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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Shit like this makes people go back to reddit. At least there’s more content and getting banned from one million user subreddit doesn’t stop you from going to another big sub. Here, if you get banned in one or two of the big instances you have to become a lurker. I take pride in being able to disagree with the dominant opinion in a reasonable way, but these .ml mods are unreasonable.
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.
Did that months ago; defederated completely when they turned into Lemmygrad-lite. At first I missed some more active FOSS communities, but since then, others on different instances have become more active.
programming.devhas a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on.mlso maybe check out what they’ve got.If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else, nurture it, and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about
.ml, and you probably won’t be the last.Related: I genuinely feel that
mlbeing the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.Edit: Oh yeah. Didn’t recognize your username at first, but I was looking at the modlog the other day from my LW account, and saw a bunch of individual community bans from Dessalines and wondered what was up. Figured it was something exactly like this, and it was. Thanks for sharing.
I think all instances need to defederate. This is totally inexcusable. We shouldn’t be attached and well connected to a CCP-controlled (influenced or directly) community. This is propaganda, pure and simple.
It’s not a problem to have dissenting opinions to widely held beliefs, but it is a problem to have those injected constantly into our streams while all opposition is silently erased and curated to artifically support state-sponsored CCP propaganda.
As a marxist, I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism. And I don’t even understand how people can stay with “Stalin was not so bad”, knowing that he never planned to apply the last state of the Communist theory, and even if it did, massacre are not acceptable (sounds obvious), same applying with China and their open market.
In my country (France), Stalinism isn’t a thing, all communists are against what happend in USSR, and most are anti-china.I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism.
It’s because tankies are just contrarians that use communist ideology as a vehicle to be anti-west / anti-United States (anti-liberal democracy). Tankies will defend any cause or ideology that is against ‘the west’ even if that means happily ignoring the blatant homophobic, genocidal and repressive authoritarianism.
And capitalist regimes. The Russian Federation was literally founded by a betrayal of a reformist movement in the USSR, and China consulted with Milton Goddamn Friedman on their economy, ending up with billionaires. I even saw .ml users crying about Russian *oligarchs" having their assets seized (“stolen,” as they said), and unironically citing Matt Taibbi. Not even “back in the day” Taibbi, but literally The Twitter Files. Using bought & paid for corporate propaganda to make their point.
They’re just campists. I don’t want to run afoul of a “No True Scotsman” situation, but fuck, for people who seem to think they’re the Only True Socialists, they’re willing to drop socialism in an instant if it means they can be edgy dickheads on the internet.
That describes them well imo
wow this is literally them
It’s called second campism, and it’s been happening for a long time, it just used to make more sense when it could actually seem like there was two hegemonic camps during the cold war (still an oversimplistic view).
Now they just support any regime that’s anti-US/the original capitalist camp because they have no hegemonic camp of their own to support, just a broad smattering of authoritarian regimes with completely different ideologies.
As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.
The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.
Tankies warming up to call you and Lemmy.World fascists in 3, 2, 1…
Whenever this topic comes up, I find myself wondering what these folks do all day. Not in a Boomer “don’t these people have jobs?!?” way, but more … what is it like to be them? Do they just sit in front of the computer looking for conversations to disrupt? What is their daily existence? Because I find their volume and dedication to what they do fascinating. Cancerous and absurd, but also fascinating.
This was my experience. My first interaction was me asking a question in good faith. I was then attacked en masse and banned. When I asked about it, I was told how I was a terrible person for not already knowing and believing what they do.
Keeping in mind that “knowing and believing what they do” is itself a perilous notion because one of them might be a “Post-Madrid 1933 purple throated” Marxist while another might be a “Modernist new path” Marxist (I made those terms up). I mean I know “lol factions” is an old discussion with the farthest left, but they can’t even agree with each other.
Honestly once you sort of realize that you can’t be on the left and also support authoritarianism/fascism (regardless of the label or intent) the factionalism kind of isn’t as troublesome or confusing.
You end up with those who believe in supporting progress informed by rational, current understanding of reality and then you have those who cling to failed ideas the same way conservatives do.
The left can debate solutions and data reasonably without splitting into contradicting camps, people just need to always check and see if they’re actually oriented towards the defining principles of left wing politics; bolstering human rights and well being, strengthening democratic institutions and outcomes using the most current understanding of the world we have available to us right now.
The left, by definition, flexes and adapts to reality to achieve an outcome, conservativism is when people try to bend reality to fit their ideology.
My wife and I have a saying we find ourselves using far, FAR too often: “Conservatism lurks in the most unexpected places…”
This is their job. They get half a yuan (wumao) per post.
