For all your boycotting needs. I’m sure there’s some mods caught in lemmy.ml’s top 10 that are perfectly upstanding and reasonable people, my condolences for the cross-fire.
- !memes@lemmy.world and !memes@sopuli.xyz. Or of course communities that rule.
- !asklemmy@lemmy.world
- !linux@programming.dev. Quite small, plenty of more specific ones available. Also linux is inescapable on lemmy anyway :)
- !programmer_humor@programming.dev
- !world@lemmy.world
- !privacy@lemmy.world and maybe !privacyguides@lemmy.one, lemmy.one itself seems to be up in the air. !fedigrow@lemm.ee says !privacy@lemmy.ca. They really seem to be hiding even from another, those tinfoil hats :)
- !technology@lemmy.world
- Seems like !comicstrips@lemmy.world and !comicbooks@lemmy.world, various smaller comic-specifc communities as well as !eurographicnovels@lemm.ee
- !opensource@programming.dev
- !fuckcars@lemmy.world
(Out of the loop? Here’s a thread on lemmy.ml mods and their questionable behaviour)
OOTL on this one, what happened on lemmy.ml?
https://lemm.ee/post/33872586
Criticizing China on lemmy.ml goes about as well as evangelizing crypto on awful.systems. Join an instance that shares your values or roll your own. Know your audience or get the hammer.
It’s like a huge chunk of the population out here has never experienced a forum before.
It is far more than just that. Removing comments is one thing, mass-banning from many communities at once despite never even having commented in them at all is another, but the real issue is using database manipulation to delete the log entries as to why the comments were removed after the fact.
Even if unintentional, which strains credulity, this is some spez-level stuff going on, edit: where we have the option to either take what a single person (who does not seem inclined to follow their own stated rules) offers, or else we can leave. Many are choosing the latter, and like the Rexodus, making the situation known to others as well in the process.
“Criticizing China” was merely the spark that lit the match, with the situation offering proof of what apparently people have been suspecting for some time now.
The sad part is that this situation was entirely predictable a year ago.
The Lemmy devs (who also run lemmy.ml) made no secret of who they are and what they believe. Especially dessalines.
I do think they have made a very good piece of software. And I think we’re better off here than on Reddit. At least it is more difficult for one asshole to ruin everything. We have tools to block people and instances, so it doesn’t matter as much even if they’re in charge.
I worry that if lemmy.ml continues to be run the way that it is, then it will bleed over into the software side, and we would be forced to fork Lemmy. So far though, despite running lemmy.ml like assholes, the actual development seems fine – not too different from any other open source project (I only remember that one issue where dessalines completely failed to understand why a user would want to block an instance).
The irony is that, despite creating a tool with what seems like very socialist principles (it gives users & communities a lot of power, and doesn’t centralize that power with one person), those principles are often lost on the devs in favor of authoritarianism. Hence the term: “tankie”.
Oh he knows why, because he IS why. He wants to pretend he doesn’t because he knows people will use it to block the instances that force the politics he enjoys. Nobody is fucking trying to escape star trek lol, it’s him and his ilk and he knows it, and since their goal is evangelism (they have to save our souls with authoritarian dictatorships!) he doesn’t want the evangelism machine shut down.
Fascism is quite capable at achieving its goals - seeing as how it is not limited by any of that pesky “morality” that slows others down.
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You people are so lost up your own asses, you will never find yourselves. Conspiratorial nonsense driven by your McCarthyism 2.0 with a complete lack of self awareness.
But I guess I shouldn’t expect anything more from a NATO funded user and instance, right? The Heritage Foundation and CIA signing the checks over here?
Very worrying indeed.
What kind of moldy McCarthyite garbage is this? If my Grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
If my Grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You need to take a step back. You can’t see the forest for the trees. Our strength is in our diversity.
Hexbear defederated from us as we were discussing whether to vote on defederating them, which was a foregone conclusion. Our users can’t walk into their communities, because they are scared that we might poke a hole in their bubble. Perhaps these boogeymen that you envision are less interested in taking over the world, and more interested in simply having their own space on the internet.
It’s not nice to put words in someone else’s mouth. I will always protect my users against being brigaded. Hence why we were about to defederate hexbear before they beat us to the punch. But we aren’t being brigaded by lemmy.ml.
