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. 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” (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 of the instance looks like:
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 that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
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, 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/[email protected] 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 hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
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I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
Did that months ago; defederated completely when they turned into Lemmygrad-lite. At first I missed some more active FOSS communities, but since then, others on different instances have become more active.
programming.devhas a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on.mlso maybe check out what they’ve got.If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else, nurture it, and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about
.ml, and you probably won’t be the last.Related: I genuinely feel that
mlbeing the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.Edit: Oh yeah. Didn’t recognize your username at first, but I was looking at the modlog the other day from my LW account, and saw a bunch of individual community bans from Dessalines and wondered what was up. Figured it was something exactly like this, and it was. Thanks for sharing.
If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably wont’ be the last.
Maybe we should open a thread on [email protected] about this
TIL that community existed. thanks!
What? I thought I pinged you there a while ago! Anyway, have a look, there should be some topics you might find interesting
May have been my LW account? I mostly use it for my mod role, but I’ll switch to it sometimes and browse all there to look for new communities I might like. Perhaps it was that account and I only interacted from there? (My memory is terrible these days 😆)
I don’t remember, you’ll see a post with a lot of pings, one of your accounts should be there 😄
Did you ping in the post body or comments? I learned a month or two ago from someone that mentions only generate a notification if they’re in the comments.
I made sure to ping in the comment for this reason. Actually now I’m curious, let me have a look
Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.
I had actually considered Lemmy before The Great Reddit Exodus. Lemmy.ml turned me off from that.
Now we have Kbin (you can make it, my love!) and Lemmy.world, and I feel much better.
I… don’t think Kbin.social is going to make it. Even if it comes back, too much trust has been lost. Ernst should have stuck to just working on his coding project, not also administering his own instance, b/c that carries with it a certain level of “always-on” responsibility - e.g. I have unfortunately had to block Kbin.social lately, b/c nearly all (>>99%) of the spam that I currently see on the Fediverse was coming from the communities on it. Since I blocked it, I think I’ve seen like 1 single spam post for the past month.
So Kbin.social is turning people away too, for different reasons.
Mbin seems healthy though?:-)
I want to use Mbin, but all Mbin instances are federated with tankie instances, including hexbear.
And Mbin doesn’t make it easy to see user/community instance.
I gave up on the Kbin/Mbin style entirely - it sounds nice to Federate with both Lemmy and Mastodon, but I don’t like the interface.
Can you not do personal user instance blocks like you can in Lemmy as of v0.19.3 half a year ago? That would be an absolute deal breaker for me too. On Kbin.social though it was not an issue bc they were defederated at the instance level.
Kbin, please come back to me
I really want Kbin to succeed, but Ernest seems to see the project as something he checks on once every few months and then ignores, but he still seems to want to be the only one who gets to make decisions. I get that he has stuff going on in his life, but the solution to all these problem starts with communicating and working with the community, not disappearing for months at a time and refusing to work with the people who try to help him. You just can’t have a successful project with an approach like that.
Is it possible to see who is behind a mod action? I’ve figured something like world news on ml has some compromised fascist actors as mods but if it’s the main creator doing this then that’s crazy
There’s an instance level setting to hide moderator names from unauthenticated and/or non-mod users. They probably have that enabled. Those actions federate, though, so the mod names won’t be hidden if viewed from an instance that doesn’t hide the mod names.
programming.devhas a lot of communitiesIs there a way to search for/browse communities on a single instance?
I use https://lemmyverse.net/
You can search for all communities of all instances, or click in a specific instance.You can in Tesseract, but AFAIK, that’s the only UI that lets you browse remote instances. Otherwise, you gotta go to it directly, browse communities, and copy/paste the URL into your instance and search for it.
It should be noted that the (visibility of) community bans are a result of better enforcement of site bans in 0.19.4, which for now is implemented by sending out community bans for local communities when a user gets instance banned: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4464
Prior to this, when a user got instance banned from .ml, they were also implicitly banned from .ml communities, but this was only known to the instance they were banned on. As a result, users were still able to post, comment, and vote on those communities, but it would be visible only on that user’s instance, not federated anywhere else. Visibility of this ban was exclusively on the banning instance’s modlog.
Happy cakeday.
Shit, so it is (depending on tiemzone) lol Thanks!
It is actually tomorrow but there’s a bug that causes the cake symbol to appear a day early in the default UI, because 2024 is a leap year.
Ah, gotcha. Without doing the math, I assumed it was basing it on UTC or something.
