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.

  • NuXCOM_90PercentEnglish
    433·
    5 months ago

    The hexbears realized that EVERYONE blocks them. One particularly humorous youtube even did a “One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let’s use hexbear as an example. Please follow along” gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.

    Since ml was generally sympathetic to tankies, if not full of the idiots, the hexbears basically just joined that en masse.

    But yeah. Caught a ban for racism/xenophobia because I questioned what positive benefit accelerationism would have for the Palestinian people. Reminded me way too much of attempting to interact with hexbear so I used that as an excuse to just start blocking any .ml community that I see in my feed. Not QUITE at the point of blocking the whole instance but… I expect to be there by the end of the month.

          • fuckingkangaroos@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            5 months ago

            Nonsense, go take a look at Hexbear or Lemmygrad. There’s very little moderation here, why wouldn’t they target it?

            • PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@feddit.ukEnglish
              2·
              5 months ago

              There’s plenty of moderation there, it’s just highly biased.

              There aren’t enough users on lemmy for a state actor to bother putting resources into controlling the narrative.

              Why waste time on a few thousand lemmy users when there are literally millions of gullible boomers on facebook that actually vote based on what they consume on social media?

              • fuckingkangaroos@lemm.eeEnglish
                1·
                5 months ago

                “Here” as in the fediverse generally, not “there” as in Hexbear.

                The Fediverse currently has over a million active monthly users, and had more in the past. You think it’s not worth it for them to spread propaganda to a million people in an environment they can manipulate? Come on.

    • Blaze@reddthat.comEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      One particularly humorous youtube even did a “One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let’s use hexbear as an example. Please follow along” gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.

      Interesting, do you have a link to the video?

      • NuXCOM_90PercentEnglish
        8·
        5 months ago

        Not off the top of my head. It was one of the various “tech” youtubers who will do everything ranging from “here is how to set up proxmox” to “I tried five twitter alternatives for a week” videos.