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.

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

(1) shoutout to the community at !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca for helping guide people into things like how to make a functioning link to communities and users, and I posted something there myself mentioning a variety of ways to curate someone's experiences, e.g. to block extremist content. I would share a link to that here... except links to posts are not fully functional on the Fediverse, since they take you off of your home instance and require jumping through hoops to avoid that. Also, if that community does not show up for you, like if visiting that link it looks empty, then subscribe to it and wait about a day. The Fediverse is not so easy to use as people keep saying it is...

Though ironically, as you said, what's the point when nobody even knows of that community's existence. Worse yet, a lot of "guides" pointed to in the sidebar of a large number of instances either have next to no information, or at most only a single years-old post with a ton of comments like "thanks" and "^THIS" that you cannot easily get past b/c of how the Lemmy web UI makes you load only a portion before making you go to the bottom and load another, and another, and another, and another... almost none of which have anything useful to add, and yet the instance admins (which people like Blaze and I have specifically told) choose not to point to a "community", and instead leave those years-old links to posts. Speaking of, and funny enough, in the case of lemmy.ml go to the sidebar and click the "What is Lemmy.ml" - the result is hilariously on-brand!:-P

(2) measuring community engagement stats can be tricky - for one thing, the numbers when viewed from an external instance are often wrong, but going to the home instance and looking in the sidebar iirc offers the true values. Also, "subscribed" means next to nothing, and instead active users per month (AMU) is where it's at. With that in mind then:

linux@lemmy.ml has 2.23k AMUs
linux@lemmy.world has 1.39k AMUs
after that it drops precipitously, e.g. linux@sh.itjust.works has just 36 AMUs

Still, linux@lemmy.world is not nothing, with 39% of these users - a lower-bound estimate since many people are likely subscribed to both.

(3) And Linux@lemmy.ml is the #3 community on that instance. The large majority of the other communities - asklemmy, memes, news, privacy, technology, etc. - all have counterparts on other instances.

One counterexample that is pretty bad is firefox, with lemmy.ml vs. lemmy.world having 3.82k vs. 0.72 AMUs, respectively.

So, do whatever you want, but it is what it is. Personally I've user-blocked lemmy.ml b/c... well, you can see it yourself from the replies to your post here, it's just not worth the hassle of having to receive such in my feed (though sadly, user-blocking seems to make extraordinarily little difference compared to not doing such). All I can suggest is that while it may not be "easy", we can each of us be a part of the change that we want to see in the world. Find, subscribe to, and POST on communities that you would like to see grow.

[–] Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I censored them. All of them.

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[–] doctortran@lemm.ee 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I feel like I've been saying it from the beginning, but for all of the problems Reddit has that Lemmy ostensibly solves, it opens the door for far worse moderation problems than Reddit had.

We can shit talk Reddit admins all night and day, but their long-standing and often problematic insistence on neutrality was nevertheless beneficial for the site's growth.

And I think one of the fundamental problems with Lemmy is that too many of the people in charge of various instances don't have a similar philosophy. They want to choke the place, and curate it to their exact specifications, for their own individual reasons.

Which would be fine in a vacuum. But in a federated space, what is done on one instance can have a wide ranging effect on the visibility of content outside of that instance. And as op rightfully points out, because communities are locked to an individual instance, the nature of federation doesn't help users escape overbearing moderation when the only true sizable communities for a thing happen to be on a specific instance.

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[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (97 children)

All instances, except for the lightly moderated ones, have censorship issues from time to time. You can say one thing on one thread, and that same thing can get you banned in another thread on the same instance. This is an issue with the great degree of political polarization on Lemmy.

My point is that Lemmy is multipolar. It’s divided between the right-leaning instances like Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, the left-leaning instances like Lemmy.ml, slrpnk.net, blahaj.zone, and dbzer0, and the leftist instances like Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. Mods and admins on each instance are guilty of maintaining the “instance line.”

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.

While I won't repeat what got me banned, this is what got me banned from Political Memes on Lemmy.world, this isn't just a Lemmy.ml thing. This is also when one of the moderators claimed they weren't censoring anyone and were incredibly fair on a comment chain calling out their censorship, and refused to elaborate. They would not even tell me how I could edit my comments to comply with their rules.

What does this all mean?

Honestly, I think close to everyone knows that Marxists dominate Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad.ml, Hexbear.net, etc. I think close to everyone knows Liberals dominate Lemmy.world. I think everyone knows that anarchists dominate dbzer0, slrpnk.net, Hexbear.net, etc.

If your call to action is to defederate Lemmy.ml, then that's just contributing to this polarization effect, as people would jump ship from .world and .ml to the other if it fits their views better. If your call to action is that people should move communities from Lemmy.ml to other instances, this has already happened a bit, this thread gets reposted very frequently. All it really seems to me is that you're spreading drama.

What do I recommend?

Rather than trying to consolidate communities across instances, replicate communities as needed. Communities on Lemmy are more like hashtags for an instance, and instances are more like subreddits of old. Instances have their own cultures and values, so a Gaming thread on Hexbear, for example, is going to be different from a Lemmy.world Gaming thread, and that's a good thing. All sorting can still let you see other instances, there's no need to risk moderator dominance over communities by trying to consolidate on a single instance. Heck, this community is an example of that very process.

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