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’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.
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 !fedigrow@lemm.ee about this
What? I thought I pinged you there a while ago! Anyway, have a look, there should be some topics you might find interesting
programming.devhas a lot of communities
Is there a way to search for/browse communities on a single instance?
I use https://lemmyverse.net/
You can search for all communities of all instances, or click in a specific instance.
Is it possible to see who is behind a mod action? I’ve figured something like world news on ml has some compromised fascist actors as mods but if it’s the main creator doing this then that’s crazy
It is actually tomorrow but there’s a bug that causes the cake symbol to appear a day early in the default UI, because 2024 is a leap year.
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.
I… don’t think Kbin.social is going to make it. Even if it comes back, too much trust has been lost. Ernst should have stuck to just working on his coding project, not also administering his own instance, b/c that carries with it a certain level of “always-on” responsibility - e.g. I have unfortunately had to block Kbin.social lately, b/c nearly all (>>99%) of the spam that I currently see on the Fediverse was coming from the communities on it. Since I blocked it, I think I’ve seen like 1 single spam post for the past month.
So Kbin.social is turning people away too, for different reasons.
Mbin seems healthy though?:-)
I want to use Mbin, but all Mbin instances are federated with tankie instances, including hexbear.
And Mbin doesn’t make it easy to see user/community instance.
I really want Kbin to succeed, but Ernest seems to see the project as something he checks on once every few months and then ignores, but he still seems to want to be the only one who gets to make decisions. I get that he has stuff going on in his life, but the solution to all these problem starts with communicating and working with the community, not disappearing for months at a time and refusing to work with the people who try to help him. You just can’t have a successful project with an approach like that.
It should be noted that the (visibility of) community bans are a result of better enforcement of site bans in 0.19.4, which for now is implemented by sending out community bans for local communities when a user gets instance banned: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4464
Prior to this, when a user got instance banned from .ml, they were also implicitly banned from .ml communities, but this was only known to the instance they were banned on. As a result, users were still able to post, comment, and vote on those communities, but it would be visible only on that user’s instance, not federated anywhere else. Visibility of this ban was exclusively on the banning instance’s modlog.
Hello,
A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml.
Are they? Most of the communities are rather on LW: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
!collapse@lemmy.ml is moving to !collapse@lemm.ee
Is there any community you need that doesn’t have a LW or another equivalent on another instance?
So long as any active communities on .ml end up on the front page, they will inevitably draw attention away from less censored spaces. An interesting one is !comics@lemmy.ml which tends to rise and fall in popularity in inverse proportion to !comicstrips@lemmy.world.
I agree that other communities have popped up to fill the same niches, so that’s step 1 and 2 done. Completely moving away from them, as OP intends, doesn’t seem like a plausible solution.
I’m sure it’s still doable.
Ironically, I’ve been trying to move a few communities away from LW (to avoid hyper-centralization), and it worked, for instance with !map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz (compared to the previous !mapporn@lemmy.world ), same with !casualconversation@lemm.ee which replaced !casualconversation@lemmy.world
Maybe we should bring attention to people about the lemmy.ml kind of moderation (and I guess this post does this quite well) so that they will avoid to post there in the future
It’s difficult to bring attention to censorship by way of active censorship of the censorship. I occasionally wonder whether folks on .ml understand that they’re being fed a very particularly catered experience. At least .ml isn’t the largest instance anymore, otherwise getting the word out would be nigh impossible.
And it was a nice bit of foresight to spread the load!
I was among reddit refugees a year ago and it took me a moment to notice what was going on ml and their communities were more significant in comparison to what we have today.
One of the reasons I’m on sopuli.xyz now is that it was one of the first reasonably big instances to defederate hexbear outright. Hesitance and outright hostility to defederate it from some instance admins was also worrying.
World grew MASSIVELY around the time of the reddit mod strike.
In the time since? A lot of those communities are basically full of people who can’t stop talking about their ex while constantly re-posting everything they see there. And… the lemmy world admins made a few controversial decisions and their method of removing problem/“problem” users made a lot of us uncomfortable. Piss off an admin and your entire comment history is wiped in an instant and your ban reason is unverifiable.