You actually believe Dessalines is taking money from the Chinese government? Come on dude, that’s absurd. Occam’s razor: he just doesn’t like when people say shit he doesn’t agree with, and petulantly bans them. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just an internet moderation saga that has played out a million times before.
Just going to address your first paragraph: I sincerely doubt that the devs are receiving money from a fascist government. I simply don’t think Lemmy is big enough yet to be on the radar of e.g., the Chinese government. Yes, maybe there are some Wumaos on here. My understanding is they get better training and autonomy these days, so it’s certainly possible. But most of the comments look more homegrown. I just doubt the Chinese government (or any similar government) would care to the point of trying to pay off devs, and it’s not their MO anyways.
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But you’re happy to spread this rumor around.
It may have come from a hole in the ground. It may have come from the Pentagon. It may have come little green men from Mars. What are you smoking?
I don’t even admit to anyone that I use Lemmy, too much political extremism and propaganda.
Within a couple weeks of signing up for Lemmy I was told I’d “get the wall”, and had to abandon an account because Lemmy.ml users followed me around and downvoted everything I posted (mostly funny memes).
But after I blocked hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml, I started to forget that all of that was even there, though I internally made a kind of automatic mental block for Lemmy.ml too (like WHAT!? oh nvm it’s from them…). I shouldn’t forget though, that that is what a new user would see… thus it would be quite unfriendly for me to bring fresh meat to the fascist audience for their amusement.
Listening to instance admins, I just don’t know why they refuse to see those campaigns of brigading as you described happened to you (can you prove it btw, like if the account still exists, and you find a way to view downvotes - does Mbin let you? I tried but maybe it needs a login to do that and it appears greyed out to me without one…), and they say things like “they don’t affect our users” (bullshit, you just perfectly described a situation that I suspect happens all the time where it does), and basically act like bullying and intimidation is not a thing that exists in the world. Like, if you ever say anything to anger someone on lemmy.ml, then that’s your fault and you deserve whatever comes your way after that!?
Tbf, there are instances - e.g. reddthat.com - that disable downvotes entirely. But I don’t want to simply become insensitive to everyone else’s disapproval around me - rather I want the system to work properly so that I am only getting disapproval from people who I either respect or at least are neutral, i.e. not fascists who abuse the system bc they are allowed to by inattentive admins.
If there was an instance somewhere that had defederated from the Big 3 Axis powers - hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml - I would likely join it, and promote it, and recommend Lemmy to people irl again. Otherwise, I will either leave the Fediverse if it gets too bad, or far more likely simply block lemmy.ml but then only enjoy the Fediverse privately rather than as something I am allowed to share bc of how poor and off-putting the initial user experience is.:-(
It is extremely sad how heavily this aspect hinders our continued growth - even if Reddit does something annoying like finally kills off old-reddit for good this time, are people really going to want to come here, so that instead of being exposed to the right-wing propaganda over there, they can be exposed to the fascism-disguised-as-leftism over here? Fascists are controlling everything, everywhere!?!? But we were supposed to be different, here. At least that’s what we told ourselves.
Yeah, well said. I’m not sure about seeing where downvotes come from, if I could it might be worth getting back into my abandoned account to provide more evidence that defederation is warranted.
Same. I want a system where everyone has an equal voice with limited censorship and a zero tolerance approach to governments or corporations spreading agendas.
Agreed. But to be fair, there’s never been a forum like the fediverse before. People are still learning how to navigate this complex, multifaceted space. It’s not just one audience, it’s many different ones.
Thanks!
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I mentioned elsewhere but here’s a copy and paste:
It is far more than just that. Removing comments is one thing, mass-banning from many communities at once despite never even having commented in them at all is another, but the real issue is using database manipulation to delete the log entries as to why the comments were removed after the fact.
Even if unintentional, which strains credulity, this is some spez-level stuff going on, where we have the option to either take what a single person (who does not seem inclined to follow their own stated rules) offers, or else we can leave. Many are choosing the latter, and like the Rexodus, making the situation known to others as well in the process.
“Criticizing China” was merely the spark that lit the match, with the situation offering proof of what apparently people have been suspecting for some time now.
This weeks drama.
