Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There's a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we've had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, 'tankie-ism', etc. The subject of the admin's, and Lemmy dev's, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don't really engage with posts about international events, I don't share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond "Don't be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can", and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I'm also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
Hello! I'm a guy who decided to join lemmy a few months ago, specifically because I was absolutely enraged by how moderation on Reddit worked. I am also taking part rather vigorously in the conversation about how much I dislike .ml moderation practices! I think I might be a little bit of an agitator in all this, because In joined lemmy after about a medium bit of research, and then jumped into it full tilt with the idea of "why not, I spent so much time as a revolutionary, myself!" And then I hit whatever the internet/globalization has done to what I recognize as leftist political spaces.
AMA, I guess!
For some background about myself, I'm an older millennial, who grew up with disparate web forums which were generally hidden behind a random website. My favorite haunt was punkbands.com, and loved LAN parties and early MMORPGs. Anyways, I had to get off the internet for a while to make a living, but eventually got to a spot where I could again visit the world wide web during working hours. One of my coworkers introduced me, through my first "smart phone" (an android, like, whatever was around in 2011 and cheap as fuck but still let me get online) to reddit. I really loved that old(ish) school internet, where people could spam and insult eachother within limits, and the community policed itself through a somewhat democratic process. I was legit excited to join lemmy, given how far I think reddit had fallen and how much disinformation had infected it, and how similar it appeared to the older, more democratic internet of my youth.
However, I found that a large part of lemmy is dominated by people who profess to be leftists, but ambush you with ideological purity tests and subsequent abuse if you don't pass. I questioned a post on the .ml world news sub that came from a source that is literally a Syrian and Bolivian governmental news outlet, which alleged that the US military was stealing crude oil and raw wheat from Syrian oil derricks/Syrian farmers. I used mediabiasfactcheck.com to support my questioning of this source. I also appealed to logic, questioning why the US would steal things that it exports. A mod there (I believe the username is davos) engaged me in a conversation spanning hours, where we exchanged information about whether mediabiasfactcheck.com was a reasonable source to help assess the validity of media. While the conversation was uncomfortable, we each exchanged information and links supporting our arguments. Because I did not accept his outright rejection of medibiasfactcheck.com as a way to assist with the judement of media, I was banned and all of my comments were deleted.
Since then, I have met another .ml mod (username yogthos), and engaged in a long conversation about this same topic (.ml censorship). It was in a meta sub, hosted on the .ml instance. The conversation I am referring to has since been deleted, and I am not sure if it is possible to find it again, since my own history has disappeared; I will be happy to answer questions of anybody with the tech savvy to retrieve these exchanges. Anyway. In this meta thread, I engaged several users about the issue of unfair .ml moderation, alongside several other lemmy users. During the course of this exchange, a .ml user made an assertion that the OP (who was complaining about the "tankie problem") was banned from the .ml instance because they had, somewhere undefined, insisted that the Tienanmen Massacre had actually happened. As a note, please understand that this was about a week before the start of June, and nobody so far in this thread had mentioned Tienanmen Square. Anywhere. Anyways, I questioned this particular statement, and yogthos suddenly butted in with a ton of weird sources that supported his claim that Tiennenma Square never happened. They insisted that the whole thing was a Color Revolution that was sponsored by the CIA, and that actually the students of the Tienanmen Square had attacked the Chinese Soldiers. I insisted that this was inconsistent with prevailing evidence, but was told that I simply needed to watch the various videos and read the blogs to understand that it was all untrue. I also engaged with some uders about my own ideology, where I was insulted as a "lib" for stating my intense distaste for authoritarianism. yogthos, the .ml moderator who I spoke with, told me that "libs don't understand" that authoritarianism is ok if it is in defense of fascism... but did not expound as to how fascism was defined.
As for my evidence, I have shared it in some of the other posts. However, if you'll look at the moderation history of .ml, under my user name, you will see that I am banned from several subs, and I think from the whole .ml instance. It will be for "Rule 4," which from what I can tell is spam, or advertising. I have never taken part in anything that resembles spam or advertising. I have, though, had comments that insist that there was some kind of violence surrounding Tienanmen Square, or debate the validity of news from Syrian government media sources, removed from .ml instances. You may also notice that I was banned from subs like palestine and usa, which I have never actually participated in, aside from upvoting or downvoting.
