The administration of lemmy.ml routinely abuses its rule 1 anti-bigotry policy to conduct political censorship, deleting documented facts regarding the ukraine invasion, holodomor, and xinjiang abuses under false pretexts of imperialist propaganda, misinformation, and nazism while leaving pro-Kremlin talking points untouched.
Verifiable public moderation logs prove this systemic shielding of state propaganda, down to moderators inverting standard geopolitical context, such as noting that fringe extremist units do not make an entire democratic nation fascist, to ban dissenters under the explicit excuse of being a Nazi.
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=25800386 and https://lemmy.world/modlog/446?page=1&actionType=All&userId=20355358.
The Europe community moderator (https://lemmy.world/u/[email protected]), who focuses exclusively on criticizing the West and never Russia or China, banned me as a Nazi.
I decided to block the lemmy.ml instance entirely to avoid any further interaction.
I see that there are dozens of relevant posts; you can find the relevant report posts here
- https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
- https://lemmy.world/post/5697017
- https://lemmy.world/post/50302822
- https://lemmy.world/post/13238608
- https://lemmy.world/post/43978041
Log screenshots
The comments in this post are turning nasty and I’ve already banned two users for their behavior. Locked.
The path to enlightenment.
Reminds me of some zio article I read lately that says in reality democrasy does not work in the middleast and that Israel is the only democrasy in the middleeast…etc ,… without mentioning that in reality the US steps in to slaughter every middleastern country the moment they try democrasy, and forces them to install a puppet dictatorship government that works for the intrests of israel and US.
It is so blatantly obvious. Worse than the_donald was on reddit. Pure Chinese and Russia propaganda. Overtly negative on anything from the west and won’t allow anything negative about Russia, China, etc.
The mods do whatever they want, many break their own posted rules with regularity.
In my experience, in Lemmy they are more apt to delete a comment then ban, so that is nice.
There’s no logic to it. I’ve said “The nation ___________ says this, their motto is ___________ … (and then repeat their own slogan from their own officials).”
Delete. 100% true, easily verifiable everywhere, public information pertaining to the discussion, deleted.
So, if you’re censored or banned, that just means that you’re a thinking person with reasonable opinions who bases your conclusions on the factual information available to you.
It’s a good thing. Thank God.
If they agree with you, please get help immediately. Time is short.
The authoritarian bootlicker server is doing authoritarian bootlicker things? Shocked, I say. Shocked!
I’m just a user here but three days ago I was banned from some community without any explanation. Some moderator accused me of being a rapist because of one comment that they deleted and no one could read. After some comments trying to find out what was happening, I was banned. I didn’t see before, but in that community, in the blahaj something instance, they warn something like ‘no tankies’. I’m in lemmy.ml, and I guess that makes me a tankie.
These instance wars are bullshit.
I’ve blocked all .lm instances and even now piefed. The creator or piefed bans anyone who criticizes his dumb ass decisions. Well that’s fine, there a reason the entirety of piefed as a software has been decreasing population.
Also there are occasional mods that just love to jerk themselves. The dumb taco truck mod on the Star Trek instance will ban you if you say you don’t like new Star Trek, but that dumbass just moderates two mostly dead communities, so it’s okay
It’s basically a rite of passage for a new lemmy user to get banned from half of .ml for a completely mundane comment they made.
Just defederate yourself from those instances (block them.) Idk why you think spending all this time and effort on an instance you really don’t like is going to do anything positive for you.
If you root for murderous authoritarian dictatorships just cause they are anti-west, you are not a leftist, you are not a tankie, you are a fascist and should be treated as such.
You must be new around here. This is old news and a reason a lot of places block ml
It’s important to document their behavior anyway, because not al places block ml.
I knew that lemmy.ml is tankies, but removing comments/posts that don’t serve their agenda is new to me.
In large part that is what the word “tankie” means - denial of reality, instead substituting their own, which can only be done inside of a controlled echo chamber. Tankie is no way is synonymous with Communist.
Think MAGA but on the left - it’s otherwise identical in terms of behaviors, merely different talking points.
You may find this illustrative:
It’s pro-authoritarian. That means this control is not really a contradiction. They say they’re leftist, but I think it’d be hard to actually justify that based on the groups they support. Russia isn’t leftist. The USSR may have been, but it’s long gone. Russia is anti-LGBT+ and doesn’t protect workers. It’s an oligarchy.
There are only two consistent things they follow. They’re pro-authoritarian and anti-west.
