cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531

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.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      133·
      13 days ago

      Hey, remember when you said you’d vote for the Dem candidate if Biden was replaced? How’s that going?

      • basmati@lemmus.orgEnglish
        39·
        13 days ago

        As with most time sure they meant, if Biden stepped down and a primary was run, not if he unilaterally appointed one of the least popular presidential candidates of all time.

        • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          133·
          13 days ago

          Oh yes, just like I’m sure she was being completely sincere when she said all Biden had to do to earn her vote was ‘call for a ceasefire’ within the coming year.

          Turns out when MLs don’t say a single thing in good faith, people start remembering and stop taking them seriously. :)

          • basmati@lemmus.orgEnglish
            36·
            13 days ago

            Given Harris has never and has stated she will never call for a permanent ceasefire, I have no idea where you think your gotcha moment is here.

    • monobot@lemmy.mlEnglish
      72·
      13 days ago

      While I understand someone not agreeing with the way some instance or community is managed, I see value in different opinions.

      Lemmy is great for exactly this purpose, we can have different instances and are able to be exposed to different ideas.

      I can not understand the need of some people to limit their exposure to different ideas.

    • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
      914·
      13 days ago

      It’s why I try to get more people to read theory, the people leaving Reddit usually are the types who care enough to keep up with current events and willful enough to abandon Reddit over ideals, but generally haven’t yet read leftist theory.

      To be clear, many people do read theory, they just aren’t the same people trying to recreate Reddit.