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.

  • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
    50·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      6 months ago

      Saying anything negative about China is a violation of rule 1 on lemmy.ml from the admins perspective. They classify anything critical that gains any attention as Sinophobia and file it under bigotry.

      • Lianodel@ttrpg.networkEnglish
        14·
        6 months ago

        It honestly reminds me of fascists saying that harsh criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. It’s a dishonest rhetorical game.

    • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
      81·
      6 months ago

      There is no “lemmy standard”. There is ActivityPub though. Lemmy could maybe implement something to send an ActivityPub message when something is removed but this has not been done yet. I think there is an issue for it on GitHub though?

    • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      103·
      6 months ago

      Mods will never tell you that you’ve been moderated.

      Mods are generally fieflords exercising their mediocre powers for kicks. It wouldn’t be much fun if they had to have a discussion with all of the poors about why they’ve been censored.

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
        101·
        6 months ago

        Not all mods are like that, for the record. I’d even say it’s the minority of mods that are like that (at least on the Fediverse - on reddit, I’m not so sure).

          • Zeroxxx@lemmy.idEnglish
            22·
            6 months ago

            Yep. When the power shifts to user (as opposed to Reddit’s corp power) it gives more freedom for abuse since there’s no longer centralized control

            Power trip is one of the biggest issue – ‘THIS IS MY INSTANCE NOW BEGONE YOU INFIDELS!’

            • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              21·
              6 months ago

              And that’s an issue with the instance system, losing access to tons of communities you have no problem in because you happened to piss off the instance’s admin in a community they frequent? That’s completely ridiculous.