I don’t have an issue with lemmy.ml users but that’s because I don’t use sweeping generalizations. I’ve had perfectly acceptable conversations with people across all kinds of instances.
I’m not a tankie but am a fan of parts of communism and I like socialism.
I like socialism too. But I hate bootlicking authoritarian simps who pretend like they know shit about socialism because they read that one Lenin essay on Marxist.org
The problem is that folks see these things implemented in the past and say “let’s just do that.” Why can’t we take the good parts and think beyond the rest? These are systems that just won’t work with current population growth and resources. We can always do far and away better than capitalism, but I’ve talked to a handful of working class people that lived under communism for years and they have nothing good to say about it. Not a single positive thing. It’s easy to dream about these things and wax poetic when you don’t experience them firsthand.
Any time a path opens to seize power, humans fill that void regardless of what they believe in. Now suddenly we’ve traded authoritarian 1 for authoritarian 2. It makes no sense to me and I read both Lenin and Marx.
What's worse on the internet these days is "Marxists" that have never read Marx, or just the Manifesto, yet think themselves an authority on the subject. I made an intro to Marxism reading list to help alleviate that, and try to point out misframings and misunderstandings of Marx when I see it, but it's still a huge issue across Lemmy. Particularly Lemmy.world.
i've had interactions with a lot of normal people on lemmy.ml, i've also had a lot of interactions with a lot of really fucking weird people on lemmy.ml
i'm also blanket banned on lemmy.ml as well, so that's fun. They don't really like dissenting opinion over there.
All of these spaces are permeated with foreign actors. Not all users, but I know a percentage of the users statistically have to be across all the large instances. I’m in tech and we’ve seen fake users appear in public Slack and Discord channels, try to schedule job interviews (it’s happened before), etc. The forces these governments have in tech behind the scenes is enormous, and there is no way to truly know who is and isn’t a state actor on the web.
We need more critical thinking. More separation of person from ideas. People get too hung up on figures.
Hey, I was you about 6 months ago. Same views, and then I was called a dirty imperialist just because I wasn't left enough. Like, these ML people are out for blood. They want a revolution and it's acceptable if people have to die to achieve it.
They want a revolution and it’s acceptable if people have to die to achieve it.
Yeah that's how revolutions work. Because the alternative, at least in theory, is more people dying of poverty, environmental pollution, institutionalized oppression, and other consequences of the current global economic system.
i've created this alt in the interim of finding a more permanent instance residence. Just got exhausted by the massive amount of shit they peddled over there.
All tankie users are in .ml, but not all .ml users are tankies.
You should always judge the merit of the comment, not whether or not the person is from .ml. If you see a comment that is pro-CCP or pro-Kremlin from an .ml user, then the point of the meme is valid. But a well-thought, benign, good-faith or wholesome comment from an .ml user should not be dismissed.
Not everyone in a nazi bar is a nazi. Let's hear them out and give them the benefit of the doubt even though they could go to literally any bar, but keep going to the nazi bar
When choosing an instance, it is not necessarily overtly advertised as such. It's just one of the largest instances, so many "regular" people are obviously going to pick it. New users are not going to be intimately familiar with the elaborate politics of federated Lemmy servers upon first arrival. It would be a bit bizarre to expect them to be.
Here's a tangentially related comic, as I just read the latter bit of your comment in that tone, (not saying you're guilty of the same things.)
Basically, because being directly pro-Russia is so see-through, a lot of bad actors merely sow FUD. For one check [email protected] if you want an example. A very polite person who lists links and sources (firehose of falsehood is also a soviet strategy btw).
Dude pretends to be American, talks American politics, but always in line with Russian propaganda, while saying things like "reality has a well known Russian propaganda bias" and absolutely refusing to address whether he is pro-Russian or not, despite very clearly having talking points which show he is strongly pro-Russian.
So either he's an American who fucking loves Soviet culture and larps being Russian, is actively against Ukraine and believes Russia was eight to invade it, so the least patriotic American to ever exist.
OR... (and I believe this to be a tad more likely) he's actually a lying Russian.
But Russians aren't known for disinformation and lies, right? Right....?
