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.

  • kbal@fedia.io
    2·
    2 years ago

    Rule 1: Crushing people with tanks is fine so long as it’s our side doing it.

    Literal fucking tankies. I wonder if they will ever come to their senses. Oh well, it’s not as if there aren’t Nazi instances somewhere on fedi as well.

  • Audacious@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Sad to see. Feels like Lemmy has no bright future with people in charge of it thinking russia’s and China’s government is good and ban difference of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs.

  • MrSpArkle@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    The mods of the non-political subs need to move elsewhere, eventually after that the content will just be tankie bullshit and everyone can just defederate them.

    • Crowfiend@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Even the non political .ml communities are full of power-tripping, ban-happy, thread-nuking tyrants in my experience.

  • nutsack@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    as a communism sympathizing leftist, i hated these mods on reddit and i hate them here. the behavior is idiotic

  • GingaNinga@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’ve had this happen to me, I was chatting in a thread with some guy about IP theft and plagiarism at universities- a legitimate discussion about a current topic- and all my comments were suddenly deleted for “xenophobia”. I let it go but its still really jarring and annoying.

  • wahming@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’ve been banned from .ml for being a ‘racist’ for being anti-Xi, despite the fact that I am Chinese, and pointed out my ethnicity as such in the discussion. I guess antisemitic Jews aren’t the only weird accusation getting thrown about nowadays.

  • Socsa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    People are naive if they think the .ml admins and devs don’t intend to keep their thumb on the Lemmy scale. More instances need to take this threat seriously and defederate from .ml, and possibly even fork the Lemmy repos for when the devs inevitably decide they want to start building quiet exploits into the code. There are serious cyber security implications here that people are sleeping on

  • Darkpepito_tux@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    As a marxist, I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism. And I don’t even understand how people can stay with “Stalin was not so bad”, knowing that he never planned to apply the last state of the Communist theory, and even if it did, massacre are not acceptable (sounds obvious), same applying with China and their open market.
    In my country (France), Stalinism isn’t a thing, all communists are against what happend in USSR, and most are anti-china.

    • finder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism.

      It’s because tankies are just contrarians that use communist ideology as a vehicle to be anti-west / anti-United States (anti-liberal democracy). Tankies will defend any cause or ideology that is against ‘the west’ even if that means happily ignoring the blatant homophobic, genocidal and repressive authoritarianism.

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    2 years 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.

  • EleventhHour@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    As others have said, the only option available currently is to leave the instance and re-create your beloved communities elsewhere. The Lemmy.ml Admins also happen to be the ones actively developing the Lemmy code base, and they’re not gonna change because they feel entitled to do whatever they want, and technically, they can because they run the instance.

    My best advice is to move on from the instance.

  • taipan@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    .ml = Marxism-Leninism

    This wasn’t obvious to me because ML could also mean the country of Mali or machine learning, but based on their content and moderation patterns, it’s unmistakable that the “.ml” in Lemmy instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml stands for Marxism-Leninism.

    Hope that clears things up.

  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I think all instances need to defederate. This is totally inexcusable. We shouldn’t be attached and well connected to a CCP-controlled (influenced or directly) community. This is propaganda, pure and simple.

    It’s not a problem to have dissenting opinions to widely held beliefs, but it is a problem to have those injected constantly into our streams while all opposition is silently erased and curated to artifically support state-sponsored CCP propaganda.