme options.

And would you be so kind and tell with me which one, so i can see for myself what you seem to be seeing there?

I think you are confused, but that obviously doesn't keep you from throwing out wild accusations. How is what you linked Nutomic's page? Because it's lemmy.ml? I really feel for Dessalines and Nutomic with all the shit they have to deal with.

Ah! That makes sense. I was on world news of Lemmy.ml and the comments where full of nutters and/or troll farms. It was like gote/gout (or whatever it was called), another Reddit alternative I've tried that seamed to fill Nazis kicked off Reddit. I unsubscribed and blocked.

Edit: Voat! That was it.

Lemmy.ml is a massive instance. I don't really know where are you posting there, probably in political communities and thus this reaction. But I follow lots of communities that are hosted on Lemmy.ml and they are just normal communities about their topics, normally technology. I certainly do not want to lose those communities of having to move my accounts around just because you had some problems with some particular people. Block them yourself and move on.

I don't get why there's always people in small places that are always doing their best to make them even smaller. Lots of goods things are lost this way. We must be clever in trying to preserve and make this good things thrive. And, believe me I've been in lots and lots and lots of small community driven projects, this kind of attitude is no good for them. You cannot take every small issue you have with some part of the project and say: "we do not work together anymore".

If there's an issue let's be constructive about it. But defederation of such a big instance with so many people and communities that just does not care about this drama... I don't see how that helps lemmy as a whole.

I suppose there's a lot of political ideology behind what's being ask for, and what's being said. So I do not expect convince OP of anything, as those hard as steel political beliefs are inmutable. But I hope sanity and a wish for making Lemmy a big project of the kind of social networks we want in the future will prevail. Even if that means sharing space with people you don't politically agree 100% about everything, because that's how a community works, different people working together.

I've seen inter-Lemmy drama posts in this comm before, and the mods deleted them (or locked them—I don’t recall).

It's hard for me to believe the mods haven't seen this post. They've probably gotten multiple reports.

It seems they're making an exception this time.

The fact I got an instance ban means the admins were involved and were endorsing the tankies. The problem exists at the highest level of Lemmy.ml, not just in a handful of communities.

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I've been saying this for like 6 months.

.ml is just a filter for Hexbear and lemmygrade users to infiltrate the greater federated instances.

No. Defederating at the drop of a hat is stupid. You don't like it? Then you, YOU, block the instance.

I don't like defederation, but these clowns are asking for it for a very long time.

Lemmy.ml is not only a massive instance, it is also the original and core lemmy instance. Widespread defederation would be like a nuclear bomb to the lemmy platform.

Some people have developed alternatives in the threadiverse like kbin or piefed. If lemmy.ml is truly too far aflight for users to tolerate, it seems likely that alternative platforms will fill in the gaps. For now, lemmy is still a thriving and growing platform.

Widespread defederation has been the norm, though. It has always been a thing, and many threads exist going back and forth on mutual defederation for ages.

And also, the only reason I'm on Lemmy.world and not .ml is precisely because of their moderation and their community. I'm the example you're talking about.

I say bite the bullet and break the cord already. This is not the first or only thread calling for defederation of Lemmy.ml.

What I'm saying is that this is a unique instance. I also think that for my purposes, .world is a much better option, and I think that for most people, it's a much healthier and more stable place. I'm just not sure that the rest of lemmy can survive without .ml - It is literally where the development of the platform happens.

What do you do when you have defederated from the developers of the platform you're using? How do you have a working relationship to meet users needs? Someone will say just fork it, but that's essentially the same as launching a new platform. As I mentioned, others have done exactly that, partly for technical reasons relating to the vision of what the platform should be, but also for political reasons.

I'm not advocating for anything, i'm simply stating some of the realities of the platform we are using.

Ml will be long term poison to the group. There's nothing new to say over there, all their own threads are circular.

.world spent months denying the genocide in Gaza. It's a shithole that is likely an op run by western governments to herd in normies and push favorable narratives. Not remotely hard to see that

That's a joke. I've seen denial comments but from the very start world was always pro Palestine. This does not mean there are no examples of Gaza denial on . World

It's not thriving. The devs are prickly arseholes, which is anathema to building a cooperative, volunteer-driven dev community and the tone of many mainstream communities is obnoxiously set by tankies amd their alts.

Probably one of if not the biggest reasons people had poor experiences on Lemmy before was because they signed up on Lemmy.ml

LOL this was me. I thought it would be cool to be on the DEV instance and didn't know that it had a whole lot of other baggage on it.

It would've been me too, but when I started looking at Lemmy the dev's instance was closed along with many others, so the first one was Lemmy.world for me. While Lemmy.world has its flaws it's still way better than ml, really dodged a bullet there.

You were lucky. I got in right before the Reddit exodus, so I guess I got in before they closed things down.

What have they done to prevent a cooperative, volunteer driven dev community?

My experience contributing to lemmy was not bad, albeit it was pretty small thing.