You may find this illustrative:
404 not found
Here let me help
Whatever the fuck tankies are -------● doing / / ● Far \ /Right \ / ●----●Center●/ Far Left™Images barely working, ascii art, threaded structure, federation…
close enough, welcome back usenet.
Thanks. I still have no idea what I’m looking at though. A left-right scale of some kind - is it just randomly drawn lines in the classic political compass?
It is labeled “stethoscope theory” and the image is just regular horseshoe theory, but with “far left” replaced by Tankies and moved to its own special branch that continues off to the left instead of circling back around.
Thank you! That at least gave me enough context to find this image (let’s see if it works)
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They are not really leftist. They call themselves that, but they support the authoritarian oligarchy of Russia. That’s not what a leftist would do. They are anti-western and pro-authoritarian, and that’s about it.
Tankeis are not leftists.
I never paid attention to the word until I came to Kbin and subsequently Lemmy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie says:
Tankie originated in the UK as a term for hardline members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who continued to pledge support for the Soviet Union even when doubts had begun to emerge elsewhere in the party.
… Politically speaking, tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China, etc.
Practically speaking, tankies are pro-fascist and pro-genocide, plus individual (literal) murders, so long as it is done by their favored in-groups (e.g. Russian aggression vs. Ukraine portrayed instead as poor whittle russia forced to defend itself, whoopsie), and opposed to anything (even outright socialism) when done by their opposed out-groups - chiefly Western Civilization.
So their cries of “Death to the USA” are meant literally, and also inclusive of other NATO states.
Source: go visit Lemmy.ml, which unlike most other instances by default without being logged in shows only Local rather than Global content, and see for yourself, it should only take a couple of minutes to find such evidence. Or possibly better yet lemmygrad.ml, except that most instances actually defederate from that one whereas almost none defederate from Lemmy.ml.
One of my first experiences in the Fediverse was mentioning the Uyghur genocide and having my comment promptly removed by the .ml admins. They’ve been doing this all the time.
When I first got on here I waded into a thread praising north korea and got so many downvotes for not knowing how awesome the Kim regime is. Fucking tankies man
It’s a rite of passage here 😁
imagine you mentioned the tianamin massacre, it would get thier panties in a wad.
A lot of instances are curated, they’re the supreme mods after all. Some delay your posts until they can curate them, and some just remove them. It’s the way it be.
This isn’t said and understood enough. Instances on the Fediverse aren’t free-for-all, apolitical places without ideology. Some try to be (with varying success) but being active in the Fediverse and especially running an instance is in itself a fairly ideological and political act. So chances are instances reflect their owners’ ideology. And that is great because one has places to be if an instance doesn’t suit them, unlike corpo platdorms where one ideology drives most of them.
The only thing that bugs me about it is that the largest instances can control what most people see.
True. It’s definitely not a perfect, problem-solved thing. Merely an (significant?) improvement from the corporate status quo.
The great thing about lemmy’s design is that that’s not really true. I’m seeing this criticism of .ml despite being on .ml, because most of the posts that I see on lemmy are not on my home instance. At least half the time, I’m having discussions outside of my “home turf.”
When you have a space that agrees on certain base assumptions, it becomes easier to have more in depth and thoughtful discussions, because you don’t have to focus on just proving or advocating for those basic assumptions over and over again, and watching every word you say to make sure it can’t be twisted or misinterpreted to paint you in a negative light. By contrast, sharing a space with ideological opponents often means people tend to dig in and just make snipes at each other, everybody’s just grandstanding and trying to get owns in, and the level of discussion is brought down to name-calling and accusations.
At the same time, yes, echo chambers are a concern. If you’re never exposed to opposing viewpoints, obviously that’s not great either. We can see that happen on any number of subreddits. And if we were on different subreddits instead of on different instances, I wouldn’t be seeing this criticism, and you wouldn’t be seeing my response to it.
The way the fediverse is designed inherently addresses both of those concerns. You can have a space where the discussions assume a shared ideology allowing for in depth discussions, but then you’re also federated with other spaces with different shared assumptions. The “tankie” creators of lemmy designed it this way on purpose, for that reason. To allow minority views (including but not limited to their own) to have spaces for discussion, without becoming isolated. To allow for higher level discussions with shared assumptions while also allowing for interactions between groups with different assumptions.
This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies, and that is not in spite of what the .ml’s admins want, they literally designed it that way on purpose.
