No, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and I do not fully disagree. But I think context matters. I like tanky because it helps people understand the dangers of the ideology more than other alternatives like communist or Marxist-Leninist or whatever. Is there more danger of violence against tankies or that their ideology may grow and cause violence against others? Right now I perceive the latter to be a bigger issue, and I don’t see any real risk of harm coming to them, at least in the social circles where my words have influence.

If there was a movement that sought to do physical harm to them (outside of a defensive context) then I would weigh that appropriately in my language. The term is a tool of persuasion and I deem that persuasion more important than any risk of dehumanization, which I do oppose and recognize as harmful.

Thank you very much for sharing that history - that really helps me understand why people are not taking this seriously. If they “feel like” they have heard it all before, then they give their rote responses from the past, not realizing how things have changed.

And too there’s GIGO, where people that should have been banned were banned, but it’s still not a terribly persuasive happenstance to convince people who cannot handle the subtleties involved between the outcome vs. the method by which it was arrived at.

Google at one point was not evil, and people warning us not to put trust in them to make Android were solidly ignored. Apple, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of it was the same. And look at us now. FAAFO. Well, now we’re seeing firsthand some very few glimpses of how bad it could ultimately get, for those companies.

But for lemmy.ml we are still in the early stages, where people are saying “but they write the code” (irrelevant), and “they aren’t evil” (we have proof, NOW), and “the Fediverse is still too small, let it grow first” (a horrible idea - for one thing it won’t grow as much this way and for another if it did then having so many communities held hostage on that instance would be even more difficult to fix than now). Oh, and another one I hear quite often is “lemmy.world has problems too”, which I’m not even going to dignify with a comment about. But the big ones are “only the admins are bad - not the users” (partly true but not entirely and quite frankly… if YOU want to ignore all the warning signs then that doesn’t mean that *I* should be forced to stay behind with you as well - particularly when user-level blocks are NOT the same as instance-level ones); and “but some of the biggest communities are there” (I mean, so what, go back to Reddit if you want that but… okay it is a more fair objection tbf).

I doubt many places will defederate lemmy.ml right now… but on the other hand, I see preparations paving the way for that to happen by removing the existing roadblocks, most notably https://reddthat.com/post/20197120. Though that too will require more than a little effort reaching out to each and every single community group of mods to begin the discussion about moving their communities, one by one. This fight against authoritarianism will be long, costly, and may never truly be won - e.g. even if Lemmy.ml gets defederated, the users of hexbear, lemmygrad, and it may simply hide out as alts elsewhere? - but it seems to me to be worth fighting? Though I may need to find at least one instance that actually does defederate from those Big Three Axis powers to use in the meantime.

Thank you 🙏 for your own efforts in combating these (mal)practices.

You are correct that it is not in the OP wording itself, but it came out as part of the discussion i.e. it is in the comment section if you want to read through that.

It is now getting significantly harder to find the comments I saw originally as lemmy’s UI decides now to hide comments by default, bc there are so very many on that thread, but to get you started, one is https://lemmy.world/comment/10461570, and another is https://lemm.ee/comment/12369094.

Even if the former issue was the result of that new feature being tested out on Lemmy.ml first (and perhaps having bugs causing issues with the mod log), the other issue remains that the modding in such occurrences is accused of being rather… “over-zealous”. As in why remove someone from a meme community, if they merely made a comment about China in a political community somewhere else on the same instance? What does someone being (potentially) incorrect in their facts have to do with being able to interact with people in a meme community that they have (reputedly) never commented in even so much as once? (presumably they must have interacted with it somehow, according to the wording of the new mod feature, so probably they did vote)

If you hear of an instance that has defederated from them, I would be interested to know. Otherwise, this OP at least seems to be helping prepare people for that eventuality even if not yet happening now.

Well, more to the point, it’s too late for us to test this all now. We’d have to spin up our own instances, watch all of the signals coming out, and compare those signals to what they used to be vs. then become. As someone did - with screenshots demonstrating the before vs. after. But we cannot now go back in time to confirm that particular instance, we’d have to catch a future occurrence.

Unless you meant the mass removals - but people have been complaining about that for quite awhile now iirc? This is not an isolated incident, by any means. For months now I have been defending Lemmy.ml to various random commenters across the Fediverse, citing how different it is from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net (and truthfully, the situation is quite different, here being isolated more if not exclusively to the admins), but lately I have given up b/c the collective weight of all of these actions seems indefensible to me now, as a pattern of behavior.

I actually have compassion for them - as you say they are programmers not social workers, and if they truly want their goals of FOSS acceptance and socialist world-views to be exported around the world, then they are working against their own goals but do not see that. Put another way, they may truly believe the local Chinese propaganda, but in order to export their ideals to a global audience, it needs to be tempered with a greater mix of acceptance that people exposed to more Western-style media are accustomed to (where we are allowed to watch things like videos rather than be forced to read state-sponsored bulletins telling us what to believe).

But anyway, the removal reason is far from the point - it is the manner of the removal that concerns us so greatly. But sure, start up a dialog with them if you wish - you sound like a good person to initiate such, since you go to lengths to understand their POV:-).

Btw do you have any suggestions as an alternative to “tankie”? I am not 100% convinced that it is fully “dehumanizing”, but I do see where it is somewhere along the spectrum towards that goal. Would “fascist” or “authoritarian” work better?