Asking as there has been a few comments mentioning this with the new [email protected] taking over [email protected]
[email protected] for additional context on those recent events if you are interested
Also, an older post for more context on how lemmy.ml is managed: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
Curious to hear other thoughts about this, as I’m trying to keep [email protected] active, but might suggest to move it elsewhere if a lot of people prefer not to interact with lemmy.ml communities
No, there are no instances whose communities I refuse to participate on. I have never blocked a community, user, or instance here.
Oh man I don’t know how I would use this place if I couldn’t block communities. First few weeks I try to use Lemmy every single post was just memes so I’d end up blocking like two dozen communities to stop it.
Not to mention just randomly scrolling in public and whoops, it’s a random porn clip brought to you by lemmynsfw
In your Settings is an option to ban all content labelled as NSFW regardless of its origin.
Me too but clearly Lemmy.ml doesn’t like me xD
*Besides the ones your instance has defederated from
No, because its nonsense tribalism. I haven’t seen any actual consistency in nonsense takes between any particular instances, with only a couple of extreme examples (explodingheads, grad, yddrasil, etc) that are already blocked or dehosted. ML has more socialists, because lemmy was a little leftist community project at first and it’s one of the oldest and biggest instances. Big instances also have a lot of idiots. World has a reputation for a lot of idiots, because it’s by far the biggest instance. That doesn’t mean everyone, or even most people, are idiots that are on the instance.
When the admins spend more time banning people for speaking against fascist russia than developing lemmy it doesn’t matter what the userbase is like. And not wanting to participate in an instance where the admins religiously scan every comment for wrongthink is pretty reasonable and not tribalism.
It’s full of Tankies spewing disinformation and ban you for moderate stances. Take their news community for example.
Before I completely defederated from them, their “news” communities were the first ones I ever had to administratively remove/hide because it was nothing but propaganda and bad faith posts.
Omg you defederated from them - that’s amazing! I’ve been going around saying that lemmy.cafe is the only instance I’ve ever even heard of that has done so, but now I can add dubvee.org to that list as well.
Damn, you keep impressing the hell out of me!:-P Every time I dig deeper, there’s always another thing to like below that!:-)
Lol, thanks. I just try to curate the best experience as I can for my instance.
Re: Defederation
Lolz so true!!:-)
Take their news community for example.
No thank you, I would pay to avoid that actually! 😆
I don’t have anything against .ml users as a whole. As you say, every instance has its bad apples.
But .ml has the most hostile and heavy-handed admins of any instance I know of. It makes it impossible to have real conversations because talking about certain topics will get you instantly banned from the whole instance. It’s not about socialism either. In fact that’s part of the problem—I’m a leftist myself who would like to discuss leftism there and I used to enjoy doing so, but at this point that’s only possible if you follow the admin’s ideological beliefs on practically everything to a tee. It’s a toxic environment where real conversations can’t take place.
Ignoring reality doesn’t make it less true. Certain groups of people or environments are worse than others, acting like that isn’t reality is pretty naive.
If there was a pro slavery, racist group would you say they deserve to be respected, of course not. There is a line, we just disagree on where it is. And calling that disagreement tribalism is simply trying to hand wave away valid criticism.
I’m only an idiot when I fully intend to be one.
This is the biggest flaw with Lemmy at the moment.
I think I’m on my 4th account . Mods tend to block me befor I block them, because I don’t adhere to tribal rules.
I’m probably anarchist / socialist politically but I call out bullshit when I see it. People don’t like that.
I’ve blocked the instance quite a while ago. In the beginning I was just blocking communities, but the users spill everywhere unless you go nuclear.
Thanks for this info, I didn’t realize you could block an entire instance.
You can’t really. I mean you can block an instance, but that only hides the communities that are on it - you’ll still see the users. The only way I know how to ditch the users, besides blocking each one individually, would be to make a new account on either dubvee.org or Lemmy.cafe where all 3 of the big 3 are completely defederated. Think of those instances as troll-blockers, working hard to keep the Fediverse pleasant to converse in:-).
This is something that that bothers me… I joined lemmy.ml around 3 years ago as one of the pirate subs on reddit made a backup community there in case they were banned.
Fast forward to the api debacle, I started to use lemmy as a permanent alternative, and made 3 of my favourite art communities- abstract photography, collage and printmaking
It’s always been in the back (and sometimes the front of my mind) whether to move them elsewhere, partly because people commenting on their ‘blanket ban’ of lemmy.ml, and the fact that I sometimes feel that I’m on one of the ‘pariah’ instances.
It’s interesting reading the comments here, especially considering the art communities are laid back, without politics, and haven’t had any issues (so far)…
Moving communities is always an option.