Yes, of course you are right. But for those less experienced on discourse, there is the principle of charity. It is important to give the benefit of the doubt that the interlocutor is acting in good faith. But when you exhaust all the good-faith and sensible arguments, and that person resorts to either providing irrational points or acting unreasonably and/or disingenuously, then it is completely safe to assume that the person is actually a bad-faith actor. It's on that person, not on you.
But you should not readily accuse someone a troll unless you could calmly point out why the person is such and such. Trolls exactly want you to do that.
Do you really love or have any feeling towards your instance? I think of it more like an e-mail address than a "name" for like an apartment building or mascots/team name (probably why these posts confuse the shit out of me). My first instance had connection issues/downtime so I switched to .ml. Almost switched from them like a month ago because of slow loading times but seems to be better the past couple of weeks (this is the basics of html, I shouldn't have to "watch" it load).
I just always scroll on All (active), and sometimes subscribed if I'm feeling in the mood so I never even consider my instance unless something technical or posts like this come up. I have a couple of mobile devices that I'm never logged into that I'll pop up lemmy on from different instances (.world, .ee, etc), I actually am less likely to use an instance that advocates heavy defederation.
The admins of ml are tankies and so are a lot of the communities there. The non tankie users are moving away from that instance which increases the tankie concentration.
I think what you are meaning to say is that many tankies can behave like normal people. To take your comment farther, tankies can be anywhere but you will most likely see them coming from I stances like ml and hexbear or fresh accounts on other instances.
This is like listening to a drunk uncle rant about "them" after watching a tiktok video that triggered him. "The non tankie users are moving away" "tankies can behave like normal people" "tankies can be anywhere"
The admins of ml are tankies and so are a lot of the communities there
... communities like Memes? How about the most popular AskLemmy community that everyone uses? Linux, Privacy, Programmer Humor, wtf are you even talking about now? You've fully lost it with this "tankie" hate that's apparently being fueled by being on here so often. You've probably associated any/most downvotes or disagreements into this "tankie"-fantasy which is just further driving it at this point.
Does "be civil" include constantly shitting on huge groups of users just because of the instance they created their account on? There's a very simple solution for this if you truly believe an entire instance is worthless and it's called the blocking function, but I suppose that'd stop the joy you get out of loudly complaining about that instance repeatedly.
But theres a difference, when a .world mod defends genocide or promotes imperalism you know its ok because its in the name of Western Democracy ™. Tbh .ml and .world are basically in a competition on who can fling the most shit and who can bootlick the hardest.
As does ml. Worse even. But the fact that both do is a defense of neither. So I'm not sure why you even bring it up. Be better. World isn't tied to any particular political ideology. Ml 100% is. And if you mention absolute documented facts. You can and will be banned from there. Because the facts go against the narratives. World has its problems. But I haven't seen anything approaching that yet.
i assume "be civil" just means that you can't call people "dipshit asshole dumbass idiot" and things akin to that, i.e needless name calling, calling out perceived problems as long as done civilly, or being rude, but in a civil discussed manner, is i think fair game.
i.e. i could call this a stupid post because it covers what should be clearly demonstrated by common moderation history, i.e. these kinds of threads stay around for a while, these kinds of comments tend to stick around, and that's generally good enough reason to keep moderating as you are, precedent is a very strong thing.
but i couldn't just call you a dumbass because you should know this, and therefore you must be the most uneducated person in the history of humanity. Because that's not civil.
a) Huge groups of users well known to spread the promotion, praise and propaganda of dictatorships and other authoritarian governments, bigotry, racism and transphobia. Even when there are hard facts against them.
b) The Lemmy blocking function isn't anywhere as good as you think it is. Maybe even by design, the main admin on .ml is also the lead dev of Lemmy after all.
If you're mad at lemmy.ml users for doing those specific, detestable things, why not make make the meme to be about lemmy.ml users doing those specific, detestable things instead of anylemmy.ml user making any comment?
As a resident of a politically indifferent instance that is on good terms with everyone, I can say one thing:
Fuck absolutely everyone who turns Lemmy into yet another Internet battlefield.
