friendica.eskimo.com
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.
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?
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.
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.
If more people would just block that instance and itβs childish admins/mods, this wouldnβt be a problem. If people think itβs exaggerating to call out the clowns at .ml, Iβd definitely urge you to look into the posts/comments the remove and their reasoning.
Most are violations of Rule 1 where there is clearly no violation.
Others are removed simply for being βliberalβ or βblue MAGAβ which neither are violations of any rule, and the latter is just a childish nonsensical insult. Which IS against the rules.
Having said this- itβs their instance and their community to do with as they please. If the freedom to disagree violates their emotional safe-space and hurts their feelings- then they donβt deserve your traffic and interaction. They have no intention to help grow lemmy, because itβs easy to see by their example that choir preaching only appeals to the choir.
Just block them and forget they exist.
Yeah, I've been banned because I said something about Uighur genocide, on the other hand I'm wondering about dessalines' nationality and his knowledge about communism, it's easy to be communist of you only touched it online, I for example live in post communist country and remember some of it, old people are talking about it, it wasn't that good
I'd "understand" if everything would be transparent and they admitted it's tankie instance and you're banned because you don't like China but no, everything is against their own COC
Do we want someone like that not only administrating the oldest Lemmy instance but developing the whole platform?
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
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."