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.
It’s much easier to still contribute to the conversation on Lemmy than Reddit.
Also !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com allows you to call out power tripping mods
For people who want to avoid all content from lemmy.ml, including posts and comments:
I use lemmy.cafe now because it has defederated with lemmy.ml.
As a lemmy.cafe user, I don’t see any post/comment from lemmy.ml users at all.
Communities on lemmy.cafe are invisible to lemmy.ml users, so I would recommend creating more communities there.
do you mean i have to make a new account? or is there a way to “move” basically?
You will need to create a new account, but it is possible to export all of your subscriptions to a new account. There should be a thing you can click for that in your settings menu to download the export file, which you would then import into your new account.
Your old comments will not transfer, however.
I think some mobile apps have functionality to essentially move your subscription list.
I’m half retarded, any videos explaining the structure of Lemmy? No idea the difference between .ml and .cafe, is it supposed to be different subreddits? Or different websites?
The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to email.
You know how you might have a gmail address, your friend might have a protonmail address and your parents might still have their old aol email address? But you can all still freely talk to each other anyways?
Lemmy is like doing that, but for something like Reddit. If you notice, usernames have an @servername on the end and just like an email address that’s the server that person is connecting through. For example, I’m Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org.
Which means I log in to lemmy.sdf.org and use their servers to read Lemmy, but I can read, post and comment on communities on any other Lemmy server that is federated with lemmy.sdf.org just like they’re on lemmy.sdf.org just like you can send an email to someone using a different email service and it makes no difference on your end.
Communities work the same way - so for example politics@lemmy.ml, politics@beehaw.org and politics@lemmy.world are all different communities hosted on different servers with their own separate posts, subscribers, mods etc. And users on any Lemmy server federated with the server that community is on can read, comment, post, etc (mod action notwithstanding).
This federation thing I keep mentioning is just which servers are willing to talk to which other servers - again you can compare to email. Sometimes email servers pop up to send massive amounts of spam, and when they do mail providers blacklist them and simply ignore all messages from that source. Defederating is the same idea. You use lemmy.world according to your username, so if lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml then you will no longer be able to see any communities @lemmy.ml or read any posts or comments posted by someone @lemmy.ml - to you it will be like lemmy.ml just doesn’t exist.
If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link labeled “Instances”, which will give you a list of which servers lemmy.world talks to and which ones they’ve specifically blocked. Lemmy.world has a pretty long list of blocked instances.
One of the reasons I picked SDF’s lemmy instance was because they don’t block **any **instances - as far as SDF is concerned it’s up to the end user what they want to see. Also SDF is kinda a cool entity - they’re a non-profit best known for maintaining public access unix servers and a bunch of retrocomputing stuff (like dial up internet and a gopher server) that has been around since 1987 (the name is literally an old anime reference because they started out as an anime BBS).
Not video, but I will try to explain it in a simple way:
Lemmy instances are individual websites that run the Lemmy software. These instances are operated by different people or organizations and can have their own unique topics, rules, and communities.
Lemmy instances federate using the ActivityPub protocol. This protocol allows different servers, or instances, to communicate and share data such as posts, comments, and community interactions.
Different instances use the same software, but are managed by different admins.
For more detail about the admin of lemmy.ml, please refer to this post: https://lemmy.world/post/16239454
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We found the thin skinned tankie.
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You appear to be lacking critical thickness in the rolled homogeneous armor of your Type 57.
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There are lots of comments on that thread trying to divert the issue by pointing out the violence done by the western countries. I would assume his comment was in response to one of these comments, so he wouldn’t be the one to bring up the West into the discussion.
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I didn’t react to any of the “but the West also…” comments. I replied directly to the top level of the post, linking to an article that goes in depth on what actually happened as most people in the West nowadays only know about the iconic tank man image.
try posting any pro jewish and/or pro israeli, anywhere on lemmy or kbin instances (watch the votes for this comment, lol)
Yeah cause most people on here don’t like ethnocentric genocidal states. Sorry to burst your little bubble ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Holy fuck.
Zionism (the political policy supporting the genocide) is not Judaism. How would I know? I’m a Jew and I abhore the Palestinian genocide. Nothing in the Jewish religion supports what is going on nor does anything in our religion say “go be ZIONISTS and kill people”.