Some people got really butt hurt because of some mods in lemmy.ml
to me it was more the straw that broke the camel’s back. every rude and unreasonable interaction i have in here is with someone from .ml. it’s not even about their politics or beliefs, they’re just not pleasant to have around.
the second you try to engage them they throw the real arguments out for pedantry about definitions and using that to call people dumb instead of actually having meaningful discussion about ideas. they’re the worst kind of “it’s not my job to explain it to you, Google it” people too. like, i get the mindset, but it’s just not going to change anyone’s heart or mind. it’s not how you actually win an argument.
every person on Lemmy.ml argues like an annoying 14 year old atheist that just discovered Internet arguments and the think whole Internet is Christian. they’re just shitty to be around and basically never add anything meaningful to a discussion other than “you’re wrong and dumb”
My experience has similarities and differences - I don’t find .ml users as a whole to be shitty, but if there’s a shitty user, chances are pretty good that they’re from .ml rather than one of the smaller instances, World, or Kbin. And they’re almost always evangelical in nature - as a former evangelical, I recognize the type. The preconception of ultimate and indisputable correctness - they’re often willing to explain and honestly discuss their views, but not acknowledge any serious possible fault or flaw in them. The scriptures are holy, after all.
They swapped the opiate of the people for some synthetic Stalinist stuff.
Brilliant. I’m saving this imagery for later.
Fair enough, is definitely not my experience and I have an account on .ml for about 1 year.
I could argue that I see more trolls on lemmy.world than any other instance, but that obvious: is the larger instance but probably the ratio troll/normal people is more or less the same than any other instance.
That’s a behaviour that I do not see ever on the communities that I participate(basically technology and linux)
I wonder if where you have your account affects how you notice where the trolls are from? Like I don’t notice trolls coming from .world much because I just see a username, where a troll from .ml is
username@lemmy.ml.That makes a lot of sense.
Maybe they see your ml account and hate you by association because of abuse they’ve suffered from other ml accounts
yeah, I’ll agree. the tech communities in there are not like that. it’s the political ones.
an example: they’ll say something off the wall about the Ukraine war and American support for it, you’ll reply with something that mentions the Americans that support and don’t support it among many other things, they’ll dog pile you for using the word “liberal” with the common American definition because apparently linguistic drift is illegal. theynever get off the subject and then never actually tell you their definition and how it differs.
that’s every political discussion with anyone from .ml involved. if it was just their own communities it would be fine, but it’s that they go out and do that with every community that doesn’t defederate.
imagine it this way; what if “the Donald” had broken off Reddit later and made one of the largest lemmy instances. they were perfectly cordial when you were in their funny dog pictures community, but they constantly act like trump supporters in every political thread.
obviously we’d all defederate with them. very few world even question that at this point.
that’s what this is. they’re just loud, and extreme, and annoying on this one subject. we’d rather not see the Linux main community hold us captive against excising the problem.
To be fair I did have a decent run in with some mods on .ml as well and I am not a fan of their practices.
I do however think the public shaming and calling for boycott is so wrong its not even funny. We‘re still talking about the people who made this here possible. Especially the derogatory use of the word „tankie“ is unacceptable imo.
I‘d prefer if people started debates and tried to find common ground instead. For the reason of decentralization I would like less popular „versions“ of the communities to thrive.
But the mods don’t allow that kind of discourse, that’s the whole problem.
Also, tankies are advocating for a society where I and those like me would be killed. If that’s not worthy of a derogatory term then what is?
Where and why would you be targeted by them?
When they seized power as happened in Russia, China, and many other countries, they consistently murdered or enslaved dissidents. And they defend such practices to this day. I am an outspoken dissident in my current society and surely would be in their imagined future as well.
Nothing is. Shaming and harassing others is not the solution. Instead we should let them advocate for whatever their ideal is. The same we let nazis have their own little „reich“ in their own homes. If they start breaking rules they get the same backlash as anyone else. Dont make it about „identity“.
Its dehumanizing and leads to hate and violence. Same as with psychopaths, narcissists, pedophiles, etc. These people are living creatures just as we are. Some of them are sick, some of them are dangerous. That does not mean they can be treated as lesser.
I acknowledge that tankies are humans with rights but I don’t acknowledge that those rights include not being called an accurate but slightly demeaning term that they don’t like. Particularly because their preferred terms for themselves are inaccurate.
Like I’m not going to stop calling fascists by that name even if they prefer to be called freedom-loving patriots or something. And I personally see the two ideologies as having a lot of similarities.
I agree with you on both accounts. Their preferred choices arent the same as pronouns and I think both authoritarian ideologies are similar and dangerous.
My point was solely that namecalling, derogatory words or slurs arent doing anything for anyone. They‘re just helping others hate us and us do unspeakable things to them and vice versa.