You will also, looking back, hopefully find the initial conversations I reference in this post. If you have specific questions, I will try to figure out how to find them, using the mod log.
This is a long post... and I'm sorry. I guess I just really don't want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.
I'm sure I have missed a ton here, and paradoxically written far too much. I am happy to answer any questions or critique, as long as it is relatively polite and relevant.
Edit: I'm also just kind of a nerd about propaganda and discourse in international relations, especially in online spaces. I've studied it. Ive written papers on it. I find these things incredibly meaningful and important, so I've gotten involved here.
I don't mean to instigate an argument, but I think this comment illustrates pretty well why .ml might actually be justified in judicious use of the ban hammer. If people are coming in specifically motivated by an ideological disagreement, then maybe they're well within their right (ethically I mean, they're within their right just on the basis of owning the instance as it is)
But the person you replied to wasn't talking about ideological disagreements - they were talking about factual disagreements.
As in, the .ml mods seem to deny facts.
Yes I'm sure OP was having a very rational conversation about widely accepted and not at all contested facts that are not at all important to any ideological perspective.
The Tiananmen square massacre is not a contested fact. It's just a fact.
Yes, a famously uncontested fact
And I am sure that fact was brought up completely organically and not specifically because op knew it was a source of ideological tension
Truth isn't an ideology though. You keep trying to draw a false equivalence between the two. Truth is just truth. Ignoring the truth is simply acting in bad faith, and that's something any ideology can do for any truths. If a group is denying that truth then they are trying to spread misinformation.
I'm not making a statement about the truthfulness of the specific claims being raised, i'm just pointing out that the topic is very famously contentious, and going to that space specifically to raise it knowing full well it is not a welcome one is itself bad-faith trolling and deserving of removal and possibly a ban, depending on how hostile you're being.
It isn't your space where you can decide what topics are fair game, and frankly whining about it here isn't going to change anything about their moderation policies.
Seems to me you're just skirting around the fact that there's a group that specifically against the truth.
Not only that, but now you're saying a group has the right to pretend that a fact is not a fact, and they did he allowed to have a space where they can push lies without repercussions.
But even ignoring all that, moderation where you get banned and censored from communities unrelated to the where you post a fact is just acting in bad faith. It's no longer moderation as you state, it's actual censorship.
I'm not skirting around anything, I'm just pointing to the problem. If someone walked into a LGBTQ forum and started harassing users about male and famale biology phenotypes, they'd be within their right to ban that person. It doesn't matter if what they were saying was factually correct or not if the reason they're there is to harass them along an ideological fault-line, especially if they're instigating that topic themselves to begin with.
It's their space, they're allowed to keep certain charged topics out of it, even if you disagree with them or if you feel like they're trying to censor what you consider to be factually accurate. You can talk about that topic anywhere else you want, they can't censor you in your own space.
Honestly I think they're not being strict enough, if it were me i'd be taking notes on everyone here affirming their intention to push this topic in my space and just preemptively ban them.
Username checks out
PS: it's not considered factually accurate. It is.
"I don't have any defense for my behavior, LOL nice username"
PS: idk what fact you're specifically talking about, nor do I think it's particularly relevant to the question
You don't get 2 things.
you already admitted you don't care for the truth. Therefore, it's not possible to have a civil discussion with you, because you're someone that doesn't accept facts, because you'll always invent some fantasy that's convenient to you for the argument.
People like you are indeed allowed to live in your censored fantasy instance. But there's no rain other instances need to tolerate your fantasy world, let alone allow members into instances that do fairly moderate, accept the truth, and don't try to force their fantasy unto others (which is inherently what happens when one side accepts reality and the other denies it + censors reality).
Therefore, there's no point in continuing this discussion, "comrade".
You're free to block me if you find my criticisms objectionable.