I don’t think that person was saying that it was
That’s possible, the statement is a bit ambiguous as to which part they are "whomp whomp"ing to.
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How exactly can a political policy support anything? It’s the people who call themselves after an ideology who support it. Not an abstract ideology that a guy invented over 100 years ago.
That’s a fair question.
In consideration, take the Jim Crow laws from the USA. These laws enforced racial segregation and allowed for abject racism and abhorrent conditions/treatment of black people. In short, they supported racism.
Now one could say “but the people were the ones to carry it out” which sure, but then we might as well start asking ourselves how much government really matters and other philosophical questions. I don’t think the people are innocent, but to focus on your question, that’s an example of how political policy and laws can support things. The laws enable the legal environment, the people then carry it out.
Watch this!
I think Jewish people are great.
Thanks I think you’re pretty nifty too. You’re welcome over for latkas anytime
Hopefully yours are better than mine
People are happy and enjoy eating them so I guess I’m doing it right. How are you making yours?
Poorly. I don’t remember anything but that.
I tried twice, and have just decided that I would rather have hash browns anyway. (I can actually cook them)
Upvoted!
I have so much support for jewish people, and especially those who are against Netanyahu’s atrocities
What do you mean by “pro Jewish”? I doubt a comment like “Jewish people are human beings that deserve respect” would get you downvoted.
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That one no, but there are plenty of leftists in the fediverse that can’t understand the concept of “Zionism is not Judaism.” And saying such gets you down voted because lol.
I haven’t seen that myself, but I’m sure some of them exist and they’re dumb for thinking that. The person I’m replying to, though, is clearly taking the position that anti-Zionism = antisemitism.
Not sure if you mean me by “person you’re replying to” or someone else. I believe it’s someone else but it’s a little bit of a confusing sentence.
Either way, it’s been a fun couple of months since this bullshit started. With all kinds of dumb takes and arguments. It’s enough to make someone say “oyvey”
I meant downpunxx.
Gotcha gotcha
If people disagree with me and downvote my irrelevant lie they actually hate Jews fucking gottem
There’s going to be bubbles everywhere. I’ve been called a troll and downvoted heavily in various communities because I don’t hate Microsoft or AI in general, for example.
First, its obvious that anything pro israeli is going to be met with backslash when they are doing a freaking genocide. Second, downvoting is not censoring, is just people saying they disagree with you or your comment is just stupid/non helpful
Getting downvoted is one thing. There is definitely a certain bias in the wider fediverse community on this topic, so it’s normal that your comments aren’t received well. It isn’t manipulative and probably an accurate reflection of what the community thinks.
What lemmy.ml is doing is more insidious though. They are manipulating the discussion by actively muzzling users with dissenting opinions.
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I’ll argue that crocodile tears deserve downvotes, as do bullies.
Im pro jewish, Im pro Israeli, but im so anti-injustice that I’m willing to stand up to anyone pushing for or acting as a pro-war Israel supporter, or jewish as an Israeli identity when it comes to being prowarfare, when they still support what has quickly evolved into a politically strategic genocide against palestinians. Hamas deserved what it got in the immediate aftermath of October 7, but after 2 weeks then 3 weeks then a month then 2 months it showed that despite all of Israels’ military and civilian efforts of having an experienced security apparatus steeped in information warfare and threat containment, they didnt have the effective strategic competence to actually wipe out Hamas without having to constantly murder civilians.
But they went ahead and kept on fucking killing.
So now, they keep moving goal posts for any chance of peace. Its not a new strategy, but it has far more violent consequences and only further spreads fervor for more violence. Peace begets peace. One side doesn’t get to play that against the other like a ping pong match and expect objective obervers to fall for either side’s propaganda.
This is all revenge without justice now.
Take your foot off the throttle.
As others have said, the only option available currently is to leave the instance and re-create your beloved communities elsewhere. The Lemmy.ml Admins also happen to be the ones actively developing the Lemmy code base, and they’re not gonna change because they feel entitled to do whatever they want, and technically, they can because they run the instance.
My best advice is to move on from the instance.
If you want to get away from the Lemmy codebase entirely I can vouch that mBin works quite nicely. I’ve been on fedia.io for months now and only once or twice hit some kind of technical problem, which was resolved quickly.