I really want to understand their relationship with the CCP.
Do they genuinely believe the shit they’re peddling or are they paid propagandists or is their something more nefarious afoot.
They get half a yuan per post. Not sure what the rate is on banning or deleting comments.
i’ve seen you say this more than once. do you have a source?
This is what’s being referred to:
Do they genuinely believe the shit they’re peddling or are they paid propagandists or is their something more nefarious afoot.
From my interactions, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re mostly seriously broken people who’ve discovered Marx, convinced themselves that capitalism is the cause of all suffering and believe socialism is the solution that will free them from their trauma. The degree of their attachment to socialism is a reflection of the degree of their suffering and brokenness.
If they weren’t so toxic, they’d be deserving of compassion and forebearance.
I mean… that description quite accurately describes me. I’m a broken person who has become convinced capitalism is a major source of strife in today’s world, and have come to believe in socialism as the answer.
However… that hasn’t led me to champion authoritarian states that repress people. There must be a little something extra thrown in there. My guess would be an unacknowledged desire to replace their oppressors.
This reminds me, I wrote something on the subject once:
When you’re privileged, and never had to fight for anything in life, you probably won’t even recognise it when you see it happen right in front of you. In fact, you might even write it off as baseless antagonism, a thoughtless disruption of peace, and side with the oppressors.
“What do you mean he didn’t pay you? He’s an honourable man! He pays me, every friday, on the dot! You must be lying.”
Even more insidiously, though, is the fact that, even if you do suffer and fight your whole life, you still may not see it as oppression. You may even begin to think it the natural order of things, even begin to value and love the suffering, as a trial that proves your worth in life, internalising the values of your oppressors, until even the thought of a better life becomes not only fantasy, but dangerous sacrilege.
“He didn’t pay you? Of course he didn’t pay you. Welcome to life. Pay? You want a blowjob with that, too? Get real.”
And with this internalisation of your oppressors’ values, this adoption of their mindset, and the unquestioning acceptance of the status quo in its current form, once enough does eventually become enough, and you finally get it into your head that things can change, the inevitable form of that change becomes a mirror image: yourself in the throne of oppressor, cracking the whip not only upon your former master, but also upon your former comrades (now, as ever, seen only as competition) for the simple reason that the throne exists, and must be filled, for why else should it exist, other than to seat a whipcracker?
“There’s no law telling him to pay you, why are you even surprised? You expect him to do it out of the goodness of his heart? Of course not. And when I’m on top, I won’t pay you either.”
It is an interesting question because even China doesn’t believe in the disinformation they spread. It’s just a tactic
Yes.
I’m all for defederating from tankie instances. They suck.
The thing is, the Fediverse, link the original concept of the Internet is flexible and can survive losing nodes - it just routes around and issue. If there are problems it can mutate and survive.
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 the best solution - the answers are in our hands. Communities only thrive because the users are.posting and interacting on it. If the Mod goes inactive or an instances goes down, we can switch to a new community. That then gains the momentum and goes on to thrive. It’s survival of the fittest and why having more than one community on a topic (especially big topics) is a feature not a bug because it gives the network flexibility and resilience.
So if there’s an issue with lemmy.ml, boycott it - unsubscribe, give the other communities on more agreeable instances your time and they will grow and prosper. If there isn’t a relevant alternative start one.
Lemmy prevails.
I am one of the removed comments and just found out about it here. Does the Lemmy standard really not send direct messages to users when one of their messages was removed? If it was an actual Rule 1 violation (which of course, it wasn’t) I’d like to know.
You just made me realize that I have been banned from some of the communities over there while never having posted on them, mods are reading conversations in other communities and preemptively banning people…
I’ve defended lemmy.ml in the past when people have blamed the entire instance for the actions of a solitary, overzealous moderator, but this genuinely concerns me:
This must have been action taken at the instance admin level, considering all those communities have different moderators.
Is there any way to probe the modlog to see which account it was?
Tankies are modding many communities here as well. The solution is to fight them tooth and nail.
I am surprised that my comments on that post weren’t removed.
It is pretty horrifying that there are people in positions of moderating what thoughts are allowed to propagate who deny or cover up the events that took place in Tienanmen Square.
Rule 1: Crushing people with tanks is fine so long as it’s our side doing it.
Literal fucking tankies. I wonder if they will ever come to their senses. Oh well, it’s not as if there aren’t Nazi instances somewhere on fedi as well.
Tankies gonna tank. Just block their shit instance and move on with your life.
