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.
What you are describing is basically Mastodon (or, if you like porn and hatespeech, twitter… non-consensual porn because a lot of Mastodon instances are REALLY horny).
The moment you aggregate communities across instances you remove the ability to moderate them. Because maybe a hexbear mod wants to remove all mention of the Uyghur people, an ml mod wants to remove all mention of genocide against them, and a zip mod wants to remove all the comments about why genocide is good in a thread about god damned Bluey.
Do they all get to delete everything across every instance? Do you start having different views of the same community depending on your home instance?
No, they control their content and you control whose instances you sub to.
Again, how does that work if c/linux is “the same” on every instance?
Will comments and posts exist on the world view of c/linux but not the zip view? At which point… what are we actually getting over the status quo? Because you can bet that anyone who has hexbear unblocked would see two different versions of every single thread because nobody else would see the hexbear posted thread.
What I mean is that a subset of all Linux communities agrees on a common set of rules and forms a community of communities. Content of all communities is shared with everyone who subscribes to one of the communities. Every community moderates its own content. If one community decides to have stricter rules than the others it can defederate. Basically just like on the level of instances.
What stops us to just defederate from lemmy.ml is that the community is hosted there and all members are linked to that one point of failure.
So… exactly what we already have except instead of c/[email protected] it is c/[email protected]?
No. Mastodon and twitter are short message services. Lemmy and reddit are content aggregators.
Instance A also cannot moderate the content of Instance B. Your argument is therefore invalid. The point of federation is that instances can agree on a common set of rules and values or not. In that case they defederate from each other. However, this doesn’t work in practice as communities are centralized. Obviously, most of us agree that lemmy.ml is a problem but we don’t federate just because they ‘own’ the instance.