Are there mobile apps yet? Because if no that’s one huge advantage Lemmy still has over Kbin/Mbin, and it’s why I switched to Lemmy when Artemis started having issues (it went down completely since) instead of going back to Kbin.
Oh, cool. That one flew completely under my radar. I’ll have to check it out when I have time.
Don’t forget about piefed it’s amazing and lets you subscribe to posts and/or comments. Theres someone who contributed Lemmy API compatibility to use some Lemmy apps with Piefed instances. Its still very early but so far its extremely promising and the codebase is in python and the main developer is focused on ensuring it wasy to contribute. Check it out: https://piefed.social
Code is on codeberg which is great too https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi
Agree and just to add to this: the official list of mbin instances
MBIN FTW. KBIN has been “We are working on resolving the issues” for some days now. I hope Ernest is ok.
I have a login for lemmy.ml, as I have several from when I was switching over from Reddit. I’m thinking from what I’m reading here, that it’s not an instance I want to associate with.
Yeah, nothing against Ernest but developing and running kbin is just too big to be a one-man show.
Dude’s a superhero, and needn’t be a ‘lone ranger’. Agreed. As the Fediverse expands, it will be the work of many; it just has to be that way.
I do hope he eventually finds a balance that works both for him and for us. I greatly prefer Kbin, when it’s, y’know, up.
Agreed! And yeah, still down, I just checked.
Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.
Lemmy.ml also has the funny quirk that it doesnt have a proper legal imprint or team list afaik. So we don’t have actual transparent information on who is on that instances admin team and who is not. Iirc only one of dessalines and nutomic is on that admin team anymore.
Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.
I hardly see what that would accomplish if we could.
People keep bringing up that because of the devs history with that instance, “surely it is the Lemmy devs themselves who are doing this”. Which hurts Lemmy’s reputation overall.
Actions have consequences
I guess some mod actions could be considered accidents or mistakes instead of bad actors. A transparent system would have a flow to allow the user to contact and get such a mistake rectified, or report a wrongful mod action to an admin.
But if the admin is a problem, then that needs more figuring out how to get one removed.
the only one who can remove an admin is a more senior admin, and they can already see behind the “mod” alias.
your point seems moot
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This Dessalines?
Creeping the admin logs to find out who dared down vote him.
Decentralization is good for everyone.
Tell that to the Chinese government lol
I agree completely. Blocked the instance only now despite them becoming more and more annoying each month.
I’ve had this happen to me, I was chatting in a thread with some guy about IP theft and plagiarism at universities- a legitimate discussion about a current topic- and all my comments were suddenly deleted for “xenophobia”. I let it go but its still really jarring and annoying.
I’ll go out on a limb and guess China was mentioned somewhere
Which community was that?
world news lol, Thats probably why. It was a comment under an article on that topic and they went censor-crazy.
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?
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Perfectly reasonable to ban someone from completely unrelated communities like mechanical keyboard and arch Linux? Come on. It’s not like they’re throwing out toxic terms or criticizing on a personal level. They’re questioning the way things are being modded. Those aren’t even attacks.
They banned from the instance. Apparently the fact that you get banned from hosted communities is just a new feature.
I think you have a very different definition of “perfectly reasonable” than most people.
The criticism is warranted. They don’t even equally apply their own rules depending on context
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They specifically obfuscate which mods take what actions so you can’t appeal or even defend.
Tbh, also harass a mod. People get quite worked out when being moderated, and being a mod is enough work without people chasing you to argue with you or straight up harass you, I suppose. At least, I can see plenty of good reasons to hide the moderator name.
To quote the reason why calling out mods by name is forbidden from a previous encounter I had with them: “removed for doxxing”
So yeah I think you’re giving them too much credit here
I am not sure I understood. You called some mod by name and they removed the comment? If that’s the case, I perfectly understand and agree with the decision tbh.
That said, this is a general argument, not referred to any particular mod. I think that many people get angry when their content is moderated and they might want to harass/argue/avenge against the mod who took that action.
You agree that tagging the username of a mod (wasn’t even one it was an admin) is doxxing? If so, you’re delusional.
Mod names are visible by default on my instance so if taking a look there and then mentioning the username you see there is doxxing good luck with the rest of your life. You can’t have a system where everyone can easily find out who performed a mod action and then claim you were “doxxed”
No sorry, you said name as in the person’s name, I did not understand “username”.
well in this particular case it wouldn’t have mattered, I used the username but the admin in question has their clear name set as the display name (which made the whole “doxxing” claim even funnier to me)
Then have a mod box or something. What they currently do is, “Post removed. Reason. Rule 1.”