Leave .ml alone. Leave Hexbear alone. Even yes - leave Lemmygrad alone. People there will not change their opinion when facing hatred, and newbies coming there doesn't change the big picture, as Lemmy is federated and they can figure stuff out for themselves.
Trying to silence entire instances, especially the biggest ones, is absolutely not a welcoming picture to whoever's coming here, and being cut out and filtered for happening to choose the "wrong" instance is the worst possible greeting.
I have no problems with tankies expressing there opinions. The problem is when someone points out they are wrong they get mad and if the mods are tankie they ban you. If not they just get mad and start name calling.
In a nutshell I think they should be allowed as long as they follow the rules. Same for everyone else.
Yeah, from my pov, it's not about silencing their opinions as much as it is wanting to avoid their authority because they abuse it to push their opinions.
Same reason I ultimately left Reddit. Admins were making choices I didn't like and forcing them on their users. The new site and official app both suck, but I had the option of using other apps or the old site. Even the old site isn't a great experience on mobile vs some 3rd party apps, but then they killed off the apps in a way that looked like they weren't being honest about (though in hindsight it was more about wanting to price access for AI training than specifically wanting to kill the 3rd party apps imo).
Lemmy isn't immune from any of that, but the impact isn't as high because federation gives options. And corruption turns into more of a game of whack a mole instead of "throw lots of money at the one entity controlling it" like Reddit and Twitter.
Plenty of us tried that. We weren't the ones that turned it into a political Battlefield. I didn't start out blocking their communities and servers. I'm a pragmatist. Actually largely against people who are blindly ideological regardless of the ideology. Even if I tend to personally identify with the anarchist Spectrum.
Hell lemmygrad and hexbear weren't banned because of their politics. They were banned because of their behavior. Anyone who behaved like so many of them did should have been banned regardless of politics. Lemmy.world was de-federated by certain servers for far far less.
And if you want to exist in a bubble. Then by all means please do. But don't admonish other people for not doing so. Ignoring politics and being ignorant of politics is in large part how so many of the problems we have today were created. People left alone at the levers of power who should never have had any business. All because people were content and ignorant.
And if you want to exist in a bubble. Then by all means please do. But don’t admonish other people for not doing so. Ignoring politics and being ignorant of politics is in large part how so many of the problems we have today were created. People left alone at the levers of power who should never have had any business. All because people were content and ignorant.
Just wanted to chime in that I agree with this, and frankly that's why I value keeping an eye on what the narrative that both sides have been operating by. I don't see how any of the problems we face are served by selective ignorance.
Hell lemmygrad and hexbear weren’t banned because of their politics. They were banned because of their behavior. Anyone who behaved like so many of them did should have been banned regardless of politics.
To say they weren't banned for their politics but instead their behavior is a bit misleading in terms the sequence of events. The .world defederation was preemptive as near as I can tell- Hexbear turned on federation but before they federated with anyone, .world had already defederated. The citations in the .world defed thread were all pre-federation threads of people being hyped to connect to more people. Even if people were saying they wanted to 'bully libs', that just reads to me like people talking shit because as far as I can tell the hexbears never made a single post anywhere on .world.
The thread in question cited several threads, it's a bit dramatic in places, but also explicitly instructing people not to break rules- instructed not to even register accounts for trolling. Standard things to be aware of in posting on a federated instance even if they are being dramatic or saying they're propagandists- there's plenty of normal people there from what I've observed this last year. If the points they outlined in that post are to be their party line then at least they're just stating it right there so you know what their angle is going to be.
I feel like the case that it was not political censorship would be stronger if the whole thing had been less vibes based from the start.
I made the mistake of not knowing I was on an .ml community and disagreed with a post using, y'know, facts, and was downvoted to shit because my reply didn't jive with the room's echo chamber. I don't know what you mean by "leave(ing) them alone" when their brand of hate and bullshittery bleeds into the "All" feed. We're supposed to welcome that? Paradox of tolerance and all that. If someone joins one of those instances I kinda find it hard to believe that they wouldn't check out and stick with what they're attracted to in the first place.