The only censorship that really matters on the fediverse is defederation.
and those other instances can also moderate and delete comments and posts for all other instances unless archived or crossposted. If a lemmy.world mod deletes a comment in a lemmy.world post, I won’t be able to see it from over here in db0
Tbf this is true for all instances - it is simply how the ActivityPub Protocol works. The home instance “owns” the content, so if e.g. a Lemmy.world user submits a post to a community on Lemmy.ml, then other LW users won’t be able to see it if it gets removed, but the same is true vice versa if a ML user submits a post to a community located on LW.
This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies
Literally nobody has ever claimed that users on Lemmy.ml are not allowed to see content on other instances - this is not merely a strawman argument but an absolutely ridiculous one.
Please don’t bother to reply to this if this is the level of content that your messages will contain.
For anyone else that is curious, the complaint is about the lack of transparency in describing what content is vs. is not allowed - a community of people discussing FOSS comes nowhere close to mentioning that you are not allowed to come close to criticizing Russia, China, or North Korea - e.g. it is not allowed to state that Ukraine is not the aggressor and that rather Russia is, or to state that Uyghurs are being killed by China.
I really really really really really really really really wish that Lemmy would implement a true instance block so that I did not have to spend time reading such comments as this. But for some reason that option is denied to me. Go figure.
It’s not really a strawman in that I never claimed anyone said it. It’s just that people talk about “censorship” and “echo chambers” and “they have to remove things to keep their users brainwashed” or whatever nonsense, ignoring the fact that the structure of the fediverse, as designed by the .ml admins, makes that more or less impossible.
For anyone else that is curious, the complaint is about the lack of transparency in describing what content is vs. is not allowed
OK, fair enough, they could afford to clarify the rules somewhat. But I don’t really consider that a huge deal. I’ve been banned from communities on .world for things that aren’t enumerated in the rules too. I don’t see why rules have to cover every possible thing.
Why are you writing tankie in quotes?
Because I disagree with the term. The admins are not “tankies,” they are Marxist-Leninists.
What makes someone a “tankie” is that they “defend” certain states. In practice, “defending” often includes just refuting misinformation, for example, if I refute that “everyone in North Korea gets the same haircut” then I’m “defending” it and therefore a “tankie.” It can also mean acknowledging accomplishments, saying any good thing about any socialist state, like, “Cuba had a very successful literacy program,” which is just an objective historical fact. “Tankie” is supposed to mean someone who blindly supports everything a socialist state has ever done, in practice, it means someone who supports anything a socialist state has ever done.
Before it was “tankie” it was “pinko,” and before that “red.” That kind of red scare bullshit has allowed blatant misinformation to run rampant, because even rational people avoid pushing back on it for fear of being labelled a “tankie.” As stories about how all communists eat babies or whatnot run rampant, it has in turn hurt the reputation of both leftists and liberals, because it literally doesn’t matter how hard you try to distance yourself from the far-left, you’ll still get associated with it. Joe Biden got called a communist for Christ’s sake. To put it another way:
Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.
The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.
- Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds
That is why I put “tankie” in quotes.
This. Just imagine if all of Lemmy was like one instance or another. The whole point of the fediverse is that there can be multiple instances, and you can just gravitate towards the ones that align with your own views.
Except it would be nice if the instances were honest about their rules, or at least that they would be described somewhere written down, rather than people having to continually find out the hard way (such as OP).
They’ve always done this. “Rule 1” Is pretty much a .ml meme catch all for “you aren’t allowed to use facts here. Agree or be removed”
You might be thinking of lemmygrad?
they have been doing that, maybe you dont visit thier posts often. hexbear, lemmygrad, and ml are all super tankies. others ones you may want to avoid is dbzero, or equivalent, startrek website comm, and some of blahj ones.
LOL, startrek.website? IIRC the whole hubbub about them was that they defederated from dbzer0 in the first place.
What part of “tankies” do you not understand?
Im glad youre taking the steps to enjoy lemmy your way. Take care stranger.
There needs to be a list of instances that defederate lemmy.ml by default. It’s not just a single community, it is at the admin level.
Be the change you want to see in this world. Make your own instance and defederate.
Defederate lemmy.ml
I had one .ml mod delete a comment of mine because I listed events that disagreed with them minimizing the horrors of 1986 republicans. They stated your average '86 republican was further left than 2026 average dem. So I blocked that mod and that channel.
So I guess .ml are apologists for the '86 gop now?
Tankies: we’re leftists!