No details, no appeal, nada.
What does this have to do with showing mod log? Genuinely confused
If they act on a post or comment, there’s no way to ask why or see what their actual reasoning was. So it allows blanket censorship without a paper trail.
It does, but it’s an online forum, not an essential service, and easy to replace. On the other hand, being there with your name or nickname exposes you to harassment from those pissed at you for your decision.
I would say it’s an acceptable evil given the circumstances.
As a side note: asking why after a mod action is almost universally pointless. Moderating is free work and a level of subjectivity is implied. I think not having the ability to argue is infuriating but understandable.
My experience with them is you can’t even find the modlog if you look when they remove comments. I guess they don’t federate it and/or it only shows if you’re logged in?
Good incentives to block their instances.
Gonna put this out there. Ended up in a thread on ML the other day. The poster/admin got a little unhinged, over 4 down votes. 4. Took to the admin panel to see who dared down vote him. Convinced he had been the victim of the tiniest not swarm ever.
It’s troubling behavior for anyone with power.
Downvotes are public on Lemmy fyi. There are interfaces that show who voted on a post or comment.
For admins, yes. I was pointing that out in the picture of the responses I posted. But not for General users.
Even regular users can see them through other federated services like kbin AFAIK. They show up under likes and dislikes.
Lol, is that why they removed scores from the API? 😆
You gotta admit, it’s very suspicious to be massively downvoted (25, not 4) over an inconspicuous comment that merely highlights a few paragraphs of the linked article.
I know I would also be wondering if there was a pattern in the origin of those downvotes.
I can’t see those, specifically, but a similar pattern of mass community bans after even remotely criticizing an authoritarian regime is completely on brand for Dessalines.
I don’t have record of the comment that triggered these, but when it’s something like civility, it’s usually just a comment removal and maybe a single community ban.
See https://lemmy.world/comment/10467647
It seems this is just a new feature in the upcoming relase (the communities ban).
Interesting.
Still, site bans for criticizing China is just as bad, if not worse as mass community banning.
Yes, but that fact is well known and at least this shows there was no particular intention to chastise the user - it was just a button press.
Imagine that - a white dude who appropriates the moniker of an actual slave revolutionary as a symbol for his “cause” might be cringe and unhinged.
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I would imagine that if an admin is doing this the modlog could simply be faked, you wouldn’t be able to trust anything that the instance is reporting to the outside world.
This is actually more evidence that the Lemmy devs run a modified version of the code which gives them the ability to, eg do things like dole out mass community bans. There is also some evidence that they selectively federate the mod log as well. It all points to the obvious conclusion that these people can and will abuse their power in any way they can.
I have had comments removed and could never see why. Now I just block their instances.
They roleplay as communist censors since that’s all they can afford to do from their positions.
I’m pretty sure any admin could do that with their Lemmy server, couldn’t they?
Yes, an admin probably has access to community level moderation rights and the lemmy API is not difficult to figure out.
It would be trivial to come up with a script to go through the community page, get all the current communities and iterate through them banning a user in each of them.
Only admins can do site bans. What you’re seeing is a hacky/temporary feature of the upcoming Lemmy v19.4, of which lemmy.ml is running the pre-release: when an admin bans someone from the site (temp or otherwise), it also automatically bans them from any community they have ever participated in. Lemmy.ml has always been the “beta” instance for new releases.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the heads up.
Thanks for illustrating that I was banned from not just one community I don’t participate in aside from upvoting, but several that I have never even visited. All for “Rule 4,” which as far as I can tell is spamming ads, which I have never done. I’ve tried to message the mods of those communities, but haven’t gotten any kind of response.
It’s really disappointing that this is how Lemmy seems to work. As a new user, I had to actively persevere through the .ml bullshit to understand that lemmy as a whole is not like that. But it’s almost impossible to be a progressive (but not full blown anti-western communist) on an awful lot of this platform.
It really does the other large instances a disservice that those mod/admin practices are so commonplace.
I know the answer is to defederate/block them, but I genuinely find the news and posts interesting, and .ml was one of the instances that I was first looking into, because I literally didn’t understand how the fediverse worked but kept hearing “just pick an instance, there no wrong choice since you have access to all the other instances.”