So what if it is the original? Bad moderation, combined with idolation of authoritarianism is some poisonous stuff.

The question is if admins are willing to have an open conversation about the moderation and content.

But deFederation is a fine solution. Then the admins on .ml have their way and they can have their little hermit kingdom without any dissenting views. And we can go on with out lives without their bile in our feeds and threads.

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If that's what it takes I'm ready to switch to a new platform today. Let's fork and make something healthy.

You might also be interested in checking out kbin, mbin, SubLinks (under development), or PieFed. they each emerged for the reasons we are talking about. They are all free to try and AFAIK interoperable with lemmy for the time being.

Thank you. I've been hearing bad things about Kbin the last few weeks, but Mbin and SubLinks sound promising.

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So, you want people to miss out on cat pictures because your feelings were hurt?

There are much better places to find cat pictures.

Your stance is basically: "I had disagreements with/don't like users from an instance, please block an entire instance for all other users in the instance I'm in". Why are you making your problems everyone else's?

My stance is that Hexbear is a bunch of fascists spreading their ideology and Lemmy.ml is helping them doing it by banning dissenters. I believe that freedom of speech only works with parity, and giving fascists a one-way echo chamber with which to spread fascism, deny genocide, brigade, and otherwise act in bad faith should be entirely unacceptable. People should not be getting posts from Lemmy.ml on their feeds because this "curated" discussion is basically the memetic equivalent of an engineered virus, and it cannot be allowed to spread.

It would be better if you could just ignore them.

In general this Lemmy architecture, presented as compromise, where instance admins have some power and defederation is a thing - I don't like it. I understand it's simpler to do, but socially it may just not be something that will work.

IMHO user identities should be cryptographic, so should be community identities, and moderation should be done the same way as certificate revocation, and providing storage and connectivity shouldn't be connected to moderation or identities.

It's very easy to label people fascists as a generic "bad people" label and claim they're arguing in bad faith based on nothing but your feelings. I could just as easily call you a fascist for trying to decide what everyone else on this instance gets to see and that you're arguing in bad faith wanting vengeance because you threw a tantrum on another instance and got spanked for it.

The most name-calling I see are from people like you who label anyone who disagrees with them a "fascist", "shill", "bot", "tankie", "wumao" or millions of other terms and I see so many posts getting downvoted for not following your desired narrative. We can see this happen in the posts right here.

tankie:

(politics, slang, derogatory, by extension) A supporter of authoritarian policies and actions by the Soviet Union, China, or other nominally socialist governments.

fascism:

Any right-wing, authoritarian, nationalist ideology characterized by centralized, totalitarian governance, strong regimentation of the economy and society, and repression of criticism or opposition.

So yeah, Hexbear isn't full of fascists, it's full of tankies, which are just fascists with a socialist coat of paint. The fact that I'm doing this because I was actioned by a moderator acting as a tankie commissar doesn't change the validity of my reasoning as to why being federated to Lemmy.ml is a problem.

and you think this entitles you to be commissar dictating what everyone on this instance gets to see or not see? If I call you fascist enough times, does that mean your posts can be blocked for everyone?

"My opinions are so weak, I can't tolerate dissent."

I predicted this when lemmygrad got defederated. I said that neoliberals were gonna identify some other instance as the "tankie instance" and start campaigning to defederate from it.

Funny because it's always been those 3 instances this whole time, nothing ever changed in our dislike for them.

Uh huh. Once you've succeeded in defederating from .ml, in a few months, there will be another instance that neoliberals decide is full of tankies, and it will have always been those 4 instances.

I called it last time and neoliberals don't change their desire to silence people to their left.

Sure mate. And tankies are not to my left in the slightest.

And .ml is only the "tankie instance" because neoliberals found "tankie" to be an effective cudgel to silence people to their left. They don't have to be tankies to get the label.

Right, but I am AnCom call them tankies because they support the USSR & China.

You can hate neolibs all you want, that doesn’t change the fact that CTH, Lemmygrad, & .ml are the tankie trifecta.

CTH? I thought Hexbear was the first "tankie instance"

See you when you guys get the urge to karen another instance.

Hexbear is CTH.

When reddit banned CTH, some of the community went and made Hexbear, most of us stayed on reddit and due to the small userbase it become an incestral breeding ground that removed all but the most hardcore tankies and authiechuds leading to the shitheap it is today.

Is CTH in the room with us right now? If so, how is lemmy.world gonna defederate from itself?

That doesn’t even make any sense?

You’re so irrationally upset about people not liking tankie instances.

I called it last time and got a pretty similar response.

In a couple months once you've decided that some other instance is the tankie instance and want it gone, we'll have this conversation again.

As long as we all agree you don't actually care about rule violations, you're just mad they think differently than you.

my face when i signed up for lemmy.ml 2 months ago for fun and now they're being called 5 different political terms

(their sign up verification test was "what is two plus two" back then)