The zionists here, too? I used reddit for over a decade and left because of how awful zionists barrage reddit into a propogandist cesspit. And yes screw anyone who makes lemmy a battleground like reddit
Fuck absolutely everyone who turns Lemmy into yet another Internet battlefield.
This is what the tankies do, would you rather have them just run roughshod all over Lemmy spreading hostile country authoritarian propaganda?
Leave .ml alone. Leave Hexbear alone. Even yes - leave Lemmygrad alone. People there will not change their opinion when facing hatred
Not about changing Tankie opinions, they're too far gone, this is about pushing back on the spread of authoritarian BS.
and newbies coming there doesn't change the big picture, as Lemmy is federated and they can figure stuff out for themselves.
"Don't tell the new comers to town about the Nazis at the Nazi bar, let them figure it out for themselves so they have a negative experience and leave"
Trying to silence entire instances, especially the biggest ones, is absolutely not a welcoming picture to whoever's coming here
If they're (admins and mods) going to allow a toxic culture on their instance, then it doesn't matter their size. Toxic Tankies is not a good look at all.
and being cut out and filtered for happening to choose the "wrong" instance is the worst possible greeting.
The worst possible greeting, is seeing Tankie shit takes with paragraphs of "Russia/China did nothing wrong" and everyone going "We let them post their stuff because we don't want to hurt their fefes"
I'll bash them too when I see them doing so. So long, it's mostly them (or really, everyone leftier than liberals bunched along with actual tankies) that are under fire.
Your war made too much collateral damage, that's what I'm saying. Newbies come to .ml and other popular instances, and are attacked on the spot for being presumably almost Nazis. Others come and see this mess.
You are so concerned about someone making China/Russia look better that you are ready to overlook everything else.
Don't you know that defending against authoritarians is the real authoritarianism? Just look at how Ukraine is visiously provoking russia to invade by checks notes defending themselves during the invasion
Edit: thank you for real responses, got so used to be people getting pissed for no reason on social media that I was genuinely surprised to check Lemmy and see a bunch of genuine answers with no butthurt to be seen
The admins and mods cultivate a community of genocide denial and authoritarian apologism, which many users on the instance then buy into.
Why don’t you just block the instance
Instance blocking only blocks communities, not users, who still show up whenever there's a Chinese genocide to deny or a Russian atrocity to "WHATABOUT", or a non-Western aligned dictator to "BOTHSIDES".
When I accidentally blocked an instance, any comment from a user on that instance would be replaced by a message like "you have blocked this instance and so will not see this comment." I don't know if that's a feature of my client, Connect, or of lemmy itself.
The ml in lemmy ml means marxism-leninism, it's maintained by the lemmy devs so it has lots of "normal" users too. Some people associate lemmy.ml with "tankie" viewpoints.
I choose not to block the instance because there is a very small group on there that have non-political discussions that I enjoy, same with hexbear.
I also don't like creating an echo chamber where all I hear is what I want to hear. Hearing from the other side, as disgusting as their viewpoints can be, at least let's me know how they think.
I like this view, because I have zero idea what I just walked in on. This account is just 16 days old and I'm just here to chat non-politics and doomscroll. And by 16 days old I mean like 4 because their acceptance email got sent to spam and I didn't notice it until then.
Tbh, I had no idea there were even factions or drama among the instances.
In my experience, the mods on lemmy.ml are particularly biased. Like it's okay to joke about American school shootings but not about abortions biased. But after a while I just stopped posting there. (I barely post to lemmy at all now, but that's another story.)
Lemmy has a very different community than Reddit - here, people are often outright kind.
In part that's a large reason for the beef with Lemmy.ml, e.g. recently a mod there removed comments for a user over a misunderstanding in a game, and in the process said that they (the MOD!) wanted to shoot them (the OP), doubling down and even tripping down to say "I hope you die soon". (Described in more detail here.)
It is ironic that one of the very first Lemmy instances, and also being the one whose admins are also the developers of the Lemmy sourcecode, is so much less like the rest of the people on Lemmy, and more like Reddit. But it is what it is.
Lemmy.ml is admin'd and moderated mostly by Marxists, and the liberal side of Lemmy is hostile to that. That's the principle contradiction, everything else stems from that core issue.
