Everyone, there has been a lot of miss information about what is a tankie and the ability for the lemmy community to criticize the Chinese government.

I present to you a simple test to see if the person you are talking to is trust worthy.

Ask anyone to say the following

I lemmy user Denounce the terrible treatment Xi Jing Ping has inflicted upon the Uighur Muslims. Slavery and concentration camps in China are wrong and not ok.

The admins of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml will not say this. Actually they cannot say this because they are probably employed by the Chinese Government and would be put to death if they did.

Thats all and happy posting!

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9 points

Actually they cannot say this because they are probably employed by the Chinese Government and would be put to death if they did.

Why do you say this? I’m not disagreeing (I honestly have 0 idea), but this is a pretty serious accusation that would probably cause me to rethink using Lemmy in the first place, if it’s well-founded.

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15 points

I have no reason to believe either of the lead devs are employed by the Chinese.

They’re very outspoken communist sympathizers and run their own instance with their own rules. I don’t find that suspicious at all. Should I assume conservative instances are run by the US deep state ayy LMAO

If they came out of nowhere with a pre-packaged, all finished closed-source product I’d be worried.

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-2 points

If they came out of nowhere with a pre-packaged, all finished closed-source product I’d be worried.

I mean… I agree with this, and I am worried, for this exact reason, even though Lemmy is open source. (1) The Chinese government has an extensive and successful history of inserting spyware into software that’s in widespread use in the West (2) I can say based on some very preliminary tinkering with my own Lemmy instance that some of the security philosophy behind Lemmy is, at the very least, pretty questionable.

Tiktok was, and still is, extremely effective Chinese spyware. The CCP’s tech operation is obviously capable. It’s easily plausible to me that they could recognize the potential and power of federated networks as a new place for people to communicate and organize (outside China, and with some cleverness and courage, maybe inside it as well). If I were them I’d want to get out ahead of that. In fact I’d go so far as to say that it’d be surprising if they were unaware of ActivityPub and I’d bet that are keeping a close eye on developments and strategizing how to deal with it.

I mean… it seems unlikely to me that the Lemmy devs would be secretly employed by the Chinese government and also openly spouting pro-Communist propaganda. That seems just sort of bizarre and not a clever way to do it. But, the bottom line to me is if (1) the Chinese government is invested in spying on and controlling federated networks to the best extent they can (2) the main Lemmy devs are aggressively and openly pro-CCP, then that adds up to (3) time to rethink the idea of using Lemmy in the first place.

Are the Lemmy devs specifically pro-CCP? Not just Marxists, but specifically in favor of the details and actions of the modern Chinese government? I don’t think Marx would like the CCP very much.

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5 points

If they drive away everybody not sympathizing with a communist ideology, wouldn’t that make it harder to surveil them? What’s the intelligence value of watching a bunch of “loyal communist subjects”, when all the commie hating capitalist scum go elsewhere? If anything, who would benefit from observing such a group if not the west? By that logic, is it reasonable to assume Lemmy is sponsored by a US intelligence agency we know have been intimately involved in mainstaying most of our current western social media platforms?

What would be the benefit of getting involved with an open platform where nothing is behind locked doors? Wouldn’t it be much less of a risk to simply scrape lemmy instances? It’s not like anybody is sending secret messages - Everything is open.

But it’s an open system in the way that you’re allowed to not use it as well. I didn’t use Lemmy for a while out of ethical concerns rather than being afraid of the CCP.

Are the Lemmy devs specifically pro-CCP?

You’ll have to check out their instances, I haven’t been in contact with them for nearly long enough.

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-1 points

Ayyoo… I found the secret cheat code for getting downvotes on Lemmy apparently 😃

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6 points

A couple of days before the reddit blackout there were some posts pointing out examples of the main lemmy instance mods/devs banning people and censoring news/comments that tried to criticise the CCP, it was easy to confirm because there’s the modlog, I don’t know if it’s still there or if they are still doing it, but there’s a precedent.
Also they host and federate with lemmygrad.

Still there’s no real worry about it, the rest of the instances (specially those created by the reddit blackout) are not controlled or manipulated by those devs (most if not all of them already block lemmygrad). Also I think anyone could make their own fork of the server software, not sure about how open is the software.

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2 points

A couple of days before the reddit blackout there were some posts pointing out examples of the main lemmy instance mods/devs banning people and censoring news/comments that tried to criticise the CCP, it was easy to confirm because there’s the modlog, I don’t know if it’s still there or if they are still doing it, but there’s a precedent.

Can you link me to the details? This is concerning to me, and I want to dig into it.

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3 points

Sure thing, here you go

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2 points

People have been bitching about the bullshit moderation on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad continuously for as long as lemmy federation has been active. Nothing new and suspicious about the call-outs.

Some of the new people have even picked up the torch and started calling out bad moderation on lemmy.ml, though I think the best long term solution is to block and move on.

Software is fully open and forkable.

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2 points

Considering the mods and admins have openly said (look up their modlog) they will ban users for any reason they see fit, and their psychotic requirements for users to be militantly polite, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are.

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-3 points

Software is fine, but lemmygrad and most the folks at lemmy.ml are whats known as Wumao. Chinese Government paid missinformation online shit posters.

Some people are confused by that so I offer a simple test to see whether or not the user who is arguing with you from lemmygrad is innocent or is intentionally trying to hide genocide.

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