Haha thank you for the info, I have been quite confused about this. At first I thought it was because it was already tomorrow in Australia, but then I checked a world clock and it wasn’t even close 😅
Rule 1: Crushing people with tanks is fine so long as it’s our side doing it.
Literal fucking tankies. I wonder if they will ever come to their senses. Oh well, it’s not as if there aren’t Nazi instances somewhere on fedi as well.
I’ve defended lemmy.ml in the past when people have blamed the entire instance for the actions of a solitary, overzealous moderator, but this genuinely concerns me:
This must have been action taken at the instance admin level, considering all those communities have different moderators.
Is there any way to probe the modlog to see which account it was?
I can’t see those, specifically, but a similar pattern of mass community bans after even remotely criticizing an authoritarian regime is completely on brand for Dessalines.
I don’t have record of the comment that triggered these, but when it’s something like civility, it’s usually just a comment removal and maybe a single community ban.
Gonna put this out there. Ended up in a thread on ML the other day. The poster/admin got a little unhinged, over 4 down votes. 4. Took to the admin panel to see who dared down vote him. Convinced he had been the victim of the tiniest not swarm ever.
It’s troubling behavior for anyone with power.
Lol, is that why they removed scores from the API? 😆
Downvotes are public on Lemmy fyi. There are interfaces that show who voted on a post or comment.
For admins, yes. I was pointing that out in the picture of the responses I posted. But not for General users.
Even regular users can see them through other federated services like kbin AFAIK. They show up under likes and dislikes.
You gotta admit, it’s very suspicious to be massively downvoted (25, not 4) over an inconspicuous comment that merely highlights a few paragraphs of the linked article.
I know I would also be wondering if there was a pattern in the origin of those downvotes.
I would imagine that if an admin is doing this the modlog could simply be faked, you wouldn’t be able to trust anything that the instance is reporting to the outside world.
Only admins can do site bans. What you’re seeing is a hacky/temporary feature of the upcoming Lemmy v19.4, of which lemmy.ml is running the pre-release: when an admin bans someone from the site (temp or otherwise), it also automatically bans them from any community they have ever participated in. Lemmy.ml has always been the “beta” instance for new releases.
This is actually more evidence that the Lemmy devs run a modified version of the code which gives them the ability to, eg do things like dole out mass community bans. There is also some evidence that they selectively federate the mod log as well. It all points to the obvious conclusion that these people can and will abuse their power in any way they can.
I’m pretty sure any admin could do that with their Lemmy server, couldn’t they?
Yes, an admin probably has access to community level moderation rights and the lemmy API is not difficult to figure out.
It would be trivial to come up with a script to go through the community page, get all the current communities and iterate through them banning a user in each of them.
I have had comments removed and could never see why. Now I just block their instances.
They roleplay as communist censors since that’s all they can afford to do from their positions.
They specifically obfuscate which mods take what actions so you can’t appeal or even defend.
Tbh, also harass a mod. People get quite worked out when being moderated, and being a mod is enough work without people chasing you to argue with you or straight up harass you, I suppose. At least, I can see plenty of good reasons to hide the moderator name.
Then have a mod box or something. What they currently do is, “Post removed. Reason. Rule 1.”
No details, no appeal, nada.
What does this have to do with showing mod log? Genuinely confused
If they act on a post or comment, there’s no way to ask why or see what their actual reasoning was. So it allows blanket censorship without a paper trail.
It does, but it’s an online forum, not an essential service, and easy to replace. On the other hand, being there with your name or nickname exposes you to harassment from those pissed at you for your decision.
I would say it’s an acceptable evil given the circumstances.
As a side note: asking why after a mod action is almost universally pointless. Moderating is free work and a level of subjectivity is implied. I think not having the ability to argue is infuriating but understandable.
My experience with them is you can’t even find the modlog if you look when they remove comments. I guess they don’t federate it and/or it only shows if you’re logged in?
Good incentives to block their instances.
To quote the reason why calling out mods by name is forbidden from a previous encounter I had with them: “removed for doxxing”
So yeah I think you’re giving them too much credit here
I am not sure I understood. You called some mod by name and they removed the comment? If that’s the case, I perfectly understand and agree with the decision tbh.
That said, this is a general argument, not referred to any particular mod. I think that many people get angry when their content is moderated and they might want to harass/argue/avenge against the mod who took that action.
You agree that tagging the username of a mod (wasn’t even one it was an admin) is doxxing? If so, you’re delusional.