I'm talking to people on Lemmy.ml who say things like "Reality has a well known Russian propaganda bias", "Russia was right to invade Ukraine, it needs to be denazified", "Uighur genocide is made up", etc, etc etc, I wouldn't call that "internal left fighting"
In which things is someone allowed to think differently from the US Democratic party before they are expelled from the left?
And fuck Putin, btw. But there are people with widely diverse points of view on an incredibly amount of matters, that can have common grounds on many other issues. And, at least for me, they'll need to try harder that just being putin's useful idiots to be expelled from my definition of what the "left" is.
Especially on a matter as complex as Ukraine war. That I gladly support arming and helping Ukraine, and my country will keep arming and helping Ukraine when USA steps back once Trump sits in the office. But I still understand that is a complex issue and that different points of view are expected. I have mine, which is support for Ukraine. Others may support Russia on this. But as long as we both agree on other issues I won't deny that. If they support end of capitalism, workers rights, LGBT rights or gender equality we would have common ground on those topics.
i joined .ml as it was the first instance i come across when trying lemmy out. Iv heard the admins are tankies but to be honest i dont actually know what a tankie is. i just use lemmy to look at memes and follow foss communities. i try to block all political stuff as i want to enjoy my exprience and stay ignorant to the politics here.
The lemmy.ml instance is known to have admins, mods and users that spread the promotion, praise and propaganda of dictatorships and other authoritarian governments, bigotry, racism and transphobia. Even when there are hard facts against them.
hmm, I wonder why many other instances dislikes .ml so much. It couldn't possibly have to do with them praising and spreading the propaganda of authoritarian governments so much.
I was on ml and it was pretty chill for a non-tankie. Until a mod powertripped and ban me for insulting an homophobe. Some people like me join the instance without knowing of all this tankie thing. IMO, hexbear is far more toxic.
The only bans I saw on your account were for being needlessly hostile- and they look like they all were extremely short.
Re: the homophobic comments, in your posts that got removed you were hostile for what looks to me like your misinterpreting a bad attempt at a bad joke (not even from .ml user, but .ee), though you didn't tell them to kys that time at least. You then went through the their profile responding to months old posts to try to continue things, again being needlessly hostile- if I had to venture a guess that was more of the reason for your ban 5 months ago. Plenty of other instances will also temp ban for behavior like that.
and then 8 months ago you dropped this gem: CW self harm, transphobia
spoiler
The accusations of toxicity seem to be projection.
The user bullied me for being gay. He's the one who went into my history and saw I was a gay dad.
He reply to my comment about the fact that I love my daughter with the reply "You're gay".
Then mods like you told me it was a "bad joke' remove my post and let the douche's post up.
Now I'd like to see where I've been transphobe, , I have a trans person really close to me that would probably like to see that but it never happened.
For the record, I joined lemmy.ml back in 2021 when it was the most popular instance. I had no idea about their issues, and have since created an alt account on lemm.ee.
If only that were true! That does help a bit, but it acts only as a community mute rather than more like an instance defederation or a user block would. You'll see ML users brigading posts and random users with the most off the wall takes imaginable - I think bc they get used to the style of moderation inside their echo chamber and so have difficulties leaving it behind. Tbf after the USA elections a lot of that seems to have died down.
Tbf, there are people on ML who I've enjoyed conversing with, so it's not all one way as the meme seems to convey. However, it is quite a noticeable pattern where 9 times out of 10 the comments that are the most batshit insane that I've ever seen (and don't come from hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml) are from a user on lemmy.ml. Make of that what you will - I used to argue strongly against that, but the weight of continued observation has caused me to switch sides on that argument.
I see where you're coming from. If they're not defederated and those posts are going to pop up anyway, then I can control it I see those posts or not. In my experience (same as yours), the vast majority of ml posts aren't worth reading anyways so why not filter them out?
whats wrong with lemmy.ml? i tried bunch of different instances last month, and fedaration works best on this one, when i use other instances i cant even see the posts on some small communities i follow
That was my original Lemmy instance. It was weirdly fanatically communist and pro-Trump at the same time. I had a real hard time understanding what was going on other than Russian propaganda. I left for here and it's much much more understandable.
