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’m glad that this is the controversy on Lemmy, and not things like Reddit had with r/JailBait.
I’m perfectly fine with just avoiding interactions with lemmy.ml communities. They can exist, even if I disagree with them. And if I wanted to participate, I’d probably be welcome so long as I follow the rules. Unlike r/Conservative, which required proving yourself to the mods to get a pass to enter or something…lol
But yes, it’s definitely good to know what the .ml stands for, and to keep that in mind whenever one sees Lemmy.ml.
I would be fine with that too. If the instance was just tankie people talking tankie bullshit, like lemmygrad or hexbear, it would be easy to ignore. Unfortunately it’s not that simple.
The problem is that lemmy.ml has a more privileged status in the fediverse: being the first Lemmy instance in existence it still holds quite a number of popular communities that are still frequented by people from the whole fediverse, and the tankies wield their power there as well. Like literally: make a disliked comment on /c/memes and you get banned from /c/Technology, /c/linux, /c/Progammer Humor, /c/Mechanical Keyboards,… and all your other favorite communities on lemmy.ml as well. This actually happened to me.
A second issue is that the mods make efforts to hide the censorship that they are doing, because they know it’s not a good look. If you examine the modlog over there you’ll see that the first half of the page is like a day’s worth of moderation activities, and the second half covers 4 years. So where’s the rest? The many controversial comment removals and bans that happened a few days ago on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, and who knows what else, have all been disappeared.
So yes, I think it is very important that people are being made aware of this and I also think a concerted effort should be made to move bona fide communities away from an instance ruled by bad faith actors.
Yeah, this sounds perfectly reasonable.
It’s not like it was some grand conspiracy to make all those communities communist. It’s just how Lemmy originated. As Lemmy grows, it’s bound to get more communities on other instances, and if enough people hate the moderation on ML, then the other communities’ growth will start to outpace the originals. It’s not like Reddit where there are default subs (afaik).
I suspect there’s way worse on the fediverse than Jailbait. There was a list posted a few months back of all the most defederated instance, and tankies didn’t even get a look in. I didn’t dare click them. Some of the domain names alone made me feel like I was going on a watchlist for even knowing about them.
I don’t doubt it. There’s definitely a difference when something is in the Fediverse though rather than all hosted on the same servers. It’s a lot easier to say “We don’t condone this” when a server is defederated from the gross ones.
Eh I went to a bunch of them and nothing horrible, the most morally objectionable was loli but it was all drawn
Lemmy already had a round of that, specifically over loli. It’s why a lot of instances block burghit.moe - they don’t ban loli and have a few loli specific subs.
The only other Lemmy server I know of that allows loli subs is the rad queer one and it’s tiny and also blocked by many other instances, though I don’t know if that’s for the loli or the general rad queer thing. Really, likely both.
Yeah, though I think there’s a difference between Reddit having it vs. Lemmy having it. Especially with popular/general instances defederating from the scummy ones
The main difference is that you can choose to use an instance that doesn’t.
But to a user of an instance that defederated burggit it’s more or less a direct parallel to r/jailbait, just with the extra step of asking the instance to confirm and losing the rest of the instance and not just the one community.
Not only the rules, you also have to avoid critizing the dominant ideology, otherwise you will get at best dog pilled, at worse harassed and censored by moderation.
Honestly, is that different here? Dogpiling is the rage everywhere. It’s better than reddit, but you still have a hard time if you even question something that follows the dominant ideology here. And God forbid you actually read any of the articles people post and point out that commenter’s are just making shit up to fit that ideology.
What’s a dog pill? Lol
You’re free to criticize liberalism on .ml all you want.
I subbed to r/conservative myself I tend to like to browse most political subreddits left and right. I didn’t see any “proving yourself to get a pass to enter” I just remember making a comment on a post about Tiananmen square on the anniversary clicking the join icon then getting 2 automod messages one telling me that I’m banned from justiceserved and another alerting me that I’ve subbed to r/conservative.as simple as that. I think you might be refering to r/blackpeopletwitter which uh I think this screenshot should speak for itself
In order to participate in the vast majority of active r/conservative threads (any tagged “Flaired Users Only”, which 9 of the top 10 posts right now are), you need to first pass a mod purity test to prove you’re “conservative enough”, it’s not a serious place and is mostly just dumb Facebook-tier memes and poor quality screenshots of news headlines or random tweets
R/conservative had the habit of locking most comment threads to members only. It may have been an exclude instead of include list.
It was an include list, from what I recall, that required signing up for having a mod go through your message/post history, lol
No, I don’t think I mixed up r/Conservative with r/BlackPeopleTwitter…lmao