Also tankies: Reagan wasn’t that bad
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
Y’all really need to come to terms with the fact that tankies are just conservatives larping.
Why do you need the admin of your server to manage your block list for you? Perhaps youre unsure of how to take personal responsibility of your own lemmy account. Dont worry stranger, I got your back.
Welcome to a tutorial on how to block .ml on your personal account.
In the top right corner of the top of the page, there are 3 horizontal white bars. Click it.
This will open up a drop down menu. At the bottom of that menu, you will see your username. Click it.
This will open another drop down menu with 3 options. Click “Settings”.
At the top of your screen you will see 2 tabs. Click the one that says “Blocks”.
Here you will see “Block user” “Block community” and “Block instance”. Click the down arrow below “Block instance”.
This will open up a search bar. Type “lemmy.ml” and click it after it shows up. That’s it! You’ve blocked .ml and will never see content from the instance.
But wait, we aren’t done yet in this menu. Click the down arrow under “Block user”. Now type “UltraGiGaGigantic” Make sure you select my .ml account as the other ones I no longer use. Thanks, appreciate it.
I mean. You can also just go to their front page and read the “about this instance” paragraph where they clarify that they support a specific political ideology and will not tolerate dissent.
They explicitly built a walled garden. Don’t be surprised they maintain the walls. There are other instances.
I do want to thank them for vaccinating me from their ideology. Interacting with them made me realize that I’m a social democrat and not a full blown socialist
Any other self affirmations you wish to share with us?
Nah. Do you?
Not only that but they explicitly said years ago that they WANTED someone to go make a liberal instance for liberals to use and do their own thing. Which is what happened. Yet people continue to throw a fit that .ml maintains its policies. The entire point of lemmy is that you can choose the instance that works best for you! The entire reason many of the original people came to lemmy was that reddit banned Marxist-Leninist (what you would call “tankie”) communities. And even many just vaguely leftist spaces. So people made their own thing where no one person controls what is allowed and what isn’t. That’s what federation is all about. If you don’t like that there are instances that disagree with you on a fundamental level and ban you for your opinions then you don’t actually understand what the point of federation is to begin with. I mean ML is in the name. What did you expect?
(edit to clarify I’m asking the OP not the commenter I am agreeing with the commenter.)
Recently there seems to be some of misunderstanding what the lemmy.ml instance is about, especially from newer users.
Lemmy.ml has always been a niche site, and it will most likely stay this way. We don’t have any intentions to turn it into a mainstream instance, or set a goal of getting as many users as possible. Our goal is simple: make an instance that people like to use. I would say that we have been successful in this, but obviously it is impossible to satisfy everyone.
The reason for this is that @dessalines and I are paid to develop Lemmy, while donations from lemmy.ml users only make up a negligible part of our income. Besides, having more users would force us to spend more time moderating, and less time for development. Lemmy works quite differently from big tech sites like Reddit in this regard: while they get more money with each extra user through advertising, for us it is the opposite. So we would much rather have a smaller, non-toxic, and friendly userbase, than a large one.
Part of the problem might be that lemmy.ml is described as “flagship instance”, which can certainly be interpreted to mean “mainstream” or “general purpose”. I struggle to come up with a better, more accurate description. If you can think of one, please comment here.
If you dont like the way lemmy.ml works, thats okay. Federation exists exactly to solve that problem, let different groups have their own instances, with their own rules and political views. You can see the list of existing instances, and instructions for setting up a new one on join-lemmy.org.
In particular, I would like to see someone (or a group of people) create a mainstream, or liberal instance. That should help to avoid further drama, and avoid attempts to turn lemmy.ml into something that it is not. @dessalines and I would certainly be willing to help with any technical problems that such an instance runs into, and include it on join-lemmy.org (just like any other instance that meets the code of conduct).
The problem is that it’s the developers’ instance and they promote it as a default general use instance and not a explicit political ideological instance so it has a significant portion of people just trying to join the network.
I would recommend someone looking to join the threadiverse to use piefed over Lemmy for that reason (of course piefed has its own problematic “features” with regards to default mute lists and transparency)
In my experience it’s not an explicit political ideological instance. I’m there all the time and never get called anything because I think this or that, except when I’m outside of ML, where I get “tankie” a lot.
Anyone who uses “tankies” unironically is a braindead basement dweller keyboard warrior who has zero critical thinking skills.