But even those posts about topics I am educated in and care about, it all just literally seems to be a vessel for a specific type of (dis/mis)information in the comments, which actively preys on the gullible and shuts out even moderately different views.
Edit: mobile formatting fix
Same. I’ve only ever made one post, and it wasn’t to lemmy.ml, nor have I made a significant number of comments, yet I was banned first from the instance, then from the communities, for allegedly spamming. I asked in the Matrix chat linked in their sidebar, and they suggested I message dessalines, so I did. He rejected the message request.
If this is their ideal of Lemmy, then Lemmy is dead on arrival.
It really does the other large instances a disservice that those mod/admin practices are so commonplace.
Agree.
On the other hand nowadays now most of the communities are on LW (https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active) so at least it’s a bit better compared to a year ago.
It’s a good trend, but I still think it would behoove the admin of more reasonable instances to make it more obvious that there is a sizable and aggressive group of people with nearly unlimited (internet) power, and making it clear that they do not associate at all with those instances/individual practices.
There is a huge dearth of naming and shaming bad actors, and it’s going to reach a size where people won’t do their research as I did, but will assume that all of the fediverse is run by authoritarian Communists and (not) engage based on that.
And that wouldn’t be an unfair understanding, given who the creators of Lemmy are, who their disciples/mods are, and their influence across the platform.
Lemmy really runs the risk of being “left wing Truth Social” otherwise.
Lemmy really runs the risk of being “left wing Truth Social” otherwise.
Indeed. I’m still on /r/RedditAlternatives to talk about Lemmy, and I usually have to explain that most of the instances do not share the political stances of the main devs.
it would behoove the admin of more reasonable instances to make it more obvious that there is a sizable and aggressive group of people with nearly unlimited (internet) power, and making it clear that they do not associate at all with those instances/individual practices.
The situation here is a bit tricky: instance admins still have to debug the software (as they are the ones using it), and they have to interact with the Lemmy devs. Getting too much friction with them could break that collaboration, and leave everyone with worse software.
https://sublinks.org/ is still under development, hopefully once it will be ready instance admins will have another option to potentially replace Lemmy
I hear you.
I’d just offer a slight counter, which is that if the devs want their software to succeed, they should probably work a little harder to police how their politics overflow, or work harder to contain them. And bringing these issues into the full light of day may help with that, or at least convince them to crack down on bad actors they a currently allow to function with impunity.
convince them to crack down on bad actors
The Lemmy devs have expressed several times that they don’t want to interfere on how people use their software (e.g. admin the instances and mod the communities).
Which is good (and allow us to say that they can’t indeed interfere with Lemmy as a whole), but that also means that they won’t be the one “cracking down on bad actors”
https://gui.fediseer.com/ might be something along those lines, with a chain of trust between instances
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.
A hexbear in that thread is literally claiming that “the soldiers did everything they could to avoid hurting him” when there’s a photo of him lying dead on the street after the tanks have gone through. They don’t think it’s fine, they’re saying it didn’t happen (curious)
This loony bullshit is why tankies go full useful idiot and parrot shit most of them know isn’t true. The right-wing disinfo about Tianamen square - or any other communist atrocity - is so widespread. Tankies think that the most ultra counter-narrative will somehow combat that even if its just as loony.
He is bundled off to the left by other protestors, nobody knows what happened to him, there is no photo of him dead.
A hexbear in that thread is literally claiming that “the soldiers did everything they could to avoid hurting him”
ah the trolly problem defence
Inaccurate - the tankie pulling the switch would be smiling
And there would be more people on the track.
Of tank man? The guy in the famous photo?
Where’s the picture of this? I’ve never heard that before. It doesn’t appear in his Wikipedia page, it just says there nobody knows what happened to him after.
Was it actually him? I was under the impression that history did not relate what happened to him afterwards, nor who he was. That’s not to say the CCP did not murder a couple of thousand people during the crackdown regardless, because they did, but I have never seen a verifiable claim that a picture of any particular corpse actually was the Tank Man. There are numerous theories I’ve seen floated over the years alleging what may have happened to him afterwards ranging from him being caught and imprisoned, executed, living anonymously in China, or fleeing to Taiwan. All of them are unverified and, of course, mutually exclusive.
