[Discussion] Let's talk about lemmy.ml

Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.

There's a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we've had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, 'tankie-ism', etc. The subject of the admin's, and Lemmy dev's, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.

What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?

To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?

Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don't really engage with posts about international events, I don't share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond "Don't be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can", and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I'm also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.

What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.

This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.

If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)

muntedcrocodile ,

”Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.
" - Karl Popper

We have tried to keep the intolerance of lemmy.ml in check through rational argument and public opinion. We have failed and we muat act to ensure lemmy remains a tolerant place.

They whole discussion came from someone getting banned from every single lemmy.ml community for posting a picture of tank man on the anniversary of Tiananmen square massacre on a relevant community. He then posted about this on .world where is was discovered that .ml is selectively federating rhe modlog.

I would classify the selective federation. Of the modlog as malicious as it means that .ml is performing moderation actions on posts and comments across the fediverse without federating it this is malicious and i would argue abuse of a bug (concerning considering that the bug or unintended behaviour is usefull for the people who wrote the code).

At this point the only way we can ensure security and prosperity across the fediverse is through the defederation of lemmy.ml by all major instances.

Paragone ,

I had an account on there.

Russia invaded Ukraina.

Russia used their non-nuclear city-massacring weapon their "heavy flame thrower" on a city..

Russia murdered Mariopol..

etc..

Recently there was an election in Russia, & I commented that if what Putin wants is for the war to calm-down for his political-comfort in the election,

then Ukraina had to MAKE it a political-problem for Putin

( obviously, the more politically-problematic it is for Putin, the more likely this stupid waste-of-life will be ended for internal-political reasons ).

Lemmy.ml banned me for life.

Kremlin-aligned people are doing what they can to butcher civil-rights throughout the West.

Lemmy.ml apparently is aligned with the Kremlin.

I'm not for accommodating true-enemy of our countries.

Remapping it from sociopolitical-frame to internal-to-one's-body..

IF rabies were trying to highjack your biology, would "being nice to the rabies-viruses" help your life?

Would it increase your lifespan?

Sometimes one needs to accept that some people really, actually intend that one's kind be butchered, for their ideology, or some other aspect of their personality/religion.

Young people are generally much less capable of actually-accepting/actually-believing that others aren't motivated by wanting to be liked..

Young people are generally much less capable of accepting that there are many who'd rather see one butchered/destroyed for sake of their factional-supremacism, for sake of their ideology, for sake of their money, for sake of their class-position, whatever..

Old people sometimes become capable of accepting the evidence.

It seems to be both life-experience battering it into one AND one's innate-nature ( if either one is defective for accepting the specific understanding, then it just won't get in. And I'm saying that as a guy who took about 1/2 century to learn the meaning. )

Understand that people who push to displace objectivity for sake of their ideology are, on both right & left, working to make-certain that this century gets "settled" through lashing-out with weapons, until factional-supremacism, of whomever "wins", has vanquished considered-reasoning, objectivity, correctness, sanity, responsibility, accountability, all that are required for civil-rights to be.

The amount of dogwhistle-programming going on, now even in mainstream left media ( CNN, MSNBC, "progressive" memes are getting infected with it significantly, nowadays )..

as ClimatePunctuation continues accelerating through the next few decades, it'll just keep intensifying..

We NEED to reduce the amount of ideology-instead-of-considered-reasoning.

They're not only going the opposite way, they're pushing that that be The Answer, just as the right are doing.

shruggeth

What people do is people's own business.

Humankind's enforcing the 6th Great Extinction, & pretending it isn't, it's successfully activated ClimatePunctuation, which is accelerating, & will continue accelerating for decades, before peaking, then slowing-down to the new ClimateEquilibrium ( hot planet ), & .. pretending it isn't..

non-accountability/non-responsibility/denial/ignoring is going to enforce the extermination of most of humankind, this century..

The "infection"/highjacking of the US is what happens when corruption is accommodated, right?

a "post constitutional" US of A, is what they're working-on enforcing, now, when they take possession of the US..

Notice, finally, that Leninism, with its "proletariat dictatorship" & Murdochism/Fox with its "populist dictatorship" are actually equally opposed to considered correct reasoning being normal, or owning authority.. both oppose correct-education for all, preferring propaganda/brainwashing ( Leninism through "education", Murdochism through TV & biblical "education" ).

