I read that as librarians and was very confused.

People have choices. If they want to keep using the Lemmy.ml community, that’s their freedom. The alternatives exist, if they want to switch, they can.

Because network effect is a thing, it’s really the illusion of choice. When a lemmy.ml community has 50k subscribers and the equivalent lemmy.world or programming.dev community has just a tenth of that, it’s not really a choice. People will always gravitate towards ml and the smaller community will never gain critical mass unless some strong enough outside force influences that decision.

Which brings me to …

Intrigued by your name change, you are really pushing for this.

I think defederation from lemmy.ml together with raising awareness about ml should be the outside force to move communities off lemmy.ml.

The way that I see it, the issue with lemmy ml’s administration and moderation is not quite political in origin. It’s about transparency

Well it’s really both. The issue is the combination of a number of factors which on their own would be fairly easy to deal with, but put together they are very problematic:

1. The admins are political extremists
2. lemmy.ml has a very prominent position in the lemmyverse, because they were first and got a headstart
3. The admins are actively using their position to heavily police discussion according to their extremist political views. The fact that they’re not being transparent about it is aggravating, but not the root problem.

This prominent position of lemmy.ml is the fundamental difference with the hexbear or lemmygrad situation. Those instances can easily be contained at the user level: most people can just block and ignore them entirely because nothing interesting happens on those instances for non-extremists. Not so with lemmy.ml, which hosts a number of large bona-fide communities.

So I think it’s necessary to make a concerted effort to reduce lemmy.ml’s prominence in the fediverse, so that political extremists can’t put their thumb on the scale to nudge discussion in a certain direction. Part of that effort is raising awareness about lemmy.ml’s nature, which is what this PSA does, but that likely won’t be enough due to network effect. It will take more to get people to move their communities to other instances. If other large instances, like lemmy.world, would block lemmy.ml that would provide a real stimulus for a large amount of people to move away from lemmy.ml.

With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to “use lemmy.world instead”. I don’t have anything against LW’s administration, but I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further

I agree that spreading out more would be desirable, but on the other hand “just use lemmy.world instead of lemmy.ml” is a very simple and practical suggestion to move away from ml.

Hmm, on one of the KDE plasma updates, my wallpaper did change to their infamous teletubby wallpaper. Mind you, I was still using the default wallpaper at that time, and this was their new default wallpaper, so that’s probably why.

When presented with a choice, people usually pick the community that is the most active and already has the most subs.

But I am definitely giving it a shot.

Hey I applaud your effort, yesterday the top post was several days old and top day was empty on one of the subs, so this is already better.

I’m a bit skeptical if that will be enough though. Active discussion is the meat and the potatoes for me when I go to a tech community, and for that you need more subscribers.

I think the problem is not so much that “communities don’t exist”, but that they are far less popular and active than the lemmy.ml ones, and when presented with a choice new users will typically choose the community that is more active and has the most subs. You can’t simply solve that by creating another community on another instance. A concerted effort would be needed to get people to move and to get them to pick the alternative community over the lemmy.ml one. Raising awareness and defederation by bigger instances (like lemmy.world) would help immensely.

For me the big ones are !linux@lemmy.ml and !programmerhumor@lemmy.ml btw, which do exist elsewhere but the alternatives are stale.

This is the best solution - the answers are in our hands

There is the problem of network effect though. People who frequent communities on lemmy.ml are often blissfully unaware of how problematic that instance is, like I was until a few days ago, and so they’re unlikely to just move as they have no immediate reason to.

It’s easy to say just pack up and move … but I’ve been really struggling to find an alternative for !linux@lemmy.ml, to name one example. The equivalent communities !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@programming.dev are rather stale with days old posts without comments.

So I think it’s not just something an individual user can solve for themselves, and I think that the larger instances also have a role to play here. If they would defederate from lemmy.ml, it would urge users along to move away from lemmy.ml communities towards communities on other, more suitable instances.

Next to that, we should also spread awareness about the lemmy.ml problem, and that was my intent when I originally made this post.

Like “how dare you actually show the atrocities my Chinese overlords committed in a way that can’t be denied” ?

I told them something like: “The modlog of this community is ridiculous” and posted the same screenshot of the modlog that I posted on my thread on !fediverse@lemmy.world. Forgive me if I’m paraphrasing, because my exact comment is gone.

let’s pretend lemmy was heavily conservative instead of liberal making this exact post.

I think you misunderstand the issue, so as you mentioned conservative, let’s illustrate it with an analogy.

The situation with lemmy.ml right now, and apologies for the reddit analogy, is the equivalent if on reddit the batshit crazy mods of formerly /r/the_donald or /r/conservative could ban you from /r/linux because you said something bad about Trump on /r/memes. At that point it’s not about dissenting opinions, it’s about them wielding power they shouldn’t have over those dissenting people.

An instance that operates like that shouldn’t be part of mainstream lemmy and host general purpose communities. The only way to take that power from them is to shun them, i.e. defederate.

It’s not defederating on the basis of political opinion. It’s defederating on the basis of extreme intolerance towards and censorship of people who have different, non-fringe opinions that aren’t even controversial in most parts of the world.

Right now, the instance hosts a lot of let’s say mainstream, non-political communities, purely because lemmy.ml was the first instance and so “popular” by default. The way the mods over there behave, it’s clear that they’re not suited to be a mainstream instance for these communities. Unfortunately due to network effect, people won’t just move.

The only way to dislodge these communities and move them to more neutral instances is if larger instances like lemmy.world start defederating lemmy.ml.

You can still see that your comment has been removed, but you can’t see the biased mass removals of content, like mass purging all China critical comments from a post, unless you’re quick enough to screenshot the modlog.

I believe some guy got banned from all .ml communities for posting things .ml didnt like about tianamin square.

That was me, yes.

No they don’t. I received a two week ban in the wake of the API protests, never got an explanation why or what comment triggered it.

The problem is more that they’re holding several large bona fide communities hostage this way. For example !linux@lemmy.ml is by far the most active Linux community on Lemmy, and because of network effect it’s not easy to get people to move to another instance.

It would take something huge to get people to move, for example some of the larger instances like lemmy.world defederating lemmy.ml.

Yeah the modlog is where you can normally see them. Mind you they seem to selectively purge the modlog too, presumably to hide their obvious censorship bias.

I didn’t react to any of the “but the West also…” comments. I replied directly to the top level of the post, linking to an article that goes in depth on what actually happened as most people in the West nowadays only know about the iconic tank man image.

Living in the bubble of “CCP did nothing wrong (and we will ban you from all your favorite communities if you dare to disagree)” isn’t exactly a great alternative.

So it seems they do indeed clean up the modlog… my bans are still in there, but all mod actions where they removed China critical comments are no longer there.