While you certainly are free to not care about lemmy.ml mods blocking users from unrelated communities for criticizing China or Russia anywhere on the fediverse, which effectively silences lemmy.world users, there are currently 1,019 upvotes vs. 92 downvotes on the “Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem” post, which suggests that most lemmy.world users who are aware of the issue do care.

Nobody is claiming to be trying to change the minds of lemmy.ml mods. We just don’t want to have to worry about whether posting something mildly negative about China or Russia on a post anywhere on the fediverse that somehow catches the attention of lemmy.ml mods will cause us to lose the ability to participate in a community such as !linux@lemmy.ml.

Condoning this censorship from lemmy.ml corrupts the “marketplace of ideas” because it distorts the discourse visible on lemmy.world to favor the political preferences of lemmy.ml’s mods. This affects every lemmy.world user, whether they block lemmy.ml or not, because there is no way to opt out of the chilling effects other than defederation.

The political content published in lemmy.ml isn’t the main problem, it’s the fact that lemmy.ml moderators are banning users from general interest communities, including non-political communities, when they criticize China or Russia elsewhere. This happens not only when the criticism is posted within a lemmy.ml community, but also when the criticism is posted outside of lemmy.ml.

The behavior of these lemmy.ml mods corrupts the “marketplace of ideas” that you’re describing. lemmy.world should not present or promote general interest communities that only allow users to participate if they avoid making comments critical of China or Russia on the fediverse. This kind of bad moderation creates a chilling effect.

It is lemmy.ml’s fault that their moderators have been blocking users who criticize China or Russia from unrelated communities like the Linux one. A user’s ability to participate in a Linux community should not depend on them refraining from posting criticism about China or Russia. Defederation protects lemmy.world users from having to self-censor themselves politically to participate in general interest communities.

I see more than enough justification to defederate. Being banned from every lemmy.ml community such as the Linux community because you dared to make a critical comment about China or Russia in another lemmy.ml community is ridiculous and unacceptable.

lemmy.world should only support communities with reasonable moderation policies that do not punish users for merely contradicting a lemmy.ml moderator’s political stance.

lemmy.ml has changed their level of transparency about their political leanings twice. Look at the history of their home page description:

April 2021 to June 2021:

The flagship instance of lemmy.

June 2021 to November 2022:

A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers

November 2022 to now:

A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers

Nobody is saying that there should be no moderation at all. What we are saying is that lemmy.ml moderators tend to remove users and content that are seen as even mildly critical of China, Russia, or Marxism-Leninism, and then sometimes hide the evidence of the removals from the modlog. That’s not acceptable to many people, including me.

I know that and that’s why I said .ml could stand for the country of Mali. However, the .ml in lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml clearly stands for Marxism-Leninism, not Mali, the same way the .tv domain suffix often stands for television, not Tuvalu.

.ml = Marxism-Leninism

This wasn’t obvious to me because ML could also mean the country of Mali or machine learning, but based on their content and moderation patterns, it’s unmistakable that the “.ml” in Lemmy instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml stands for Marxism-Leninism.

Hope that clears things up.