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.

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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    6 months ago

    Thanks for spreading the word. We get these complaints every few weeks. More people need to be educated and move away from these instances to make the Threadiverse a better place.

    • BigFig@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      What the fuck is the threadiverse. This is the Fediverse. Threads has added nothing and has no place here.

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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        6 months ago

        Threadiverse is just a general term to refer to the parts of the Fediverse that behaves like forums (cause forums have threads). It has nothing to do with threads.net.

      • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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        6 months ago

        thread as in threaded posts as opposed to other parts of the fediverse with another layout. it’s not about the instance Threads, but the type of fediverse service allowing a lemmy/kbin type of conversation.

        • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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          6 months ago

          Are you referring to me or BigFig? I’m neither a mile (I’m European, so we use the metric system), nor a mole. If you make me choose an animal, I’d like to be an alpaca. And I’d be willing to do a captcha to prove to you that I’m not a bot.

        • FozzyOsbourne@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          Are you new here? “Threadiverse” has been used to refer to thread-based fediverse technologies that use threaded comments since before Zuck’s “threads” was even announced!

          • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            I’ve only really heard Fediverse. I don’t really get into the meta discussions on here though. I’m also getting hyper sensitive to chatters that sound like bots. They mentioned “we”, but it doesn’t look like they’re a mod or admin, so I thought it was a bot using some PR speak from the dataset.