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/linux@some.random.other.instance.world 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.

You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments
3 points
*
Removed by mod
permalink
report
reply
3 points

If you want to get away from the Lemmy codebase entirely I can vouch that mBin works quite nicely. I’ve been on fedia.io for months now and only once or twice hit some kind of technical problem, which was resolved quickly.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Well since all major lemmy instances seem to hide mod names in their logs, we don’t know who the banning mods are.

Lemmy.ml also has the funny quirk that it doesnt have a proper legal imprint or team list afaik. So we don’t have actual transparent information on who is on that instances admin team and who is not. Iirc only one of dessalines and nutomic is on that admin team anymore.

permalink
report
parent
reply
0 points
*
Removed by mod
permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

People keep bringing up that because of the devs history with that instance, “surely it is the Lemmy devs themselves who are doing this”. Which hurts Lemmy’s reputation overall.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

I guess some mod actions could be considered accidents or mistakes instead of bad actors. A transparent system would have a flow to allow the user to contact and get such a mistake rectified, or report a wrongful mod action to an admin.

But if the admin is a problem, then that needs more figuring out how to get one removed.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

This Dessalines?

Creeping the admin logs to find out who dared down vote him.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Fediverse

!fediverse@lemmy.world

Create post

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

  • Posts must be on topic.
  • Be respectful of others.
  • Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
  • Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

Community stats

  • 4.8K

    Monthly active users

  • 953

    Posts

  • 19K

    Comments