We moved [email protected] to [email protected] a while ago, it worked fine, it’s even more active now that it used to be as there is no delay due to LW size
Yep, it’s something that has occurred to me, I’ve got an idea of which instance and all that, but I’d probably need to speak with the admins. I don’t know whether communities can migrate over posts/comments etc and part of me is reluctant to leave all that behind… BUT, I’ve done it once from scratch, so it’s not impossible
For me it was a blanket ban that finally caused me to unsubscribe from every ml community. If it wasn’t for that then it might be OK to keep hosting a non-political sub but the censorship over there is so aggressive and widespread that it’s very difficult to avoid.
I would say think about migration because if anything the problem is getting worse over time.
I do agree that art subs in general are among the most politics-free areas of lemmy, (speaking as a moderator of traditional art)
I have mostly refrained from posting political art, even though I do really like a good caricature (I grew up on Spitting Image, and other British satire progs), and also political art is, well… art
But, people come to see the nice pictures and chill out for a bit, which is fair, and it’s good to have that as a community
Although if other people either get banned as a result of saying something about China or Russia etc., or they choose for themselves to defederate somehow, then over time that is an increasing number of people across the Fediverse who cannot enjoy that artwork.
It’s like… what if the Library of Alexandria had made some copies and sent it out to remote places, before being (accidentally?) burned down by Julius Caesar during his civil war?
If that artwork is important to be seen by people everywhere, then why allow it to be held hostage by an admin team that could at any moment add still more things to the unnamed list of topics that are forbidden to be discussed on that instance? China, Russia, Uyghurs, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Taiwan, and… what else will it be tomorrow?
You might even say something that gets taken out of context and be banned from the entire instance yourself. “Killing Uyghurs is not the best work I have seen” - no no, I meant that killing them isn’t happening at all, I was referring to the title of the painting!?
Well, it’s something to consider. I hope I am not coming across here as being too extreme, just trying to offer some thoughts along the lines that you mentioned that you have already started, in case it would be appreciated.:-)
…I hope I am not coming across here as being too extreme…
Not at all, you’ve basically summed up how I feel, plus added something I hadn’t considered which is what would happen if I was banned from .ml for a post or comment. I’ve got a few days holiday to have a think about it all and also ask the community… I don’t want to make top down ‘executive decisions’ without consultation
Cheers 👍
Indeed it is good to think ahead, rather than make rash decisions:-).
I mentioned elsewhere, to the developers of PieFed that I will switch to, that Dessalines is still an ally in the flight against for-profit corporate control over everything, e.g. Reddit, Facebook, Threads, X, etc. But while I have ENORMOUS respect for having offered the Lemmy codebase, the way he runs his personal instance… it’s not all good, nor all bad, but definitely does have more worrisome elements than most Lemmy or Mastodon instances.
The lack of transparency in governance in particular, as well as how heavy-handed it is, and again the fact that the unwritten rules are so hard to guess at, and could change at any time. It leaves people feeling insecure in the situation, which seems to make it unreliable, unless you constantly dance to his tune, which he never states quite what that is. And even if you never so much as mention e.g. Ukraine or Uyghurs or Gaza, the fact that someone else in your community could, and therefore mandatorily become booted from the community (along with the entire instance), is not ideal. The rules merely state that Lemmy.ml is “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but there’s far more (politics) going on besides that.
At least Reddit was more honest about Huffman’s opinion - “you are landed gentry and I will harvest your data and no longer allow third-party apps unless they pay my exorbitant fee”. Okay… good to know I guess.
Anyway, if I helped any then I am glad ☺️.
Previously no. Now yes. Apparently got banned for inciting ‘peril’ against my own race because tankies don’t know the difference between ethnically Chinese and of Chinese nationality, and apparently you can’t criticize china in the forums. Throw in a few abusive individuals from the same instance shooting off the mouth and I pretty much said fuck it, I’m out.
lemmy.ml tends to have an immature userbase with immature mods. It’s a weird bubble of insane extremists that are all about ideological purity tests. They aren’t really interested in discussion and will ban anyone that doesn’t conform to their extremism. And their extremists are constantly edging towards stochastic terrorism.
So needless to say, I’m banned from lemmy.ml, and I feel like that’s a badge of honour. But that does mean I won’t be engaging with any community that’s hosted on lemmy.ml.
So if you want to have discussion that’s not about how super awesome the violent overthrow of the government of your country would be, I’d recommend not hosting your community on lemmy.ml.
So what you are saying is that since you are banned from lemmy.ml, you cannot participate in communities such as [email protected], for reasons entirely unrelated to anything that you said in that community?
Which means conversely that from your perspective, that entire community - and all others likewise hosted on lemmy.ml - are “held hostage” behind you either outright agreeing with whatever stance is taken by the instance admins, about whatever subject matters they choose to be the defining criteria for exclusion from the instance, or else at least you need to STFU about your true thoughts, about e.g. China, and capitalism, and Russia, and whatever else they feel like adding at any given moment.