Accommodate it if you want, or hard-block it if you want.

I'm not claiming a "vote".

it is my opinion that they ought be defederated, hard, absolutely, by all who value civil-rights, just as all who are machiavellian/gaslighting ought be locked-out.

but I'm not claiming any binding-vote, of any kind, in any community.

_ /\ _

Cracks_InTheWalls OP ,
@Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works avatar

Ok, there is a lot to unpack here and I'm not certain I'm the one to do it. But factual question - is this you?

https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=4560402

If so your ban looks like it expired a few months ago

captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

Fairly early on, when discussing defederating with an instance called "exploding heads", I laid out criteria I would consider worthy of defederation, which you can find here

I was primarily concerned with unwanted traffic going out over the rest of the Fediverse, hosting illegal content like child porn, or being a rampant hive of racism and calls to violence.

So far I've basically heard people accuse Lemmy.ml of being rather Chinese in their moderation in-house. Is that all we've got?

Cracks_InTheWalls OP ,
@Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works avatar

So far, that's it in a nutshell - barring one account of potential cybersecurity risks coming out of that, which still makes some assumptions re: motivations I'm not 100% convinced on.

I think there's people on the 'perhaps defed' side who would want to argue it on points 4 from your immediate defed list, or 1 on the call to vote list - but personally, I'm not convinced the evidence is strong enough to do so compellingly.

Regardless of the current discussion, it'd be wise for us to revisit your proposed policy as a group and see if we can make that official (with any relevant revisions from pre-vote scrutiny). I stand by what I said back then - it's a solid list, and IMO worth being made official and saved somewhere broadly visible for later reference.

captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

Because if the complaint is "They ban you over there for failing an ideological purity test" the solution is we have our own Lemmy instance, start or participate in an equivalent community here.

threelonmusketeers ,

start or participate in an equivalent community here

Yeah, I think establishing non-ml alternatives for communities which happen to be hosted on ml should be the priority here.

captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

something something blackjack and hookers.

pelespirit ,
@pelespirit@sh.itjust.works avatar

Another large instance deleted some of my posts and hid it, I think it's more common than most understand.

I also think this post has been good at calling attention to them and that it might not be good to post there if you care about your stuff being moderated. They don't seem to be outwardly malicious, just closed and authoritarian on how they run their instance.

rwhitisissle , (edited )

I think that any accusations regarding their moderation policies or agitprop should be supported with actual, physical evidence, and not just personal accounts from individuals who claim to have had negative experiences. It's lemmy. There's a record of everything. Getting that evidence wouldn't be difficult. Time consuming, maybe, but not difficult. That said, if we are banking on personal accounts, I've been on .ml for a while, and while I don't comment in political threads, generally, I've seen little to nothing that coincides with what other users have said they've seen or experienced. I have an array of accounts across several major lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml seems...normal....banal even? There's a lot of benign, largely apolitical communities there that are worth participating in. Saying "well, their political communities are terrible" is all well and good if that's your opinion, but there is such a thing as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Honestly, the ongoing discussion of defederation I keep seeing here and in places like lemmy.world comes across as ideological competition. If some instances, like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, want to reproduce the same kind of vaguely liberal ideological soup that you find on reddit, that's up to them. And that's what it seems like is happening. I could be wrong about that, but lemmy.world comes across to me as a Fediverse Democrat stronghold. I've seen a lot of people there unironically defend things Joe Biden and the Democrats have done that are, from a leftist perspective, completely indefensible. And I have to wonder how many of the complaints about moderators abusing their authority are a result of people going into a Marxist space and pushing unwelcome liberal perspectives where they are obviously not wanted and suffering the consequences of those choices.

I suppose it's probably a natural course of events that you'll see instances defederating from one another as time goes on in order to produce the ideological echo chamber that generates the least amount of complaints from users. It'll start with .ml, but I imagine eventually .world and .works will defederate from any instance still federated with .ml, like hexbears and blahaj. This will, of course, reduce the content and average user count across all instances, leading to people becoming progressively dissatisfied with lemmy instances that already had little discussion and content as they become virtual ghost towns, with people eventually abandoning lemmy and going back to reddit with their tail between their legs or some other godawful source of corporate-sanctioned content.