The tank operators absolutely did attempt to (and succeeded at) avoid running him over. That much is plainly visible in the video. Whatever happened after the video ended is undocumented and pure conjecture. Plenty of well documented atrocities actually were committed that day, before and after that moment, so there’s not much sense in inventing new ones and bickering over details we haven’t actually got.
That photo (I’ve seen it circulate on the internet myself) is a photoshop. Every reputable source says that no one knows what happened to that man, and we have no evidence whatsoever of him getting run over.
Crushing people with tanks
Just a heads up, while it is established that the CCCP killed tons of people on that day, the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia and mostly considered inaccurate news reporting.
The famous “tank man” photo shows a guy standing in front of a tank in order to prevent them from moving tanks to another part where the protesters had gone. We have no evidence that he was driven over by that tank.
Those “academics” are wrong.
We know this because there are photos of bodies and bicycles smeared into a paste [Source. Warning Blood/Gore].
And because people who were there literally said that’s what happened:
"The shooting was going on and people were still running to try and block the tanks, which were travelling at high speed, some positioning buses in the road. But the tanks crushed the buses and people, they didn’t care. People’s bodies were merged, moulded to their bicycles. They were flat.” [Source: Shao Jiang to The Mirror]
The CCP has desperately tried to cleanse the most brutal images and interviews of the massacre from the Internet, but even 30 years on they can’t completely scrub it clean. There’s a reason The Pillar of Shame monument is designed as it is.
the idea that people were crushed with tanks is disputed in academia
There are photos of people clearly crushed by tanks?
No but the red paste is most likely explained by the tanks that were verifiably there. They could have crushed people with other machinery but they had tanks.
Imo, when tankies get that bad, they might as well be nazis.
I was imagining something like this in hexbear or lemmygrad, as people there seemed quite dogmatic at times, but even on Lemmy.ml? Sad to see this, as I had mostly positive interactions there till now
The hexbears realized that EVERYONE blocks them. One particularly humorous youtube even did a “One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let’s use hexbear as an example. Please follow along” gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.
Since ml was generally sympathetic to tankies, if not full of the idiots, the hexbears basically just joined that en masse.
But yeah. Caught a ban for racism/xenophobia because I questioned what positive benefit accelerationism would have for the Palestinian people. Reminded me way too much of attempting to interact with hexbear so I used that as an excuse to just start blocking any .ml community that I see in my feed. Not QUITE at the point of blocking the whole instance but… I expect to be there by the end of the month.
i’ve noticed a butt load of lemmygrad names appearing as lemmy.ml these days. Seems they got tired of existing in their little de-federated bubble
They won’t get paid if they don’t effectively spread propaganda.
Lemmy is far too small for any actual organized propaganda machines to target. These people are just zealots
Nonsense, go take a look at Hexbear or Lemmygrad. There’s very little moderation here, why wouldn’t they target it?
There’s plenty of moderation there, it’s just highly biased.
There aren’t enough users on lemmy for a state actor to bother putting resources into controlling the narrative.
Why waste time on a few thousand lemmy users when there are literally millions of gullible boomers on facebook that actually vote based on what they consume on social media?
“Here” as in the fediverse generally, not “there” as in Hexbear.
The Fediverse currently has over a million active monthly users, and had more in the past. You think it’s not worth it for them to spread propaganda to a million people in an environment they can manipulate? Come on.
One particularly humorous youtube even did a “One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let’s use hexbear as an example. Please follow along” gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.
Interesting, do you have a link to the video?
Not off the top of my head. It was one of the various “tech” youtubers who will do everything ranging from “here is how to set up proxmox” to “I tried five twitter alternatives for a week” videos.
No worries, thanks anyway!
I think unlike on hexbear and lemmygrad, most lemmy.ml users simply don’t know, and many communities hosted there are bona fide. I’m not throwing stones at them, it’s the admins of the instance that I have a beef with.
Stuff trickles down though, so that it’s not solely the admins, even if a large number of the userbase are innocent.
I’m throwing stones. Lemmy.ml is toxic and people managing communities there are partly to blame.