Lemmy.ml has many Communists because the admins and moderators are largely made up of Marxists. This is because it is the dev instance, and the devs are Marxists. Lemmy.ml is in no way pro-Trump, the vast majority of users stand in firm opposition to Democrats and Republicans, owing to the strong Marxist presense.
The instance admins and mods of some of the larger communities are self-described Marxist-Leninists, and sometimes delete comments and ban users who make comments and posts that they disagree with. Sometimes the removed comments are what most people, including most communists, would regard as basic statements of fact, like that Stalin wasn't perfect, that something bad happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, that Ukraine's Jewish president isn't a fan of the Nazis, or that Uighurs are not universally having a brilliant time.
There's a second issue that when openly Stalinist instances like Lemmygrad (who at least used to explicitly say membership was only open to users who thought Stalin was good in their instance description) were defederated by major instances like lemmy.world, lots of users made new accounts on lemmy.ml to post exactly the same tankie nonsense (typically along the lines of Russia is fighting a defensive war and hasn't hurt anyone but even if they weren't, they'd be justified in annexing the whole of Ukraine and killing anyone who objected) as had led to the defederation in the first place.
Sometimes this leads to people not from .ml to make snap judgements about comments and posts from .ml users, when really it's just a vocal minority of nutters posting the nonsense and trying to claim that any criticism they receive is just people being brainwashed by nutters in a more neoliberal/neoconservative direction like Reagan and Thatcher.
Lol, ig "egocentric" should be part of the official tankie toolkit, and yes you were tagged a tankie a long time ago.
These posts aren't for you, they're for swaying sane .ml users to leave, showing the true colors of .ml to newbies as quickly as possible and to hopefully encourage non-.ml users to avoid posting and commenting on .ml communities
Assuming this to be a working strategy (and not a way of swaying new users out of Lemmy in general), what's the endgame? If everyone you deem "sane" leaves the place, it will just be even worse, a concentrated "tankie" circlejerk, visible to plenty of newbies. Then what?
For me posts like this just make me embarrassed to be on Lemmy in general. It's like making a post about how you get upset when you get an email from a Gmail account.
Its insane how much shit .ml and .world users fling at eachother. Ml is filled with smug historical revisionist authoritarians and Russia bootlicking other empire supporting "anti-imperalists", meanwhile .world is filled with genocide apologizing western imperialists and neoliberal bootlickers for the capitalist class. Genuenly im not sure which is worse but they're both obnoxious and unbearable, imperialism is imperialism regardless of the empire.
The ML mod in a game community telling a user that they wanted to shoot them, then doubled down on that, then tripled down still further with "I hope you die soon" points to systemic issues (such issues are widespread and well-known, as well as the entire-instance perma-bans routinely dished out by the admins themselves; you can directly read the mods own words for this particular event here).
LW mods have some issues as well, but e.g. recently the one responsible for this latest string of short 24-hr bans has already apologized within hours of the occurrence, in another comment citing a potential misunderstanding of the extent to which she was asked by admins to have done so and acknowledging her own biases that lead to that (event).
They are nowhere close to being the same. Definitely in degree at least if not entirely in kind.
Tankie Toxicity should be called out regardless of background or age. In fact, a teenager should be exposed to the true authoritarianism roots more so so there's a chance they don't become permanently part of the tankie cult
What is the real joke is categorizing people by which Lemmy instance they sign up to, and justifying it with a weak truism that "people self select for communities". I believe it is utterly stupid, and t can also be motivated. In Lemmy.ml I have met some of the brighter minds of our generation.
Well, if literally everyone I've tried to get to sign up but it didn't take are to be believed, it's the tankies. I try to explain they can use keywords to at least limit it but by then they're mad about me "hanging out at a nazi bar" and explaining "no they're really more Nazbols" somehow just isn't helping my case. Even when they give it a second shot (rare) they quit when they figure out "rule 2 be nice" means "you can't say anything we don't like even if you're nice and we're going to be insufferable cunts with impunity because our admins are hypocrites that back us."