But part of what's great about allowing self-determination in a profitless, federated network like ours is the choice of allowing said network to slowly wither and die for the sake of its users avoiding minor inconveniences, like having to interact with people they might disagree with in any capacity or suffering a temporary ban from a community.

archomrade ,

And I have to wonder how many of the complaints about moderators abusing their authority are a result of people going into a Marxist space and pushing unwelcome liberal perspectives where they are obviously not wanted and suffering the consequences of those choices.

It doesn't even take receipts to know this is usually the case, often the users complaining will say they were posting a completely reasonable take about Tiennemen square and then OUT OF NOWHERE they were banned and their comments were removed. It's not like they spend any amount of time discussing that topic on their instance on their own, people go there specifically to kick the nest

rwhitisissle ,

If there's one thing I understand, it's the desire to bicker with people. But I will say that anyone who is a true flamewar veteran knows you have to be able to pick your battles well enough that moderators won't get involved and will let you have it out in the comments with people.

TerraRoot ,

I'm more bothered by anti-tankie posts then tankie posts.

nahuse , (edited )

Hello! I'm a guy who decided to join lemmy a few months ago, specifically because I was absolutely enraged by how moderation on Reddit worked. I am also taking part rather vigorously in the conversation about how much I dislike .ml moderation practices! I think I might be a little bit of an agitator in all this, because In joined lemmy after about a medium bit of research, and then jumped into it full tilt with the idea of "why not, I spent so much time as a revolutionary, myself!" And then I hit whatever the internet/globalization has done to what I recognize as leftist political spaces.

AMA, I guess!

For some background about myself, I'm an older millennial, who grew up with disparate web forums which were generally hidden behind a random website. My favorite haunt was punkbands.com, and loved LAN parties and early MMORPGs. Anyways, I had to get off the internet for a while to make a living, but eventually got to a spot where I could again visit the world wide web during working hours. One of my coworkers introduced me, through my first "smart phone" (an android, like, whatever was around in 2011 and cheap as fuck but still let me get online) to reddit. I really loved that old(ish) school internet, where people could spam and insult eachother within limits, and the community policed itself through a somewhat democratic process. I was legit excited to join lemmy, given how far I think reddit had fallen and how much disinformation had infected it, and how similar it appeared to the older, more democratic internet of my youth.

However, I found that a large part of lemmy is dominated by people who profess to be leftists, but ambush you with ideological purity tests and subsequent abuse if you don't pass. I questioned a post on the .ml world news sub that came from a source that is literally a Syrian and Bolivian governmental news outlet, which alleged that the US military was stealing crude oil and raw wheat from Syrian oil derricks/Syrian farmers. I used mediabiasfactcheck.com to support my questioning of this source. I also appealed to logic, questioning why the US would steal things that it exports. A mod there (I believe the username is davos) engaged me in a conversation spanning hours, where we exchanged information about whether mediabiasfactcheck.com was a reasonable source to help assess the validity of media. While the conversation was uncomfortable, we each exchanged information and links supporting our arguments. Because I did not accept his outright rejection of medibiasfactcheck.com as a way to assist with the judement of media, I was banned and all of my comments were deleted.

Since then, I have met another .ml mod (username yogthos), and engaged in a long conversation about this same topic (.ml censorship). It was in a meta sub, hosted on the .ml instance. The conversation I am referring to has since been deleted, and I am not sure if it is possible to find it again, since my own history has disappeared; I will be happy to answer questions of anybody with the tech savvy to retrieve these exchanges. Anyway. In this meta thread, I engaged several users about the issue of unfair .ml moderation, alongside several other lemmy users. During the course of this exchange, a .ml user made an assertion that the OP (who was complaining about the "tankie problem") was banned from the .ml instance because they had, somewhere undefined, insisted that the Tienanmen Massacre had actually happened. As a note, please understand that this was about a week before the start of June, and nobody so far in this thread had mentioned Tienanmen Square. Anywhere. Anyways, I questioned this particular statement, and yogthos suddenly butted in with a ton of weird sources that supported his claim that Tiennenma Square never happened. They insisted that the whole thing was a Color Revolution that was sponsored by the CIA, and that actually the students of the Tienanmen Square had attacked the Chinese Soldiers. I insisted that this was inconsistent with prevailing evidence, but was told that I simply needed to watch the various videos and read the blogs to understand that it was all untrue. I also engaged with some uders about my own ideology, where I was insulted as a "lib" for stating my intense distaste for authoritarianism. yogthos, the .ml moderator who I spoke with, told me that "libs don't understand" that authoritarianism is ok if it is in defense of fascism... but did not expound as to how fascism was defined.