Side question, how do you retrieve or see “removed” comments? I get some removed and I’m not sure what they were…
Yeah the modlog is where you can normally see them. Mind you they seem to selectively purge the modlog too, presumably to hide their obvious censorship bias.
selectively purge the modlog
Now this would be a good reason to defederate from an instance. Modlog is what keeps mods consistent (right now I don’t like the Lemmy.ml mods rulebrick but at least they were open about what they don’t like).
Yeah, that’s one thing reddit did right, ban/removal notifications included a copy of the comment.
No they don’t. I received a two week ban in the wake of the API protests, never got an explanation why or what comment triggered it.
Shrug, my notifications always included it. Maybe the mod just banged you directly or something.
Not only do they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology, they often do it in such a way that it is untraceable by other mods. I’m not sure how they accomplish that, nor is the admin who messaged me letting me know that it was happening and he couldn’t figure out how. Anyways, my solution has been to completely block that instance, and delete my account there. If they want to exist in a little untruthful echo chamber, then so be it, but I don’t need to be a part of it. I recommend you do the same thing.
they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology
That is EXACTLY what is done on lemmy.world.
Nice, didn’t know there was a possibility to see deleted comments, thanks :) (not every deleted comment is there though, but enough to show the total hypocrisy of lemmy.world)
https://beehaw.org/modlog?page=1&userId=4130334
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&userId=1782109
It gets difficult to find them sometimes, depending on who removed it and from where. If a moderator, from the community, removed it then the removal reason could have originated from where the community is located at, whereas if an administrator of an instance removed it then it would be elsewhere.
For all that the lemmy.ml admins enjoy going on sprees of mass-removals, it sure would be nice if they would add to the code a way to see the reasons for removal linked to directly from the comment itself.
Oh yeah, that’s the other one, thx!
I did not even get a notification for that comment why it was deleted, but now I see, and sure enough - it’s misinformation (despite providing 5 or 6 links to sources in a comment below, including reputable western (!!) media and tens/hundreds of footages…). 🤷♂️deleted by creator
It is extremely obvious that the .ml admins run a malicious version of the Lemmy code which gives them additional levers of control. This alone makes them a serious threat to the entire fediverse.
It is not obvious, most likely not necessary and in any case completely unproven. Why are you so busy making stuff up in this thread?
There’s a ton of misinformation on this post and some of those spreading it seem to be vigorously doing so.
So it seems they do indeed clean up the modlog… my bans are still in there, but all mod actions where they removed China critical comments are no longer there.
I’m not sure how they accomplish that
If they have database access, which they would have being the admins, they can do anything.
The Lemmy devs are .ml admins to boot.
Pretty hard to boot when they own the instance
Ah, I meant “to boot” meaning “in addition to”
Ah, makes sense!
Their mod actions usually do federate out, but their outgoing federation is a bit borked right now with some instances, perhaps due to the recent upgrade to Lemmy 0.19.4-rc.6. I believe they are at least aware of it now, though they have been basically non-responsive to the issue so far.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Lemmy should tell you the text of what was deleted and the mod who deleted it, cause there was nothing uncivil about what I said.
I don’t know what to tell ya, I don’t find the word that rhymes with “hanky” offensive at all, especially when it’s applied to someone who seems to fit the bill. I think the main difference between MLs and liberals is that liberals are well aware their governments are flawed and are willing and able to criticize them and protest against bad policies, whereas the MLs are dedicated to the idea that it’s wrong to criticize non-Western governments, because “left unity”, “critical support” etc. This, despite the fact (or maybe because of it) that most of the governments they defend are totalitarian states where government criticism lands you in jail, in a re-education camp, or falling out of a window. This quote sums it up nicely:
Authoritarians, having argued so doggedly for the domination of a paternalistic state and having therefore turned themselves into ideological infants, then develop a hyper-reductive view of geopolitics; precisely the one, in fact, that a state would like for them to have. “Socialism” becomes pathologically confused with “opposing capitalist nations” or more appropriately, “opposing all states aligned with the United States.” They attempt to simplify the struggles of the entire planet down into two camps, the “bad guy imperialist states” and the “good guy anti-imperialist states.” In doing so, worker emancipation is simplified into a single question: “do you support the imperialists or the anti-imperialists?” Woe be to those who do not submit to their reductive understanding. The statists who advocate this position are completely incapable of even understanding what an “anti-imperialist” entity might look like. They, in fact, simply support one imperialist bloc over the other in a battle of two power-hoarders.
