I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A
lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml]. It’s
been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s
say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s
colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they
didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who
dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of
China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, … As an example, there was a thread today
about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there
were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some
whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of
votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support. I
posted a comment in this thread linking to
“https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs
[https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs]” (WARNING:
graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely
known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed
for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I
noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist
and denialist comments were left in place. This is what the modlog
[https://lemmy.ml/modlog] of the instance looks like:
[https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/6886b092-43d3-408b-ab57-2fa686f8a6c7.png]
Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say? When I called them out on their one
sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a
community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] that I had ever
participated in. Proof:
[https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/9c52e470-645f-46ba-ac1d-0b7d8be17af3.png] So
many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the
fediverse, you can use another instance.” The problem with this reasoning is
that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml],
and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement
lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting
for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world
[/c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world] where there’s nobody to discuss
anything with. I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge
people to avoid lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] hosted communities in favor of
communities on more reasonable instances.
Lemmy.ml, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, has consistently been accused of improper Federation practices and many instances have decided to ban one or both of the latter by default, with many individual users having already gone further to block the former as well. However, many individual users on lemmy.ml seem unaware of the accusations of the practices of their admins, and some people go so far as to see lemmy.ml as a sort of default instance on the Fediverse.
This discussion promotes wider knowledge of the situation and what might be done about it in the future, in order to e.g. not turn away new potential Federation members (Fedizens?:-) that could otherwise associate what happens on that instance as something relating to the Fediverse as a whole.
And not by random accident either - companies put in HUGE investments into designing blinking, flashing, candied-looking… everything, in order to foster “engagement”. Dark Mirror has several episodes illustrating various aspects, trying to warn people.
In the olden days there was a phrase that “sex sells”. Well it turns out, only up to a point - whereas kittens & puppies sell even moar, and getting people angry is an appetite that seems inexhaustible.
And that does not even begin to touch on how certain actors would very much like to exaggerate certain of those effects, to their own potential benefits. e.g., the likes of anti-vaxxers + never-Hillary-ers got Trump elected, and while both of those movements maybe (probably even) started organically, they definitely have also had their fans flamed both by outside groups and the poorly constructed echo chambers of social media.
This is just the way of the world, and fighting against it, like death & entropy, is an absolute necessity yet difficult.
So if that is how they want to be, then fine. But we still need to do our part to call it out like it is, and to warn others away, or else the Fediverse as a whole suffers. I almost quit the Fediverse myself a few months ago, though fortunately v.0.19.3 came out and I simply blocked lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net instead, and now I am as happy as a clam:-).
And not by random accident either - companies put in HUGE investments into designing blinking, flashing, candied-looking… everything, in order to foster “engagement”. Dark Mirror has several episodes illustrating various aspects, trying to warn people.
In the olden days there was a phrase that “sex sells”. Well it turns out, only up to a point - whereas kittens & puppies sell even moar, and getting people angry is an appetite that seems inexhaustible.
And that does not even begin to touch on how certain actors would very much like to exaggerate certain of those effects, to their own potential benefits. e.g., the likes of anti-vaxxers + never-Hillary-ers got Trump elected, and while both of those movements maybe (probably even) started organically, they definitely have also had their fans flamed both by outside groups and the poorly constructed echo chambers of social media.
This is just the way of the world, and fighting against it, like death & entropy, is an absolute necessity yet difficult.
So if that is how they want to be, then fine. But we still need to do our part to call it out like it is, and to warn others away, or else the Fediverse as a whole suffers. I almost quit the Fediverse myself a few months ago, though fortunately v.0.19.3 came out and I simply blocked lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net instead, and now I am as happy as a clam:-).