Whereas ml already had communities that existed to talk about the topic of the community rather than what reddit was talking about.
who can’t stop talking about their ex
Is it still the case? I found most the Reddit discussions happening on !reddit@lemmy.world nowadays
I’m not new to Lemmy but only just recently started being really active. Can you explain to this OOTL user (and perhaps others like me) that don’t know what went down with hexbear?
Welcome back!
Hexbear are known to be quite argumentative about politics, leading to most people blocking the instance overall at the user level.
That’s basically it, if you want more details you can have a look at the instance itself, you should get what I mean quite fast.
If you are familiar with the term tankie, hexbear is the china-fan tankie instance and lemmygrad is for those lusting after Stalin and the soviet union.
Lemmy.ml is a bit more low key about it, but equally authoritarian communist when it comes down to it, as evidenced by the op.
Especially the hexbear users have an extremely argumentative instance culture and will even brigade comment sections critical of the great leader, so most users and even instances block them outright.
Best to read it in their own words. That post really makes it clear how (in their own POV) other places should be linked to from hexbear solely for the purpose of making fun of them, and possibly to increase their engagement stats e.g. upvoting b/c otherwise it gets lonely just being on hexbear.net all by themselves. The only time they acknowledge the effects that THEY, the users on hexbear, have on OTHER communities is to state how fun it is to “[have the opportunity to] dunk on these lost [ones]”.
They are aware, and are even happy with how they are, and not only do they not mind being defederated, but they preemptively are defederating themselves from other places, as they said “As an admin team we have never wanted to prioritize growth”. They are an instance by and for people who enjoy making fun of others.
But don’t stop there: the comment section is where the real fun is at, and/or you can do the maths yourself too:-). e.g., they point out how the admins went to all the trouble to collect those votes, then threw them in the garbage and did the precise opposite of what the votes wanted and instead defederated anyway. Look at lemm.ee for instance at 41:4, that’s 91.1% for remaining federated and only 4 total votes, 8.9%, for defederation. aussie.zone was likewise 27 for vs. only 19 against, and programming.dev 27 for vs. 19 against - but they defederated from them all, despite how the (quite noticeable) majority of voters in each case indicated that they wanted them to remain federated.
In contrast, those other instances like programming.dev defederated from hexbear.net too, but only for purely technical reasons to avoid confusion by users not knowing the intricacies of how federation works - in their own words: “Weve added them to our blocklist as well so theres no one way conversations”.
TLDR: hexbear.net is not a “nice” place to visit - go there if you want, but like 4chan it’s not generally considered something that you want to stumble upon by accident, and it’s definitely not something that most people on the Fediverse want. I almost quit the Fediverse myself entirely after making the mistake of posting (edit: commenting) there, but fortunately for me v0.19.3 came out and I could instead simply block hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml and now I enjoy being here:-).
Great list! One thing I notice is wrong though: lemmy.ml is not merely not appearing among the top, most active ones (communities or instances), but I also don’t see it anywhere, even in the list of all instances when clicking Show All? So its true popularity is unknown to that list.
Edit: I see both hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, it is only lemmy.ml that does not show up there.
Maybe your instance has defederated from it?
Also I think the activity level is measured as activity from your instance, not globally.
No, my instance (discuss.online) has defederated from lemmygrad.ml but not hexbear.net or lemmy.ml and yet I see the former two but not the latter, so it definitely is something special wrt just it alone.
Also with the URL being to https://lemmyverse.net, I don’t see how it would even know which instance is “mine”? e.g. I have an alt on startrek.website, which does not block any of those three instances, and another old one on Kbin, but how would it pick?
I suspect rather that there was a network hiccup or other problem obtaining the activity data. But in any case, it’s not like “activity of lemmy.world > activity of lemmy.ml”, and rather more that the latter is unknown to that website.
Btw I nominated your discussion to the BestOf community at https://lemmy.world/post/16213730 - since you cannot do that yourself, someone else needs to nominate it for you. I hope that helps spread the word some more bc this is a very valuable discussion that needs to happen imho. Thank you for your efforts to improve things for many people in the Fediverse:-).
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”.
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.
Thanks I think you’re pretty nifty too. You’re welcome over for latkas anytime
What do you mean by “pro Jewish”? I doubt a comment like “Jewish people are human beings that deserve respect” would get you downvoted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Decentralization is good for everyone.