As for my evidence, I have shared it in some of the other posts. However, if you'll look at the moderation history of .ml, under my user name, you will see that I am banned from several subs, and I think from the whole .ml instance. It will be for "Rule 4," which from what I can tell is spam, or advertising. I have never taken part in anything that resembles spam or advertising. I have, though, had comments that insist that there was some kind of violence surrounding Tienanmen Square, or debate the validity of news from Syrian government media sources, removed from .ml instances. You may also notice that I was banned from subs like palestine and usa, which I have never actually participated in, aside from upvoting or downvoting.

You will also, looking back, hopefully find the initial conversations I reference in this post. If you have specific questions, I will try to figure out how to find them, using the mod log.

This is a long post... and I'm sorry. I guess I just really don't want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.

I'm sure I have missed a ton here, and paradoxically written far too much. I am happy to answer any questions or critique, as long as it is relatively polite and relevant.

Edit: I'm also just kind of a nerd about propaganda and discourse in international relations, especially in online spaces. I've studied it. Ive written papers on it. I find these things incredibly meaningful and important, so I've gotten involved here.

Cracks_InTheWalls OP , (edited )
@Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works avatar

Edit: Added an additional choice - block whole instance at user level - to 'option' list. If you, nahuse, or anyone else have ideas for options f through zz, feel free to say so!

Thanks for joining the discussion, nahuse! I appreciate the specifics you've provided.

As an aside, you and a few others raise an interesting point re: archiving of deleted comments, particularly when there's evidence of those comments getting removed from the modlog intentionally (I'm not claiming that this is objectively true - I don't know, but it is one of the common claims in the broader discussion here and on similar posts). Seems like a worthwhile project for someone with the interest, skills, and time to develop. But anyway.

Your experience does echo that of other politically engaged sh.it.heads* in this thread. I would ask - given the choice between
a) blocking lemmy.ml communities with evidence of ideologically motivated moderation (either on a case by case basis, or as part of a community-sourced blocklist - something I mentioned here before but do not know can be implemented), and using alternatives for 'controversial' topics;
b) blocking lemmy.ml at the instance level, as a user;
c) joining an instance which is not federated with lemmy.ml;
d) having sh.itjust.works defederate from lemmy.ml as a whole; or
e) keeping things as they currently are, in terms of your engagement and 'positioning' [eg. Instance of choice, community engagement, etc.] - retaining the ability to try and engage on lemmy.ml communities with the same risk of ban/blanket ban, and talk about it there while enfranchised and elsewhere in the Threadiverse during ban periods.

which makes the most sense to you/would be preferable?

The dynamics of Lemmy instances are kind of interesting, as each can have very different approaches to moderation. An instance admin may simply have a policy of "Please just don't post anything that's going to make CSIS or the RCMP knock on my door" (Canada bias here), and individual community moderators either a) apply an even hand with that edict in mind, or b) apply and enforce more restrictive policies. Others may have a more consistent throughline based in interests, political beliefs, and so on - which seems to be the case for lemmy.ml and is why we see these blanket community bans over innocuous comments.

I'd like to touch on that 'innocuous' point - what I've personally seen results in bans/deletion looks like fairly bog standard internet political discourse (alongside legitimately not cool stuff, but that's not in scope at the moment to tease out). You present a point, you get a counterpoint, things get a little heated - with the difference that the person with the heated 'not our flavour of far-left discourse' comment has a much higher risk of getting ban hammered.

I don't think this is ok - but at the same time, this is a moderation choice of a specific group using a specifically allocated set of resources. Alternative communities exist, and can be used, that may not have this problem (though someone will always find something to complain about re: moderation practices, tale as old as the internet)

There is, of course, the stickier point of lemmy.ml being not necessarily the main instance (see imaqtpie's post, makes some good points), but the Lemmy dev's instance. I don't think the problems people have with lemmy.ml (usually in global events and political discussion communities - unfortunately resulting in blanket bans from unrelated communities on the instance in some cases) extend to the tool/protocol itself [see: exploding-heads, all of the more distasteful instances that exist], but this may be a concern for some [see Socsa's comments here]. It may raise concerns/doubts about Lemmy as a whole. It sucks - I love this thing - but it shouldn't be unacknowledged.

