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/[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 hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

  • balderdash@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    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.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    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.dev has a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on .ml so 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 ml being 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.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.

      I had actually considered Lemmy before The Great Reddit Exodus. Lemmy.ml turned me off from that.

      Now we have Kbin (you can make it, my love!) and Lemmy.world, and I feel much better.

    • Blaze@reddthat.comEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably wont’ be the last.

      Maybe we should open a thread on [email protected] about this

  • aleph@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    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?

    • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      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.

      1000001794

      It’s troubling behavior for anyone with power.