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 [http://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 [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 [https://lemmy.ml/modlog] of the instance looks like: [https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/6886b092-43d3-408b-ab57-2fa686f8a6c7.png] 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 [http://lemmy.ml] that I had ever participated in. Proof: [https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/9c52e470-645f-46ba-ac1d-0b7d8be17af3.png] 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 [http://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/[email protected] [/c/[email protected]] 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 [http://lemmy.ml] hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

Everything I hate is now tankie. We must stop this by getting them to censor what we think is tankie

    • MaeBorowski [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      5 months ago

      Yeah, using that link, you’re viewing lemmy.world’s fediverse comm but you’re viewing it from the feddit.nl instance. From lemmy.world itself, the link to that comm would be https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse. The post we’re talking about is visible from those places, as it should be. If hexbear were federated with .world, the link for us would be http://hexbear.net/c/[email protected], but that doesn’t work since we aren’t federated. Since lemmy.ml is federated with lemmy.world, the following is the link to the same comm from lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.ml/c/[email protected] However, you’ll notice that the post in question “Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem” is not visible from that link. Which means that everyone logged in and using lemmy.ml do not see that post. It doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned, since the only way to see it would be to do so from an instance that is not their own, which people are not liable to go looking for since they aren’t aware of what they can’t see. I don’t know if instances can make certain posts inaccessible to other instances (never heard of that, but maybe?), but whether it was done intentionally or is just a lemmy bug, the effect is the same.

      I hope that made sense, and I apologize if I was just explaining a bunch of stuff you already know. Just trying to clarify the issue and explain it in case others are confused.