Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
I’ve only been on Lemmy a month, and this shit is already exhausting. Isn’t a main point of this whole fediverse thing that you can just block entire instances as well as users? Why is this even an ongoing topic that spans multiple communities?
You can do exactly that. OP wants everyone to do it.
I’m new here, so pardon my lack of understanding. But if this lemmy_.ml place is engaging in such disagreed upon behavior by so many people, why hasn’t it been banned so I’m not even seeing it in the first place? I’ve recently learned there are whole lemmy servers ignored or banned by most other civil lemmy servers due to their bad behavior, why not ml?
If this really has been going on for over a year, and so many communities are against it, why is it not banned?
Who would “ban” Lemmy.ml? There isn’t a “master instance” over all, each instance is an island.
Lemmy.world is currently discussing whether or not to sever ties with Lemmy.ml, just like Literature.cafe alreay did.
Lemmy.world has already defederated from Lemmygrad and Hexbear, the 2 largest Marxist instances, so Lemmy.ml is the last major Marxist-friendly instance that Lemmy.world interacts with.
For clarity, Lemmy.ml is seen very positively by some servers, and negatively by others. You are getting viewpoints largely from Lemmy.world, whereas other communities like db0, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, Blahaj.zone, or otherwise may have different or opposite stances.
That’s the beauty and messiness of federation.
Please bear in mind that I’m a lemmy.ml user (though not a tankie, nor marxist, nor even socialist.)
Look at OP. How many lines are about smearing someone for their politics and beliefs (Even the subject line covers ONLY that), and how many are about the need to improve moderation practices at .ml (precious few, not even the subject line).
IMO that’s one reason. The discussion rarely ends up being about moderation practices even when that’s the stated goal. It ends up being about not liking someone’s views.
The other reasons - you can personally block that instance if you choose, but for it to be hidden from EVERYONE on an instance, the admins of the instances need to make that decision. (To defederate.) There are lots of potential reasons not to do so, and I think many of them boil down to not throwing out the baby with the bathwater since there are plenty of users on ml like me who are not tankies and are just having the same discussions we’d have anywhere.
I got a 3 day ban from one single community at .ml within my first couple days here for using the term “whataboutism” - I suspect it was an automod action. I wasn’t really happy about it, but eh? shrug
I have the same answer for folks now that I did when social media was somehow full of US conservatives claiming they could no longer speak their minds on social media. No one is obligated to give me or you or anyone a platform. If Lemmy.ml is that much of a shithole, it will eventually get defederated broadly, and everyone who isn’t a tankie will stop using it.
The occasional thread like this, or someone complaining that my opinion is invalid because I’m an ml user (has happened maybe three times) are the only times I ever think about it really.
This would make a ton of sense if your choice of Lemmy instance were not just that; a choice. It’s not a characteristic innate to your being that you’re born with or something.
You can choose to associate with whatever instance you want and swap it up with another account somewhere else if you want at any time (you can prob keep the same username if you want too).
Unless it is already taken on the new instance, you absolutely can. Usernames are namespaced similar to email addresses. So,
example@lemmy.worldandexample@lemmy.mlare considered two different users. This means that there is no technical reason preventing it.Either I don’t understand your objection, or you don’t understand my point. Legitimately it could be either of those. I don’t see what this has to do with most of what I said above.
OK, yes… Are you saying I should move my account elsewhere because OP (or some other people) don’t like that my account says .ml at the end? Or because I’m only supposed to have an account on instances where I agree with the political leanings of those who run it?
There’s an awful lot of political views around that aren’t tankie.
And it’s less about the users and more about the kind of lopsided, censorship moderation that happens on .ml
That may be your concern, but it’s not the discusion OP started. That’s the discussion OP claims to have started.
Quoting myself from yesterday:
I feel like those ratios are a bit off if OP is really so bothered about moderation practices.
Sure, but most of the time you don’t know anything at all about who designs and develops the systems you use. I totally support people going to where they feel comfortable, and I’m a huge believer in defederation as one of the strengths of the fediverse. Block early and block often and all that. OP didn’t spend time on that though, OP spent most of their time on character assassination.
Also, the target of these smears is the main Lemmy dev - not just Lemmy.ml. If OP is so concerned about their influence then OP should move to mbin or something.
Tankie is a pejorative. We should stop using that - I am not sure what the best replacement is, authoritarian? Fascist?
OP seems to believe that the unfair admin/mod practices stem from their political beliefs. e.g., going against their very own Code of Conduct, the amins in question used subversive database manipulation practices to eliminate the mod-log explanations for their actions, and also preemptively banned various people from communities that they had never (even so much as once) commented in, in the past. The latter is EXTREME, and the former is disingenuous.
Oh, but the admin is an authority-loving fascist, hence it suddenly all makes sense: “service to stated principles that serve the community good” give way to “whoever has the power to accomplish things does whatever they want”, in that world-view. So they are not entirely as disconnected as you might wish in a purely mathematical & theoretical world. This is the real world, where it gets messy, and EVERYTHING gets political. But okay, what if OP made a poorly-written post - b/c their heart jumped out ahead of their brain - what then? It doesn’t mean that it’s not true, or a good thing to do, even then, and moreover what to do about it now? Re-word it if you like and write and post a new one? But this is the one that we have. Yeah, again, irl gets messy sometimes.