It would have been nice to have had a warning presented to you, wouldn’t it? Like when you first go there, have a popup or sidebar note saying “Warning: you must agree that neither China nor Russia is actively engaging in genocide in order to participate in this community discussion about… <checks notes> the popular Firefox web browser”.
I bet reading the sidebar notice presented on lemmy.ca did not quite prepare you for that!?!?!?
It would be nicer to segregate “political” communities and instances from apolitical ones. Except these days, facts themselves are political, and all we can do is suck it and swallow.
Yeah it’s really lame… seems like the ban is permanent, so I went ahead and blocked lemmy.ml. No point in seeing content from communities that some self-righteous admin decided I shouldn’t be allowed to interact with.
It is what it is. I already left reddit because of their bullshit owners. There’s still way better communities on reddit than on lemmy.ml, and as bullshit as the owners of reddit are, they’re still not as bad as the owners of lemmy.ml. So if it were really an issue to me I’d just go back to reddit. But it’s fun to discuss things in smaller communities so I’ll stick with lemmy, just not lemmy.ml.
Yeah that’s what I am starting to realize over the last couple of days - that while Reddit was bad, in some ways at least, they were less bad than Lemmy, or as you say at least lemmy.ml.
The key ingredient there is the transparency: Huffman may be a dick, but at least he is upfront about things: “you are landed gentry, under MY dominion, mu-wha-ha-ha now all will bow before me” indeed, but contrast that to claiming that lemmy.ml is for “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but did you get banned for spouting paid software? Or for violating privacy? No, or at least doubtful (I didn’t look:-). Look at the four rules - which ones did you break, that would warrant a site-wide ban? Some people get banned for none, e.g. for claiming that they have Uyghur family members staying with them who have experienced discrimination and potential genocide and… BAM, ban hammer. Bc neither Russia nor China can ever do any wrong - it is the USA that is “evil”, that is “capitalist”, and “democratic”, and “doing genocide”, but again, not precious Russia or China that does so.
I am looking heavily into alternatives that will allow banning lemmy.ml users across the Fediverse. One is lemmy.cafe, another is the Tesseract UI as implemented e.g. on dubvee.org, and another is Mbin (maybe, unless a bug no longer allows that? I saw one report of such anyway, but don’t have an account so cannot confirm), and I am leaning heavily towards joining PieFed, bc it’s so exciting what it is positioning itself to become in the future. Sublinks too but it never seems to be updating anymore, so I guess it’s stalled somehow.
Dessalines can do as he pleases. If we don’t like it, we can leave Lemmy. Those are our options.
Curious to hear other thoughts about this, as I’m trying to keep [email protected] active, but might suggest to move it elsewhere if a lot of people prefer not to interact with lemmy.ml communities
I would vote for moving it elsewhere. Maybe lemmy.zip would be a good instance that’s focused around tech and gaming. Or discuss.tchncs.de because [email protected] and [email protected] are already hosted there.
You are a very active poster here, so moving it to that instance would also be convenient in case you need to mod
Also, that instance is very well managed, always impressed with the other services they offer.
Based on the comments, it seems like we should definitely suggest this. Would you like to make a meta post or do I do it?
I’m busy this weekend. Feel free to go ahead with the post.
Done!
Yep. Even if it’s larger, I’ll post in a smaller, non-ml. I don’t mind reading their stuff and them existing but with the seemingly random moderation shenanigans, I avoid it.
Of course.
They banned me for calling Russia imperialist in one of their rant post, and claiming NATO was necessary because countries keep invading their neighbors.
Meanwhile the Hexbear users saying that “crackers” should be murdered are welcome to continue their discussions on .ml.
Our based opinions aren’t allowed over there. You have to bend left until your view is broken.
I mean really you’re bending upward to authoritarian on the compass
< looks around at Western countries with militarized police forces, brutal suppression of protest, and high incarceration rates >
“This is fine. Tankies are authoritarian.”
Lemmy is already fairly left. ML is tankie from what I understand, so that would not be further left but upward, right? I hope you didn’t get the impression I’m a fan of prison slave labor and western imperialism. Many things can be and are bad at once
If something is bad, then all its adversaries are good and can do no wrong.
Same, but Gyna.