Why is it a problem? Literally every single major social media platform has an ideological slant. Twitter (X) is the nazi one, reddit is the like omega liberal vote blue no matter who one, facebook is mindless reaction, etc. If lemmy.world was considered the “default” instance I could say the same thing about it being different than my own political beliefs.
I think the problem is that people can’t handle seeing places they aren’t welcome anymore. Marxist-Leninists are allowed to have their own spaces, and do not have to cater to other peoples views. There is ALWAYS going to be a dominant ideology and a set of rules on each instance. You don’t agree with the ones lemmy.ml has. That’s okay.
Algorithmic social media silos people into their little boxes where they only see what they want to see. People are so used to that now that imo they’ve forgotten how to handle being faced with a place/group of people who just fundamentally disagree with them, and are not open to hearing what they have to say. Yet that is just reality. People need to learn to deal the fact those places and those people exist.
Supporting the heavily anti LGBTQ imperialist state of Russia is not liberal.
Anyone who supports Russia is explicitly anti LGBTQ. You cannot be pro LGBTQ whilst supporting and defending a fascist government that treads on LGBTQ rights.
Neither is it liberal to claim that supporting the existence of Jews, whilst explicitly denouncing the genocide state of israel is a “zionist stance”, which geneve_convenience, the mod mentioned in this post literally verbatim did, and then banned someone over.
Super liberal, basically stating that Jews as a people, regardless of any individuals opinion, don’t deserve to exist, just because many of them are zionist. By that logic members of every major religion, as well as every single cis white male don’t deserve the right to exist as a people.
If you knew .ml, you would have known that they ain’t so solid on being labelled as liberals lmao.
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My reply makes plenty of sense if you know how to read. I didn’t call .ml liberal. Quite the opposite actually.
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Not from Voyager iirc, which also iirc is by far the most used third party app? Also, for multiple years that what is Lemmy.ml link did not work - it pointed to a post, which I think a later version of Lemmy.ml allowed communities to be made private, and then they never bothered to check what would happen for anyone not logged into a ML account, so it would just give like a 404 not found error for everyone else.
Agreed that it’s not impossible to find out who they are - just that ML makes an exceedingly poor representation of the Threadiverse to people coming over here from Reddit. So when they see “death to the USA”, and they are… you know, in the USA, they often nope right out and not only never come back, they spread the word to anyone who will listen that that is what “we” here who use Lemmy are.
Btw, in case you were not aware, we are a tankie bar (see: Paradox of Intolerance).
Also, despite all the curation they perform within their garden, they won’t allow people to block the Lemmy.ml instance - so it’s not entirely a walled garden so much as it is a delivery system for the messages shared by Lemmy.ml users.
So when they see “death to the USA”, and they are… you know, in the USA, they often nope right out
I say death to america all the time and I live here
same. Honestly if I didn’t live in the US I would probably be less anti-american. Living here is very radicalizing.
I don’t live in the US and you’d bet that I’m more hostile towards your state than you, I can bet on that. If you see what your state has done from a developing country’s eyes, your mind will be broken.
I think you are underestimating me, but I’m glad you are against America. I won’t say what I think because that probably wouldn’t be such a good idea for my health. But trust me we’re on the same page.
Which one do you have a problem with? The first rule?
That is the instance’s sidebar b██h. I followed your instructions and got there.
Ah, I see my instructions were not clear. You did great with the first step!
So the second step, I now realize the link isn’t “about this instance”, but it is actually labelled “what is lemmy.ml”. You can actually see it in your screenshot, right above the rules!
I’m very sorry for the confusion, I know it can be a complicated procedure.
Aww, look at the underhanded insults 😂
Here it is. Could you enlighten me with where it says that they “support a specific political ideology and will not tolerate dissent”?
Sadly, dumb shitheads like you have no capacity to read or question anything 😢
Literally calls out “western social media”
Lol stop being dense…fucking tankies man…
Learn to disagree without being rude or disrespectful.
It can be difficult sometimes, since western social media thrives on collective outrage, and they knowingly ingrain this into us for years. But please do adhere to this rule, and it will make this place much more enjoyable.
duhh, how dare these damn tankees say that western social media thrives on outrage 😤
Well, at least you can read subtext half the time. Probably explains why you read for calling everyone “shithead”.
Astonishing creativity, by the way. Simply incredible
still not answering the question
Probably explains why you read for calling everyone “shithead”.
Yeah, you’re not beating the allegations.
You should toddle off now. You are clearly in over your head. Go off and play now.
Not even gonna check what this is a reply to, even if you agree with me you suck for saying this lmao