Dehumanizing is a precursor for genocide for a reason and that is why I think its a bad idea. Of course its just my opinion and I‘m perfectly fine if you disagree with it.
No, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and I do not fully disagree. But I think context matters. I like tanky because it helps people understand the dangers of the ideology more than other alternatives like communist or Marxist-Leninist or whatever. Is there more danger of violence against tankies or that their ideology may grow and cause violence against others? Right now I perceive the latter to be a bigger issue, and I don’t see any real risk of harm coming to them, at least in the social circles where my words have influence.
If there was a movement that sought to do physical harm to them (outside of a defensive context) then I would weigh that appropriately in my language. The term is a tool of persuasion and I deem that persuasion more important than any risk of dehumanization, which I do oppose and recognize as harmful.
I can see your point. Sadly we have ample evidence that others have thought the same about such terms and they have a bad precedent.
So thanks for discussing this in good faith. I like the way we discussed this as it often isnt what happens with others.
Have a good one. :)
But that’s what’s happening now? They broke their own rules - not merely removing comments, but also mass-banning from communities people have never commented in before, and then deleting the mod log entries afterwards. The former is not ideal but expected, the middle is… extremely excessive and warrants all of this right there alone, but the latter bumps the whole matter up significantly to be outright disingenuous, so that “that side” making its case is no longer expected to yield any results, given the not only manipulative but outright deceptive practices that have been (allegedly) proven.
I do worry about the use of a pejorative term though. In thinking about it more, I waffle back and forth between it should never be done, vs. whether someone can “earn” that badge not by holding a belief but by their actions?
We should definitely respect their contributions to the code and actually I would guess that they may legit believe that what they are doing (supporting China by suppression of alternate viewpoints, using any means necessary including ones that violate and abuse their own code of conduct) is right. But that does not make it so.
This is also far from the first time .ml has been accused of manipulating the mod logs or federation database. It’s really just the first time they’ve been caught red handed, but I have definitely found a handful of my band not showing up in mod logs for whatever reason, but didn’t get a screenshot of the original log entry.
Thank you very much for sharing that history - that really helps me understand why people are not taking this seriously. If they “feel like” they have heard it all before, then they give their rote responses from the past, not realizing how things have changed.
And too there’s GIGO, where people that should have been banned were banned, but it’s still not a terribly persuasive happenstance to convince people who cannot handle the subtleties involved between the outcome vs. the method by which it was arrived at.
Google at one point was not evil, and people warning us not to put trust in them to make Android were solidly ignored. Apple, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of it was the same. And look at us now. FAAFO. Well, now we’re seeing firsthand some very few glimpses of how bad it could ultimately get, for those companies.
But for lemmy.ml we are still in the early stages, where people are saying “but they write the code” (irrelevant), and “they aren’t evil” (we have proof, NOW), and “the Fediverse is still too small, let it grow first” (a horrible idea - for one thing it won’t grow as much this way and for another if it did then having so many communities held hostage on that instance would be even more difficult to fix than now). Oh, and another one I hear quite often is “lemmy.world has problems too”, which I’m not even going to dignify with a comment about. But the big ones are “only the admins are bad - not the users” (partly true but not entirely and quite frankly… if YOU want to ignore all the warning signs then that doesn’t mean that *I* should be forced to stay behind with you as well - particularly when user-level blocks are NOT the same as instance-level ones); and “but some of the biggest communities are there” (I mean, so what, go back to Reddit if you want that but… okay it is a more fair objection tbf).
I doubt many places will defederate lemmy.ml right now… but on the other hand, I see preparations paving the way for that to happen by removing the existing roadblocks, most notably https://reddthat.com/post/20197120. Though that too will require more than a little effort reaching out to each and every single community group of mods to begin the discussion about moving their communities, one by one. This fight against authoritarianism will be long, costly, and may never truly be won - e.g. even if Lemmy.ml gets defederated, the users of hexbear, lemmygrad, and it may simply hide out as alts elsewhere? - but it seems to me to be worth fighting? Though I may need to find at least one instance that actually does defederate from those Big Three Axis powers to use in the meantime.
Thank you 🙏 for your own efforts in combating these (mal)practices.
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If you hear of an instance that has defederated from them, I would be interested to know. Otherwise, this OP at least seems to be helping prepare people for that eventuality even if not yet happening now.
