cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531
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/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 hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
I wonder how many good, reasonable people have checked out Lemmy and seen all the CCP/Kremlin propaganda then just left.
I was close to leaving. At first I’d been given the impression that “liberal” is a dirty word on Lemmy. It helps that PSAs like this one routinely appear on other instances to inform newcomers. Just keep spreading the knowledge and let it be known that everybody should block those communities.
same, that was a weird first impression.
I’ve been here since the app exodus and see way more posts complaining about tankies than actual tankie unpleasantness in the popular and top posts. I think most people just looking at the popular posts would not come across any more unpleasantness than they’d see on reddit
I browse ‘all’ quite a bit, a few times a day, and I have had the same experience as you. I see more posts complaining about “.ml/tankies/etc” than I ever see problematic/whatever posts from them.
You’re both on .world, which isn’t federated with hexbear, which is the most annoying instance. They’ll brigade other communities, for example the recent thread over at https://jlai.lu/post/11504685 (view it from that instance to see the hexbear comments)
I browse all sometimes from an instance federated with hexbear and I roll my eyes quite a bit whenever I do
Lemmy.world has like 80% of the lemmy fediverse or something like that, so this I’d a problem not thag many people are actually going to run into realistically.
I mean, lead them to instances that defederate hexbear for starters? Seems reasonable anyway.
I don’t tell anyone I use this site in case they come across that stuff first. I just say I use a site “similar to Reddit”. I’m surprised that they don’t ask me the name but most of my friends don’t spend so much time online.
Same, I haven’t told a soul I use it despite being active here over a year. I still believe in it though (or just really hate the idea of accepting corporate social media).