I never pay attention to, or care about where a community is hosted
i tend to not even notice, usually picking a community by volume of subs and posting. its hard to keep up with the terrible modding in places as ive subbed to over 800 active communities in various instances. i dont block instances. at minimum, i want to see whats going on.
i dont recall specific issues with .ml but .world seems specifically egregious with its power trip modding, based on how ive been ‘reprimanded’… its amazing how they want to kill activity/enthusiasm in some subs that are desperate for content.
it feels like once an instance gets a solid level of user account churn, they feel they can do whatever to end users as there will just be more. its reddit all over again in places.
the power modding is somewhat shocking to me as the threadiverse really isnt all that large. i guess it doesnt take much for those people.
some of the only users ive silenced are mods
Removed by mod
I would recommend sh.itjust.works
lol
I was banned from a large sub there because I downvoted some clickbaity posts by the mod themselves. Literally that, downvoting.
Removed by mod
Quite frankly I’d rather not say it, I don’t want to start shit/drama.
Removed by mod
Feel free to report it on [email protected]
Completely banned, I have zero interaction with them.
Yes. I’ve had personal experience, many times, of over the top censorship and bans based on opposing views expressed in a mature and rational way. Once or twice is fine, but I’ve seen it more there than my entire combined experience online, it’s crazy and happens to often to ignore.
I’ve also seen a crazy amount of trolling there and it seems the trolls are protected through crazy censorship of anyone calling them out. It’s just not worth the aggravation.
Fwiw, lemmy.cafe defederated from lemmy.ml, and is even running a 0.19.6 beta codebase so even if there’s only a single admin they seem really on the ball.
Tesseract also has implemented a way to ban all users from lemmy.ml.
And PieFed allows personal bans on any custom instance you choose. Plus it has “categories” of communities so that you don’t have to keep searching on All, though you can do that too if you want. It seems really polished these days! Not 100% - e.g. you can’t easily search for a user in the same form as a keyword - but it looks extremely usable, so I am switching to it today.
Meanwhile, on Lemmy we were promised that 0.19.3 would allow user blocking of instances, which turned out to be not quite true, and when your instance upgrades from that to 0.19.6 when it comes out (most other instances, like mine, are already running 0.19.5), the protections that it offers will be further rolled back - e.g. on 0.19.3 I did not receive notifications from those users, whereas now on 0.19.5 I do.
And maybe some apps allow blocking of an instance, I dunno about that aspect.
Lemmy.ml was one of the first instances in the Fediverse… but that doesn’t mean that we should be forced to listen to the stuff spewing forth from it unless we choose that for ourselves, especially in the next few months as the trolls go into overdrive due to the ongoing USA election (and likely subsequent “constitutional crisis” event).
Anyway, I just wanted you to know that there are options! Not many, but they do exist!:-)
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I have to say the responses in this thread are a bummer, but I’m not surprised. I signed up on lemmy.ml because when I read the descriptions of the various instances, ML’s “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts” sounded pretty great and I saw a lot of technical communities that interested me. I didn’t expect the politics. I tried to make a new user on .world a few months back, but I seemed to get stuck in some sort of user verification limbo. Maybe I’ll try midwest.social since I moved to the midwest recently.
DBZero is a great option if you like something slightly edgy
Dbzero and programming.dev are already also high on my list, but thanks for the recommendation. I’m not in a super hurry to move or anything, I’ve never been given a hard time on ML, but I hate to think I’m slowly being edged out of the wider lemmy experience.
slowly being edged out of the wider lemmy experience.
If your home instance is lemmy.ml and it’s just people using communities on instances other than lemmy.ml, then you still get the full experience, unless you’re committed to only using locally-hosted communities or something.
If instances are defederating with lemmy.ml, then you’re missing content.
I don’t know of an easy way to get a list of which instances have defederated with a given instance. The information is public, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has a spider, like the lemmyverse.net one, that gathers it. But as things stand, it’s easy to, given an instance name, know which instances it has defederated from, but not which instances have defederated from it.
I don’t know of an easy way to get a list of which instances have defederated with a given instance.
there’s a website out there showing exactly this,but for the life of me I can’t rememeber the URL >_<
There used to be this, but most of the instances give errors nowadays:
https://defed.xyz/check?name=Lemmy.ml&software=lemmy
This one seems to work: https://fba.ryona.agency/?reverse=Lemmy.ml
Oh yeah that’s the one
At least the latter one is just showing which instances the named instance has defederated from, not which instances have defederated from the named instance.
That’s easy to get by checking /instances on a given instance already.
The problem is that you’d need some kind of spider that crawls all of the instances to get the reverse of that.
The former one does seem to show it.
At least the latter one is just showing which instances the named instance has defederated from, not which instances have defederated from the named instance.
You are correct, I don’t why they called it reverse, it’s confusing
Here’s the search I wanted: https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=Lemmy.ml
It’s absolutely the defederating that worries me more than the blocking. I have seen talk about nontrivial lemmy instances mulling defederation enough to keep an eye on it though.
.ca is good as well, the admin is top tier and very transparent with the userbase. I’m quite happy with my instance.
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