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.
this is why you fediblock lemmy ml and h*xbear
Yeah, but for example !linux@lemmy.ml is the only reasonably active community on Linux, and one of the communities I frequent the most.
!linux@lemmy.world seems ok, I guess if any people move to it it will become even more active
!linux@programming.dev could probably be a nice one too if people want to avoid hypercentralization on LW
If enough people block it and move on to another instance it won't be a problem.
And lemmygrad.ml too, though most instances seem to do that by default now (yours has, as well as hexbear.net too:-).
So just so I know, if I took your advice and blocked lemmy.ml, does that mean I'm also blocking comments from all lemmy.ml users on communities on other instances?
In my version of software I still see lemmy.ml comments even though I've blocked the instance.
They're clearly malicious, they should be defederated.
I don't think that's the case. The v0.19.0 release notes say:
I use lemmy.cafe now because it has defederated with lemmy.ml.
As a lemmy.cafe user, I don't see any post/comment from lemmy.ml users at all.
I did this, worth it.
I think we all have to remember that decentralization should also come from ourselves.
Yup, I haven't seen one of them in weeks ever since one of their mods deleted a post of mine for supposedly being racist. Apparently, they can see what you write, but you won't see their comments.