So moderating their instance?
Where’s the evidence for this? I didn’t see that in the original post.
You are correct that it is not in the OP wording itself, but it came out as part of the discussion i.e. it is in the comment section if you want to read through that.
It is now getting significantly harder to find the comments I saw originally as lemmy’s UI decides now to hide comments by default, bc there are so very many on that thread, but to get you started, one is https://lemmy.world/comment/10461570, and another is https://lemm.ee/comment/12369094.
Even if the former issue was the result of that new feature being tested out on Lemmy.ml first (and perhaps having bugs causing issues with the mod log), the other issue remains that the modding in such occurrences is accused of being rather… “over-zealous”. As in why remove someone from a meme community, if they merely made a comment about China in a political community somewhere else on the same instance? What does someone being (potentially) incorrect in their facts have to do with being able to interact with people in a meme community that they have (reputedly) never commented in even so much as once? (presumably they must have interacted with it somehow, according to the wording of the new mod feature, so probably they did vote)
I agree that if that happened (which I dont have the time nor the nerve atm) its very scary.
Most likely, as always on the internet, the truth is they have certain beliefs which are problematic and triggering, and they are programmers, not weathered social workers who can solve heated conflicts.
And then comes the most important part: they have not engaged in these alleged practices all the time so it is likely that bad coincidences came together and brought on the perfect storm on them/us.
I stand by my initial statement. We can condemn the actions, we can harshly disagree on ideology but we should refrain from dehumanizing them.
Have a good one. :)
Well, more to the point, it’s too late for us to test this all now. We’d have to spin up our own instances, watch all of the signals coming out, and compare those signals to what they used to be vs. then become. As someone did - with screenshots demonstrating the before vs. after. But we cannot now go back in time to confirm that particular instance, we’d have to catch a future occurrence.
Unless you meant the mass removals - but people have been complaining about that for quite awhile now iirc? This is not an isolated incident, by any means. For months now I have been defending Lemmy.ml to various random commenters across the Fediverse, citing how different it is from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net (and truthfully, the situation is quite different, here being isolated more if not exclusively to the admins), but lately I have given up b/c the collective weight of all of these actions seems indefensible to me now, as a pattern of behavior.
I actually have compassion for them - as you say they are programmers not social workers, and if they truly want their goals of FOSS acceptance and socialist world-views to be exported around the world, then they are working against their own goals but do not see that. Put another way, they may truly believe the local Chinese propaganda, but in order to export their ideals to a global audience, it needs to be tempered with a greater mix of acceptance that people exposed to more Western-style media are accustomed to (where we are allowed to watch things like videos rather than be forced to read state-sponsored bulletins telling us what to believe).
But anyway, the removal reason is far from the point - it is the manner of the removal that concerns us so greatly. But sure, start up a dialog with them if you wish - you sound like a good person to initiate such, since you go to lengths to understand their POV:-).
Btw do you have any suggestions as an alternative to “tankie”? I am not 100% convinced that it is fully “dehumanizing”, but I do see where it is somewhere along the spectrum towards that goal. Would “fascist” or “authoritarian” work better?
There is no non-derogatory use of the word tankie. It’s been derogatory since the Prague and Hungarian uprisings, when it was coined.
Even if one were to come up with a new term that does not have negative connotations it would immediately soak up such connotations because it refers to counter-revolutionaries.
Tbf if I don’t call them “tankies” I’m going to call them “authoritarian evangelist pieces of human shit.” They can take their pick I suppose.
Yep, the mod got way overboard in the situation that started all this shit. Banning a user in almost all lemmy.ml communities is too much.
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Thanks for sharing your opinion. I have made different experiences. You can debate them and they wont ban you if you act like an adult. What most mods (me included) wont accept is excessive drama, aggressive behavior, etc. obviously people make mistakes, some are outright dicks. But the generalization seems very far fetched.
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And thats your right. I dont object to that.
I‘m saying thats not a general rule for these or any mods/admins. I have personally had discussions with them and with some I‘m not on the best of terms. Yet I haven’t been banned anywhere from posting. Furthermore, i have seen a lot of posts and comments „just pointing out“ stuff and using derogatory words and populist language. I cant say I‘d watch that indefinitely myself.
Btw stating a rule as a ban reason does not seem suspicious to me. Feel free to disagree.
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Not a fan either.
Are you on !fedigrow@lemm.ee? That’s a topic we discuss quite often there