*If you haven't seen this term before, it's what I like to call users of this instance (much to the chagrin of some :) ). Think Deadheads - enthusiasts of sh.itjust.works. A little cheeky, but ultimately good natured and fun - which kind of sums up my feelings about this place. We love sh.it.heads - not to be confused with shitheads.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

I too have been somewhat of an agitator in this. In my defense, data getting removed from the modlogs sounds indefensable to me - as in, incompatible with the principles of the Fediverse where we are supposed to "trust" the instances that are federated together?

In Dessalines' defense, that may very well have been real yet merely a bug in testing the newer features of v0.19.4? Only an instance admin would be able to dig deeper into that, and even that requires some bit of coding or data wrangling skill to either constantly monitor the differences in the modlog before vs. after the alleged edits, or as was suggested to have happened, be caught purely by chance (as one person claimed).

I am not volunteering to spin up an instance to test though, so I will drop this matter and give lemmyl.ml the benefit of the doubt on it. i.e., Lemmy.ml having been in the process of upgrading to 0.19.4-rc.6 wasn't widely known at the time, but now that we know that, bugs may be more expected than not during such a process?

Even so it does not change how hearing about (or observing first-hand?) such heavy-handed moderation practices as nahuse described will drive people away from the Fediverse, thereby lowering overall content for us all. Saying that it is their instance to do with as they please is like saying that it is fine for porn to appear on porn websites - which it very much is! (or should be, imho) - but my goodness, please label it so that people do not walk into it unawares!?!?! Similarly I am not... entirely happy that hexbear.net has a community dedicated to dunking on people (Chapotraphouse; maybe it is therapy for them?), but now that I know that, let them feel free to be however they want, but oh my, please WARN someone before letting them just walk into that hailstorm of comments!!! (which continued for WEEKS after I made some comment about President Biden doing better than I expected in some small matter, long after I stopped responding but my consent to continuing the conversation no longer seemed to matter to them; and then the next week I similarly walked into a lemmygrad.ml post and had the same thing happen)

The very concept of Federation makes that significantly more complicated b/c "we" choose to show that content in "our" spaces, so it is both theirs, and after it comes over, ours too. Fortunately, the site.content_warning in v0.19.4 will allow such warnings to be delivered, though I am not certain how it is implemented (it says prior to showing images or viewing a community, but what about a post from a community? e.g. !memes has a great deal of content that can be... off-putting to people). Note that it says that the warning will only be delivered the first time a user triggers it - though again the details remain to be seen, e.g. will a cookie remember that past a session for the same login?

So I personally would like to see an option "f" added that would use the new site.content_warning ability as/if it rolls out with v0.19.4. Though I have no say in this as a non-member of sh.itjust.works, so I say this only to explain my thoughts in case they were of interest. The tricky part about that might be how to implement it: the temptation would be to do so only in the more "controversial" communities, and yet the admins of lemmy.ml are doing blanket bans among many communities, e.g. !memes, despite people never having commented in them before. So they seem to think that the entire instance is one big community in that respect - or else how can that be justified? - hence the warning should be to anywhere across all of the instance, not just each community, should it not? (and again, whether that is even possible, or if it would have to be applied to each individual community plus all future ones created, remains to be seen)

aStonedSanta ,

I am not from this instance. But I’m very happy to have you on the federation we need more people willing to be open and honest about their experiences. Thank you 🙏

archomrade ,

I guess I just really don't want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.

I don't mean to instigate an argument, but I think this comment illustrates pretty well why .ml might actually be justified in judicious use of the ban hammer. If people are coming in specifically motivated by an ideological disagreement, then maybe they're well within their right (ethically I mean, they're within their right just on the basis of owning the instance as it is)

Lumisal ,

But the person you replied to wasn't talking about ideological disagreements - they were talking about factual disagreements.

As in, the .ml mods seem to deny facts.

archomrade ,

Yes I'm sure OP was having a very rational conversation about widely accepted and not at all contested facts that are not at all important to any ideological perspective.