You missed some stuff yourself btw. As individual people block you - by which I do not just mean personally but your entire instance of choice - increasingly you will find yourself speaking to an echo chamber consisting of fascists + those who are more neutral towards authoritarianism. You will reply to people, and wonder why so few ever reply back to you - but it won’t be b/c they don’t like you (well maybe some, I dunno:-P), and rather they won’t even see your replies unless they happen to visit that section of the comments for some other reason. They can do so, but they will not be notified so they will not be made aware of your desire to communicate.
This event is happening, like it or not, and one way or another. This OP at least gives us the chance to talk about it, before things go too far and even this much communication becomes impossible. i.e., the Western world is offering you this lifeboat, to let you know what is coming. Truth Social surely does far worse, and when Elon took over Twitter and renamed it to X, he didn’t warn people, and instead just started removing and banning at will/whim. But the rest of the Fediverse isn’t going to remain associated with fascism just b/c some innocent people have an account on Lemmy.ml.
Btw, in your Settings under “Import/Export Settings” there is a large button Export that can make a JSON file, and in a new account you can Import it, for easy transfer of your settings. You’d lose all your past comments/replies/up-/downvotes, but if you also transfer your iconic avatar and keep the same name, many people may not even notice.
I am sorry that this is upsetting to you.
First, thanks for the thoughtful and thorough reply.
It’s not upsetting to me, it’s just annoying. I strongly support the block early/block often culture that seems to pervade the fediverse, even when that is folks blocking me. I also support the ability to defederate, and strongly support (for example) pre-emptively defederating from threads.
Indeed, such decisions at the user or instance level are potentially messy, but the whole thing just seems self-healing over time to me. There’s an equilibrium that needs to be reached, I think, and I doubt we’re anywhere near it yet. Some instances are going to end up isolated, either by themselves or by others, and some won’t. New instances will spring up, instances will shut down, etc etc. People will move around to find a new instance when needed. It’s all really sloppy and the outcome for any one user or instance isn’t necessarily going to match the outcome for another. That’s freedom to me. And not in some maga “free speech means I get to be a jerk but no one can call me out” way, but in a “we’re all empowered to influence our own experience here” way. People can block, instances can defederate, people can deploy their own instance and make it as open or closed or personal or public as they want to. Hot damn.
And all that is going to create friction and people are going to disagree with each other about how to do it and what the right way is, just like we’re doing here.
But, despite your very reasonable rationalizations for OP, and regardless of their intent, this very subconversation and others are evidence that this isn’t what a discussion about moderation practices looks like. It’s what a discussion about publicly calling someone out with a pejorative term for their beliefs looks like. Expressing that opinion, and defending it when required, is the extent of my involvement or concern. I don’t share the beliefs of OP nor their target. Whether folks want to change how they are discussing the issue or not is up to them. That’s also freedom, in my opinion.
I might migrate instances at some point, I might not, we’ll see how things go, but it’s not going to be because of this post from OP. Folks can run their instances as they see fit. They don’t owe me a platform, nor OP.
Tbf, that’s b/c that’s what you turned it into… I think? You brought it up, hence we are now discussing that. Tbf that is what you saw within the OP to begin with, so I am not saying that the discussion was not worth having. And I did mention that OP might have done a lot better in their wording choices.
However, I am suggesting to look past the format of the OP, to more clearly see its content, even if OP could have made that process a lot easier from the start by having chosen a different name than ‘tankie’. Which starts not here but from reading the linked posts too - I know it’s A LOT of comments (~800 iirc at last count), but at the very least start with just the top-ranked ones. It’s not good. OP presumed that people already knew that, and just in case, gave those exact links so that people could catch up to that, before getting into depth into this post.
Oh absolutely 100% agree. The Fediverse is what we make of it, as you said, and we are doing that right now.
So if we are past the poor wording choice, the real issue (imho at least, perhaps OP themselves disagrees) is that those linked posts describe a situation where the admins are using database manipulation to edit the mod logs. Think about what that means. Slightly less but still extremely offensive, those admins are also mass- and preemptively banning people from communities that they have never so much as commented in even once, for a comment made in some other community that said something negative about China. This is not okay. People are not going to put up with this. The former is actually a deceptive practice, and the latter isn’t nearly as bad but is still abusive, on the level of Reddit.
These posts calling for defederation of the rest of the Fediverse from Lemmy.ml aren’t going to simply disappear, unless those admins step down. Instead, some instances will defederate from them, others will proudly remain federated with everyone, and overall a new equilibrium will be formed, but in the meantime there will be much turmoil.