Mod names are visible by default on my instance so if taking a look there and then mentioning the username you see there is doxxing good luck with the rest of your life. You can’t have a system where everyone can easily find out who performed a mod action and then claim you were “doxxed”
No sorry, you said name as in the person’s name, I did not understand “username”.
well in this particular case it wouldn’t have mattered, I used the username but the admin in question has their clear name set as the display name (which made the whole “doxxing” claim even funnier to me)
Removed by mod
Perfectly reasonable to ban someone from completely unrelated communities like mechanical keyboard and arch Linux? Come on. It’s not like they’re throwing out toxic terms or criticizing on a personal level. They’re questioning the way things are being modded. Those aren’t even attacks.
The criticism is warranted. They don’t even equally apply their own rules depending on context
Removed by mod
I think you have a very different definition of “perfectly reasonable” than most people.
People are naive if they think the .ml admins and devs don’t intend to keep their thumb on the Lemmy scale. More instances need to take this threat seriously and defederate from .ml, and possibly even fork the Lemmy repos for when the devs inevitably decide they want to start building quiet exploits into the code. There are serious cyber security implications here that people are sleeping on
I’ve been banned from .ml for being a ‘racist’ for being anti-Xi, despite the fact that I am Chinese, and pointed out my ethnicity as such in the discussion. I guess antisemitic Jews aren’t the only weird accusation getting thrown about nowadays.
I don’t think any of this is even real to them. The same way that a majority of the white-nationalist 4-channers are just roleplaying and losing themselves in the storylines, as a species we tend to do that, we just get lost in a narrative because it explains how we feel.
The tankies are doing the same exact thing. They’re not impacting policy, they’re not marching for anything, they’re not taken seriously and it’s just another in-club that has its own language and imagery and secret handshakes and a unifying message to rally behind (America bad!) and instead of turning that criticism into actionable plans for changing representation and making anything better, they put on WW2 Russian Tanker helmets and have erotic fantasies about a communist uprising that will never happen.
Children.
I got a ban for pointing out the nuclear strikes on Japan killed less than the conventional firebombing runs leading up to it, and if nukes wouldn’t have been used a shit ton more people would have died.
Like, no opinion on if what was morally right or not, just what the numbers worked out.
It’s all trolls over there, when a rational person makes a community, the admins start drama there and troll the mods till they leave or get kicked out for stupid shit.
I just blocked the whole instance. I never see any of their posts now, and as an unintended bonus I don’t even get notifications when their users reply to my comments.
Like, it would be best if we defederated from them and that hilariouschaos troll instance.
But I can just block them, works the same.
More people were killed in the firebombing.
The theory that more people would have died of the nukes weren’t dropped is FAR from settled fact. The Japanese were already looking to surrender and it’s not likely the bomb played a big part in that decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki?wprov=sfla1
Regardless it’s nothing to get banned over, that’s for sure.
Whether that alone is something to be banned over is probably context dependent, and I don’t have any faith that that instance had a good reason for it. Nevertheless that person holding up their great take about the nuclear bombs being good actually does not paint a great picture of them as a person. It makes them look like a reactionary US nationalist who wants to believe anything that makes their side the “good guys”. They can pretend it was morally neutral all they want, but morality is the only reason anybody argues something like that because it’s so nebulous the only way you get there is with motivated reasoning.
At any rate I wouldn’t put that on the pile of reasons to hate on the .ml instances, not when there are so many good reasons.
I honestly disagree that blocking works the same. Social media relies on a network effect, and if they keep being allowed to operate popular communities then they will have that network effect in their favour, and new users that don’t know any better will keep joining.
Defederation is an important tool to turn certain instances into pariahs for bad behaviour, and individual blocks don’t achieve that.
This is a lot of the problem with gen z, especially among the left. Everyone is quick to smash the block button, which in aggregate just makes everything worse for everyone else.
It’s not a generational problem, it’s a platform problem. It’s a disempowered person problem. Generations are mostly made up anyway.
Hitting the block button is fine to deal with harrassment, it just doesn’t solve the wider issue.
I think zoomers are far more prone to refusing to engage with things that make them uncomfortable than previous generations.
And just because something isn’t clear cut doesn’t make it imaginary. It’s a useful but fuzzy categorization.
Well I’d be fascinated to see how you arrive at that conclusion but until then I’m going to have to disagree on the basic principle that the generalisations people make about generations are usually pretty useless.
If you truly don’t see any difference between Boomers, Gen X, and Millenials then I think our views of reality are so wildly different we might not be able to have any sort of communication.
Explain?