Lumisal ,

The Tiananmen square massacre is not a contested fact. It's just a fact.

archomrade ,

Yes, a famously uncontested fact

And I am sure that fact was brought up completely organically and not specifically because op knew it was a source of ideological tension

Lumisal ,

Truth isn't an ideology though. You keep trying to draw a false equivalence between the two. Truth is just truth. Ignoring the truth is simply acting in bad faith, and that's something any ideology can do for any truths. If a group is denying that truth then they are trying to spread misinformation.

archomrade ,

I'm not making a statement about the truthfulness of the specific claims being raised, i'm just pointing out that the topic is very famously contentious, and going to that space specifically to raise it knowing full well it is not a welcome one is itself bad-faith trolling and deserving of removal and possibly a ban, depending on how hostile you're being.

It isn't your space where you can decide what topics are fair game, and frankly whining about it here isn't going to change anything about their moderation policies.

Lumisal ,

Seems to me you're just skirting around the fact that there's a group that specifically against the truth.

Not only that, but now you're saying a group has the right to pretend that a fact is not a fact, and they did he allowed to have a space where they can push lies without repercussions.

But even ignoring all that, moderation where you get banned and censored from communities unrelated to the where you post a fact is just acting in bad faith. It's no longer moderation as you state, it's actual censorship.

archomrade ,

I'm not skirting around anything, I'm just pointing to the problem. If someone walked into a LGBTQ forum and started harassing users about male and famale biology phenotypes, they'd be within their right to ban that person. It doesn't matter if what they were saying was factually correct or not if the reason they're there is to harass them along an ideological fault-line, especially if they're instigating that topic themselves to begin with.

It's their space, they're allowed to keep certain charged topics out of it, even if you disagree with them or if you feel like they're trying to censor what you consider to be factually accurate. You can talk about that topic anywhere else you want, they can't censor you in your own space.

Honestly I think they're not being strict enough, if it were me i'd be taking notes on everyone here affirming their intention to push this topic in my space and just preemptively ban them.

Lumisal , (edited )

Username checks out

PS: it's not considered factually accurate. It is.

archomrade ,

"I don't have any defense for my behavior, LOL nice username"

PS: idk what fact you're specifically talking about, nor do I think it's particularly relevant to the question

Lumisal ,

You don't get 2 things.

  1. you already admitted you don't care for the truth. Therefore, it's not possible to have a civil discussion with you, because you're someone that doesn't accept facts, because you'll always invent some fantasy that's convenient to you for the argument.

  2. People like you are indeed allowed to live in your censored fantasy instance. But there's no rain other instances need to tolerate your fantasy world, let alone allow members into instances that do fairly moderate, accept the truth, and don't try to force their fantasy unto others (which is inherently what happens when one side accepts reality and the other denies it + censors reality).

Therefore, there's no point in continuing this discussion, "comrade".

archomrade ,
  • i've admitted I don't think 'truthfulness' exempts attempts at harassment in another forum, even if you think that your crusade of truth is justified
  • I live in no such 'censored fantasy instance', because i've not defederated from any of the instances i happen to disagree with. Lemmy.world, however, has censored themselves from further-left perspectives, so I don't find it at all surprising that you're having difficulty with the concept. People like you feel entitled to inserting your world-view into other people's discussions, but that doesn't mean others feel the same entitlement.

You're free to block me if you find my criticisms objectionable.

fartington ,

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    Cracks_InTheWalls OP ,
    @Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works avatar

    Obviously that person was trolling you, but gotta admit I laughed at the "lol, so paranoid ... we'll keep that in mind" thing.

    fartington ,

    I was laughing the entire time lol. The deleted replies were fucking deranged and hilarious:

    What if I told you that I'm genuinely not the person you were talking to before? And what if I told you that I just don't like you and think you're unintelligent and irritating? Would that make you cry? Piss and cum, maybe? Little pissbaby wants his nappy changed I guess - too bad there's no more milkies in the fridge for him. All gone, and never coming back Enjoy your phone addiction - try living in the real world instead of a shell. It'll put hair on your nuts

    CaptDust ,

    Just chiming in to say a lot of communities I participate in are hosted on ml, I'd be pretty bummed losing access to those. For that reason I'm against wholesale defederarion. I do think the communities need to explicitly diversify away from the instance though, ml admins seem demonstrably untrustworthy.

    threelonmusketeers ,

    I do think the communities need to explicitly diversify away from the instance

    Yeah, I don't think defederation is warranted yet, but establishing non-ml alternatives for communities which happened to be hosted on ml should be a priority. Blaze posted a thread specifically on this topic: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20431762

    Socsa ,

    At minimum the .ml admins have shown a desire and willingness to keep their finger on the scale of the broader fediverse, which makes them a clear existential threat and possibly even a cyber security risk. In addition, they protect hexbear and lemmygrad, which openly state that their intention is to wage information warfare on the fediverse. We also see some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them some special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content. This alone is extremely concerning. The idea that we can individually block their instance does nothing to mitigate the ideological or security concerns I have.

