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.
There’s an unforgiving list of keywords that in the right context could mean something objectionable so they just blanket ban anyone who says the word or phrase.
I got a temporary ban in memes for saying “OpenAI/MS media alliance goes brrrrr” lmao. “Rule 1.” The OP was yet another post about Google’s crappy AI suggestions and I was implying that the mass beating of that dead horse in article after article was because the media is friendlier to OpenAI and MS in the AI space (kinda the same way Apple gets a free pass in the phone space more often than not for shitty practices and taking credit for inventing features that have existed on Android for years prior). But, even in the absence of clarification (since my quip was just observational and not meant to spark conversation lol), I have no clue how that or a lot of the other things they cite “Rule 1” on could possibly be construed as bigoted - there aren’t enough words to work with in the comment I used as an example, just a barely coherent bit of tongue-in-cheekness. Arbitrariness of enforcement is authoritarian af. I messaged a mod to ask what was up since I didn’t realize modlog was a thing at the time and didn’t hear back (which is fine really). It’s more just the finding out when you go to interact and getting a connectivity error and having to sus out what happened that’s annoying and doesn’t feel conducive to a healthy community.
Getting an automated message in your inbox telling you you’re banned, the length of the ban, and why would be a little more user friendly (though public modlogs are nice) if the goals of the developers are trying to build an inclusive platform. A lot of users aren’t necessarily the type to get a persistent itch when something curious happens, so “figure it out yourself” isn’t a great system. But, if what’s going on over at .ml really is indicative of what the goals of the developers are, it does give me pause about Lemmy as a project and where it will go in the future. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the situation is ripe for the project to be compromised if a dev is compromised and people shouldn’t be sleeping on that. Bad actors injecting seemingly inert exploits into code reviewed by others can happen with any software and fly under the radar, even popular and well trusted FOSS (for reference, see “that time the CIA snuck a backdoor into Notepad++”), so it’s alarming if a group of developers appear to be sympathizers for nationstates that are notoriously privacy hostile.
You’re operating under the delusion that they’re moderating in good faith.
Believe it or not, also Rule 1, straight to the banhaus you go. /s