When you block someone you cede the conversation to them. When lots of people block someone, fewer people push back against their bullshit. Because the people most able to push back against it no longer see it.
So you make them invisible to yourself, but not to others.
Like, no opinion on if what was morally right or not, just what the numbers worked out.
I don’t want to get in the merit of the comment, but unless you see the future, this statement is simply not true. Your argument is simply based on accepting certain assumptions as true.
Coincidentally this argument is routinely used by people supporting american atrocities, who consider nuking hundreds of thousands of people the humanitarian solution to WWII.
To be clear, I don’t agree with that line of moderation, I don’t agree with most of the views that seem to characterize .ml, but it’s a year that people make posts like this one, you can’t tell me you don’t understand the ban based on the above.
I suggest you learn about history before you form opinions on what happened
History is about what happened. “Otherwise it would” is speculation.
And even after the nuclear bombs, there was an attempted coup to stop surrender.
Prior to the bombs, there was no chance of surrender.
That is history.
And where is the count of deaths in the different timeline?
Look, my point is simple: human history is not deterministic and we simply can’t know what happens tomorrow like if we were predicting the laws of phisics. Maybe there were other 100 different course of actions leading to as many outcomes.
You can analyze what happened, but it’s foolish to say “this was better because the alternative would have led to”. You can only analyze and discuss what happened, otherwise anything can be justified with “it wouldn’t have been worse”.
“this genocide was good, because without it the oppressed population would have led to civil war and many more deaths”.
You think the nuclear bombs were a genocide?
Seriously, who “taught” you this stuff?
I am genuinely curious where people presented all of this stuff you’re saying as history.
Like, it’s almost like the only thing you know about civilian deaths in WW2 was American dropped nukes.
There’s sooooo much that you’re missing. But unless you dropped out of school at a very young age, I can’t be the first person that tries to explain this to you
So where are your opinions coming from?
Is this a thing where you learned everything you know about a subject from YouTube videos?
If so…
Why?
deleted by creator
the nuclear strikes on Japan killed less than the conventional firebombing runs leading up to it, and if nukes wouldn’t have been used a shit ton more people would have died.
That’s an absolutely disgusting thing to say. Japan was already surrendering, they were only nuked as a show of strength.
I’m not sure what you imply when you say that “a shit ton more people would have died”, but if you’re saying that the US should have napalm bombed an entire surrendering country just to make an example, I don’t think it makes your argument valid. It’s not ok to do something horrible, just because you could have done something even worse if you had wanted to.
Japan was already surrendering
Who told you something that ridiculous?
They weren’t already surrendering, ok. I’m not an expert but imo it could be argued that the Soviet Union joining the war (as they were about to) might have given Japanese command an excuse to surrender while saving face, or triggered an internal coup or something. They weren’t stupid, surely they could see the writing on the wall.
If you think there was anyway they’d have surrendered without nukes then yes, I will agree that you are “not an expert”.
For fucks sake, after the nukes there was still an attempted coup to prevent surrender…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
People thay think Japan surrendered because of loss of life, have no idea what they’re talking about about.
Japan surrendered because they thought America had more nukes, and if they kept fighting then Japan would be left uninhabitable for centuries due to atomic contamination.
The people who tried the coup, did so because they thought America didn’t have more nukes.
They weren’t stupid,
They weren’t, but honor was/is huge in their culture, and Japan was an empire for thousands of years.
They’d have fought to the last Japanese civilian was alive
They surrendered, and I know I’m repeating myself, because they thought their islands would be literally wiped off the face of the planet.
Anything less wouldn’t have won the war and cost more lives on both sides.
Even as a trolly problem, it’s not a tough call on if nukes saved lives.
If anyone would like more context about the kind of think they were posting:
Yep, the horror. I absolutely deserved an instance-wide ban for the terrible things I said.
I do love the amount of facts and proof that is been dug up and displayed in this post, many thanks to all those going to the effort!
I’ve been banned from .ml for being a ‘racist’ for being anti-Xi, despite the fact that I am Chinese, and pointed out my ethnicity as such in the discussion.
And I’ve been censored (not yet banned, but I guess it won’t take long till that as well) on lemmy.world (and beehaw) for spreading “misinformation” about Ukraine, despite being a Ukrainian and actually reading (and sharing) the local news of what’s actually happening there, contrary to the government propaganda.
