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.

  • @SupraMarioEnglish
    12•6 months ago

    Everyone who wants communism has never lived it, and those who have don’t want it.

    It sounds great on paper, but humans will always have those who wish to hold power.

    • Maxnmy'sEnglish
      7•6 months ago

      For real, I knew people whose family had to stand in lines just to get food or common items. It’s foolish to advocate for abolishing capitalism when states with “real leftism” overwhelmingly do not thrive for long or at all.

    • @[email protected]English
      -7•6 months ago

      I mean… the Soviet Union was illegally dissolved and as far as I remember, the people didn’t want the dissolution to happen. A lot of tomfooleries happened after that and many former soviet countries did lose protections for their least economically safe population.

      This is not a defense of the Soviet Union, but dealing with the first statement you wrote.

      • @SupraMarioEnglish
        3•6 months ago

        What? No just no…what type of crazy revisionist history is this…the people on the other side of the wall tried to escape constantly, they wanted Western goods and entertainment, the ussr was made up of forcefully captured countries. I don’t know where you got this idea that they liked it, maybe the people in charge did.

          • @SupraMarioEnglish
            1•6 months ago

            When you live in an authoritarian system, votes mean jack shit. People don’t escape the ussr because they want to keep it together…

            • @[email protected]English
              0•6 months ago

              So when faced with facts you just turn away. I mean, I’ll even concede that some of the member states didn’t hold elections and therefore, we have no statistics on them. Not every facet of your enemy can be unreasonably demonized. Not every element of Soviet life was as bad as you think, and it’s totally fair to say that the lower socioeconomic class was harmed by the dissolution.

              In the aftermath of the dissolution oligarchs did dismantle a lot of the social security nets that existed and concentrated a lot of wealth.

              I can just as easily shit on how Norwegian social security has been harmed by for-profit initiatives on the back of 8 years of Høyre and Frp rule.