Read the linked posts - most especially https://lemmy.world/post/16211417. This is not just about OP disagreeing with them politically. They may have worded it to look like that, but that is not all that is going on - it’s not even the half of it. THAT post at least is about how modding should be done. And this one seems to have been meant as the next step. Though if you want to make a new post to replace OP’s wording choices with your own, it may help? As you say, OP made the mistake of wrapping the real issue inside of an easily-dismissable minor one as if they were one and the same.
Edit: Oh but I should have said: and if you choose not to make such a post, that’s fine. At least we are enjoying this conversation about it all:-).
Well you’ve certainly given me more to think about. I don’t see much more to debate with you, but wanted to reply anyway so it didn’t appear I was leaving in a huff. Have a good rest of your day.
Honestly, this kind of kindness, consideration, & compassion from you is what I love about the Fediverse, where we don’t all have to agree with one another and in fact it’s arguably more fun if we start off not that way, but all along the pathway from start to finish we respect one another (potentially barring some heated moments, hopefully forgivable, and I already don’t recall but apologies if I ever did slip into that for a moment). I am told that Reddit used to be this way, before the authoritarian Huffman changed it to become mere “social media” (rather than older forum discussion board style) to increase his profits, but I barely saw it before it was gone, having joined far too late. Therefore I held out hope that I could see this in the Fediverse, which I did, then that was dashed when I encountered chapotraphouse and lemmygrad.ml, restored when I user-blocked them, and now I hope to preserve that for others to be able to enjoy it as well:-).
Fwiw I do see that you were right - this post was about differing political views, but that other post about the moderation abuses… that’s some heavier stuff that I am glad you will take time to think about. B/c it is absolutely disrespectful of the admins to the community for them to not follow their own rules, but also b/c I hope to be able to converse with you again on the Fediverse!:-)
And it is complicated - b/c without power, what good is having “rightness” of thought? And yet, the world is what we make of it, so if we all band together and say “this is right, whereas this, this we will not put up with”, then our collective might wins out. Speaking of, there is also a chance that Lemmy.ml could lose its grant over such practices, or be barred from the EU. At the very least, I see posts like the OP as providing fair warning that bad things may come in the future, so best start preparing now - e.g. by making communities elsewhere.
And the Federation model is so beautiful, that it seems worth attempting to preserve, by spreading communities out regardless:-).
Because the Lemmy user base is still relatively small, so the drama in one corner takes up a nontrivial amount of the total area. If it were the size of reddit or tiktok, you wouldn’t pay threads like these any mind.
It’s all over because it’s a pervasive problem, and it’s obviously off putting to a lot of people.
And it’s especially a problem when there are random communities peppered in your feed that you simply can’t participate in randomly, even though they may be the largest of their kind.
Ive been banned from communities I have yet to participate in, for no reason, and without any responses from mods when I ask what happened.
It’s making it so the entire platform becomes toxic unless you actively persevere through their unfair practices.
It’s important to me because I really liked Reddit back in the day, and before that the disperate forums that existed all over. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are interested in those same things, but are put off when they inevitably say something “liberal” in a meme space and are attacked for it. It’s toxic and it is counter to growth.
Not to mention how blatant an echo chamber it creates, and how naive users can be indoctrinated to misinformation without even a hint of counter discussion being allowed.
Edit: desperate to disperate
I can’t even see what instance you’re from, but your account is only a couple months old. Why not create one on a different instance?
I’ve been banned from several .ml subs, some of which are so popular they appear on All, and I didn’t know I was banned until I tried to upvote, but I’ve never participated otherwise in them, it was punitive for other comments and discussions I’ve had where I have debated politics and, propaganda, and media with mods.
I may actually be banned from the instance, but i don’t know how to investigate such things. But .ml came up an awful lot when I was looking into how to join Lemmy, obviously, and I had no idea how bad the mod practices and ideological bend would be on what amounts to one of the “main” instances.
I’m on shitjustworks, which I really like. But before I knew how different instances worked, I just assumed Lemmy was Reddit power tripping mods 2.0 across all of Lemmy. I’m glad I persevered a little bit to get to more communities.
You are, for the next 7 days. This is your modlog actions on Lemmy.ml:
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=9504078
Some of that stuff would get you banned from shitjustworks though too - e.g. civility.
I had a conversation with the mod who deleted my comments for being uncivil. A troll reported me being an asshole to him, as he trolled. If you look at the deleted thread, you can see their deleted comments.
it’s not my proudest moment, but I firmly believe that assholes should he confronted by assholes, and I took it upon myself in that moment.
Aside from that single interaction, I have abided by the rules of the forum and been polite, within reason. But I have, without remorse, questioned bullshit and disinformation.
Well I hope it helps that now you know how to check your modlog actions:-). You put your name in the box, but the hard part is figuring out which modlog even has the record of the event - though usually the instance where the community is located at.
Yeah I wonder how much assholery those admins bring upon themselves by being that way to others first, it’s like they almost do it on purpose and then use it as an excuse - e.g. Russia will say “poor me, the Ukraine is attacking me, it’s so not fair boo-hoo” :-P.
It’s because they’re on the same instance as you (and me)
Ooh, good to know. I’m still a noob here, lol
OP wants to feel like a saviour of us all from tankies.