You claim Zelensky is illegitimate and authoritarian for not holding elections in the middle of a fight for the country’s survival. The logic there is hilariously bad. Setting aside the absolute waste of resources, the last thing any country needs in such a scenario is for their leaders to start campaigning over who’s going to take control. It’s not the time and place for it. If you want to blame anybody, blame Russia
Right, so basically it’s okay for countries to be authoritarian, it’s okay to slaughter thousands of people and making everybody else live in constant fear, as long as the government aligns itself with the west.
Why would I blame Russia? It’s not Russia, it’s not Putin who is kidnapping people of the streets in Ukraine and sends them to die. It’s Zelensky’s regime.Very cool and humanitarian and obviously I don’t agree with that. But out of curiosity - can you please explain to me why is North Korea different?
It is also officially still in a state of a war with South Korea. Does it mean Kim Jong Un is suddenly also a hero that leads his country against the enemy? It doesn’t matter that people are trapped there, it doesn’t matter that people may not support him, all the atrocities committed by him do not matter as well, because they are in a war, am I right?Because South Korea is not actively trying to wipe out NK from existence, but actually the opposite is trying to reach out to NK and stabilise relations. ‘War’ is a hilarious way to describe their status. Way to strawman the argument.
but actually the opposite is trying to reach out to NK and stabilise relations
That’s just super fucking ironic, considering that Russia never stopped saying that they are open to negotiations (and the very first peace deal was actually they they go back to before-2022-invasion borders) and it is Zelensky who always refuses to negotiate and instead sends more Ukrainians to die.
Oh you mean the deal where they tried to make their seizure of Crimea legitimate?
Ok, this is reaching russian troll levels of disinformation. I think it’s clear enough to any 3rd parties just why you’re getting your comments deleted.
Oh you mean the deal where they tried to make their seizure of Crimea legitimate?
This has already happened, and is going to stay that way, whether you or I or anybody else likes it or not…
So it woudn’t have changed anything, except, you know, such a tiny little details as hundreds of thousands of lives.
Who kills the Ukranians that are being send to die?
Russia.
Now, I answered your question, would you please be so kind to answer mine now, which is also quite simple?
If there are two men, man A is simply operating a meat grinder while man B kidnaps people from the streets (soon he will start breaking into people’s homes as well), forcefully pushes them into the meat grinder, and watches to make sure they can’t get out of it, he also makes sure nobody leaves the city so that he can continue his game, who do you blame more for deaths of people in the meat grinder?
The man who operates the meat grinder? The man who started the business of shoving people into a grinder??? An everadvancing grinder? Jesus. At least get your metaphor right
The man who operates the meat grinder? The man who started the business of shoving people into a grinder???
Those are two different people though.
As others have said, the only option available currently is to leave the instance and re-create your beloved communities elsewhere. The Lemmy.ml Admins also happen to be the ones actively developing the Lemmy code base, and they’re not gonna change because they feel entitled to do whatever they want, and technically, they can because they run the instance.
My best advice is to move on from the instance.
As a marxist, I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism. And I don’t even understand how people can stay with “Stalin was not so bad”, knowing that he never planned to apply the last state of the Communist theory, and even if it did, massacre are not acceptable (sounds obvious), same applying with China and their open market.
In my country (France), Stalinism isn’t a thing, all communists are against what happend in USSR, and most are anti-china.as a communism sympathizing leftist, i hated these mods on reddit and i hate them here. the behavior is idiotic
The mods of the non-political subs need to move elsewhere, eventually after that the content will just be tankie bullshit and everyone can just defederate them.
Thanks for shedding light on this! I will do my part and no longer post in communities tied to lemmy.ml!
I think all instances need to defederate. This is totally inexcusable. We shouldn’t be attached and well connected to a CCP-controlled (influenced or directly) community. This is propaganda, pure and simple.
It’s not a problem to have dissenting opinions to widely held beliefs, but it is a problem to have those injected constantly into our streams while all opposition is silently erased and curated to artifically support state-sponsored CCP propaganda.
Sad to see. Feels like Lemmy has no bright future with people in charge of it thinking russia’s and China’s government is good and ban difference of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs.
Thanks for spreading the word. We get these complaints every few weeks. More people need to be educated and move away from these instances to make the Threadiverse a better place.
Lemmy.ml is a cancer on the Fediverse. If we want it to survive, we need to cut it off.
Not only do they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology, they often do it in such a way that it is untraceable by other mods. I’m not sure how they accomplish that, nor is the admin who messaged me letting me know that it was happening and he couldn’t figure out how. Anyways, my solution has been to completely block that instance, and delete my account there. If they want to exist in a little untruthful echo chamber, then so be it, but I don’t need to be a part of it. I recommend you do the same thing.