    My personal experience is that they protect propagandists and do not enforce their own rules evenly at all. My bans have been for me extremely petty things, and even for thing I have said on other instances. Meanwhile I have been called names, told that my family deserves to be tortured and that my country deserves to be nuked by .ml users (or hexbear proxies). I also find their defense of Russian and Chinese autocracy personally offensive, as I have family who have been directly impacted by both. It would be one thing if this was happening in a forum where these issues could be debated, or defenses mounted against misinformation and historical revisionism, but that is simply not the case. Even the most modest pushback against these ideas results in quick bans. This is not something we should associate with.

    ryathal ,

    Learning the ml is a shitty place for news and politics is a right of passage for using lemmy. Defederation isn't the answer, at least not until they do something more than ban people who disagree with them.

    dev_null ,

    When I found about the existence of Lemmy, I wanted to create an account, and found that Lemmy.ml is the official Lemmy instance ran by the Lemmy developers (who I knew nothing about). Seemed like the obvious, default, non-controversial choice.

    Of course I later learned about... All this. I'm not interested in any political content so it took me a while.

    So I guess I'd be a casualty, due to picking the biggest instance suggested to me by join-lemmy.org. How is someone new to Lemmy supposed to have the context here?

    AlligatorBlizzard ,

    It's not ideal. I will say that the focus on ml has been removed from the join-lemmy website, even when I joined it was encouraged to join something other than ml just under a year ago and that change happened in the middle of the Reddit exodus. You could consider making an account on another instance now that you do have more information, a lot of people have already done that but it's a pain without account migration implemented yet.

    Blaze ,
    @Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

    Hello,

    Any reason to not include the thread that started it all, and has documented abuse from lemmy.ml admins? https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058

    Also, if people want to avoid lemmy.ml communities, here is a thread that discusses alternatives: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20431762

    Cracks_InTheWalls OP ,
    @Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works avatar

    Nope, totally reasonable to add this. I just didn't bother because it was the top post in All at the time (think it still is this morning).

    Barbarian ,
    @Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

    I'm going to echo what seems to be the majority opinion here and say that defederation should not be taken lightly. The last big defed discussion here I was in favor of, but that was a very different case. That was a hatespeech instance with the barest veneer of "just asking questions bro", run by a free speech absolutist who was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Their daily posts consisted mostly of transphobic, islamophobic or anti-semitic rage-bait (or some combination of those). EDIT: Oh! There were also a lot of covid conspiracy posts there too, now I think about it.

    There are some communities there I avoid, but that doesn't merit defederation. In my mind at least, that should be reserved for instances that allow illegal content, pure unadulterated hatespeech, instances that have been overrun by bots so badly the admin can't handle it (temporarily for that one ofc), or instances that regularly brigade and the admin encourages this behavior.

    And besides, I've also had some pleasant and interesting conversations with .ml users. There are some problematic users and communities, but that's why we have block buttons.

    sugar_in_your_tea ,

    I'm against defederartion, but I also actively avoid their communities.

    I don't think the problem is with a majority of users, just a handful, but many in that handful are mods. As an anecdote, I got temp banned from a community there because somehow our discussion shifted to Russia, despite the topic having nothing to do with it, and the mod banned me for "anti-Russia" something or other (nothing I said seemed to violate community or instance rules), but I think the real reason was me challenging that user's authority.

    I've also noticed a lot of downvotes for well-cited but "against the left" comments, and the responses I get are often low-effort.

    I've also had some decent discussion there as well. I've challenged people's views and had good reubuttals, so it's really not all bad. I'm guessing it's a fraction of very active users that cause a lot of the issues.

    So I'm against defederation, but I also recommend avoiding their communities. It seems to be a strong echo chamber, but those who aren't interested in that do seem to branch out. So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    Ziggurat ,

    I might be following the right communities, because I never noted problem with user from .ml.

    I start to wonder whether we don't have some person using tankie the same way as mainstream right-winger use woke.

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