I'm moving to China for work, so I'm interested in alternative points of view on Chinese society from the usual U.S. mainstream media CCP hate boner. I checked out hexbear, and... my goodness.
They cheer for a version of China that the Chinese themselves would be embarrassed by. It's clearly driven by 14-year-old white boy edgelords who are enamored with a hardcore Marxist-Leninist vision of China that never existed, most likely in reaction to a dislike of modern Western capitalism. I mean, they referenced "struggle sessions" with nostalgia and cheer for Bashar al-Assad because China is being friendly to him.
Real-life China is quite different from the depictions you see on main Lemmy instances, but it sure as hell isn't anything like what the tankies are jerking off to, either.
It feels like most Western CCP cheerleaders are basically cheering on a pre-Deng version of the CCP and haven't quite noticed that the CCP of today would totally purge anyone pushing the pre-Deng/pre-1978 views of the CCP.
"China" isn't "embarrassed" by lemmy.ml or hexbear.net. "China" just shuts down access to non-Chinese social media sites as they are discovered. Any social media site that isn't currently blocked in China is on numbered days until they are blocked, whether "pro-China" or "anti-China".
This is true. I was kidding. That said, the Chinese government does engage in social media. And they probably would see lemmy users as a poor messenger, if they cared about lemmy.
ML stands for Marxist leninist, which means they love authoritarian regimes that don't like the US. The number of them that unironically stan Stalin is baffling.
.ml is the top level domain for Mali, it doesn't have anything to do with Marxist-Leninism by itself. They may have chosen it as a tongue in cheek reference, but it is also a cheaper alternative to other more popular tlds like .com.
Here is the rest of the story: the people who chose the subdomain chose .ml because they want it to mean marx-lenin... that's why it means that for them.
Generally you are right. In this specific instance it was chosen for the fascism.
Okay, but.
Are they Marxist-Leninist? Pro-China? Socialists? Anti-capitalists? Looks like: yes.
Was the whole thing founded on the grounds of free, shared things and anti-corporate thinking? Also yes.
Do we absolutely know for sure that the ML domain was chosen because of this? No, because the fucking register of the domain himself said it was chosen because it was free.
It was simply just free.
People and their "knowledge" about topics they don't know anything about...
Dessalines is the owner of the domain, one of the owners of the ML instance and one of the full-time devs of the Lemmy code.
I think an overwhelming number of people simply chose that instance becuase it was the instance, made by the devs themselves. At least it was the case for me.
.ml domain names used to be free (together with .ga I think it was) through freenom so it might just be that they snagged themselves a free domain that just happened to be ml.
Not saying you couldn't be right but not everything is quite as well thought out as it first seems.
ML is machine learning. It means they love teaching AI to overthrow the illuminati government lizard people. Can't believe u didn't know that, kinda embarrassing
Sees some use in Mali and for some websites about machine learning. Use is relatively rare elsewhere.