Other people have had the same kind of treatment. I even discussed with the lemm.ee admin about this, and he told me that even though he understood I got upset, he didn't want to interfere with community moderation.
So we started !movies. Still feels a bit sour about this, I guess I was among the top contributors to !moviesandtv
Do you think at some point it would be worthwhile to start a television community on lemm.ee as well? I know right now !movies is for both but eventually I imagine it might be best to separate them.
Happy to have somewhere to post film news - I get a tonne in my feed but there are so many film communities I hadn't got round to figuring out which to commit to. You helped that choice along.
Still a bit frustrating to see that the moderation team on !movies isn’t doing much with that place, but that’s life I guess
In the end, you can only worry about your own communities.
Yeah, I have a habit of sharing news that only really interests me. That's why I don't share everything I come across. A friend and I used to run a website together, and I got quite used to posting the latest film trailers and interesting news that I came across. Although sometimes I found it really hard to post news about films I didn't really care about. I had to write something to accompany the video.
Oh indeed - it's always possible to reach out to an Admin to try and sort out any issues - they're quite obvious though, as they have duplicate communities on the same instance.
Kinda happy how at the start of the season !bicycle_touring got a bit of traffic. But i'm not all that hopeful really because the regular bicycling subs with way more subscribers have also very little traffic. I sometimes wonder if all that even makes sense here if it isn't about computers, memes or politics.
The camping, ultralight, outdoor communities are pretty much just dead.
Kinda happy how at the start of the season !bicycle_touring got a bit of traffic. But i’m not all that hopeful really because the regular bicycling subs with way more subscribers have also very little traffic.
Nice that you got a bit of traffic. Maybe it stays low because people interesting in bicycle touring aren't that much on Reddit, without even mentioning Lemmy?
The camping, ultralight, outdoor communities are pretty much just dead.
Can you please provide links? Should they maybe try to consolidate at first, to get more activity in one place?
Camping i think theoretically has some actual users, the solarpunkers seem to mostly repost stuff, not do or plan to do something. I don't think consolidation will do much.
To be completely honest, i am a bit turned off how slrpnk's take on niche communities appears to be. They seem to care not much about the topic, but how and where communities are hosted. They don't link to the bicycle touring community because it's on .world, not to camping because it's on sh.itjust.works etc, as these instances (and many others) are "not part of the free world" and opressors. This is not how you grow the fediverse, i believe.
I've been most invested into helping !jrpg get going. It seems like there are plenty of lurkers and a growing amount of engagement by comments, but people are still shy about posting links or discussions. News in the genre has been slow the past couple months, though.
I tried with !gamemusic. As a general rule, I'll prioritize posting content to smaller instances, and I picked out that community on my home instance to do so, but I think it's just not happening. I'm moving over to !vgmusic.
I'm also glad !houseplants is doing well. Seems like they've got a good plan going on over there, with relevant stickies, a useful sidebar, and link exchange.
!superbowl is still doing ok, though not quite at its peak. I don't think new subs are going up by much these days. I have seen comments by a few new names, which is very nice to see. Overall comment levels are about the same. Upvotes seem steady, but not as high as they were around the new year. I do think the year end festivities really boosted things though.
I'm happy to be ahead of !opossums again though (no offense, I love opossums too, but I want to be #1 wild animal sub!) and I look to be top of the 2nd page of communities overall, so even though I'm not doing quite as well as I perhaps feel I should be doing, I feel I can't complain too much.
I still get a few positive compliments each week and people are sharing their personal stories with owls, which is always nice to hear. As long as I know the content is making people happy, I feel it's worth the work.
I've enjoyed having a few things to share with the !digitalbioacoustics community. I've gotten some great recommended reading materials from that group in return. Maybe I'll have to look into more collabs and get some cross promotion going.
A couple weeks ago I started occasionally posting to !cyberpunk when the main daily poster said they were taking a week off. That worked out nicely. They were offline for a week again recently and I "filled in the gap" again with daily posting.
I was posting music links daily to !gothindustrial last August but ran through my main playlist by March. I've been trying to post at least once a week since then.
!synthwave only gets sporadic posting. I'm trying to post once a week.
On !fullmoviesonyoutube the regular poster said they were out of content. A couple of us said we'd post, but personally I only have like 4-5 more posts worth of content.
I've been trying to get a bit of life into !starwarsfigures and !legostarwars - Rome wasn't sacked in a day though and experience suggests bloody minded persistence is the key.
It's hard, we probably made too many communities too quickly lol. But then again if you have a topic you're obsessed about then it's nice to have somewhere to post without worrying about spamming. Like I can't just endlessly post things about The 7th Guest or Deus Ex Randomizer to a normal games community, but spamming my own communities I do get some upvotes so I guess some people enjoy these posts.
I feel like people have been conditioned by Reddit to be hesitant about making posts. There's no reason for posting to have a high barrier of entry. Maybe we need to be more willing to post things, like people chatting in Discord.
And comments too, especially comments in old posts, Lemmy handles it way better than Reddit so feel free to drop comments in year old posts lol. Occasionally sort your feed by "New Comments" or "Active". I have a widget on my phone's home screen that shows my Subscribed feed sorted by New Comments. It was fun with old school forums and it's still fun on Lemmy.
Trying my best to keep casual HistoryLemmy alive. Sometimes I get contributors with great stuff in HistoryPorn, but I'm almost entirely alone in HistoryArtifacts, HistoryIllustrations, HistoryRuins, and HistoryMemes.
I wouldn’t care if other instances just blocked them outright. It would suck for those who are registered there, but to me, it’s no different from defederating from Nazi apologists.
Based on this, I would almost suggest creating a third "Fediverse" community, be it on lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works or reddthat.com, communities known for honest admins, and with a group of mods that could be trusted.
However, I guess finding people wanting to mod that kind of place would be very difficult based on this kind of threads.
One example of comment removal that caught my eye:
They can’t engage with any topics or offer counter arguments. Every response is: Calling people fascists, insulting and using ad hominems is lemmy.world's thing. The comment section to this is mind-blowing, really. All the things of which users of lemmy.world are accusing other instances, is exactly what your instance is doing. And you don't even see the hypocrisy...
Reason: Misinformation
ban difference of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs That's exactly what lemmy.world is doing.
Reason: Misinformation
Not being able to criticize an instance on that instance seems counterproductive to me. You are convincing people that they are right claiming you apply censorship as they are being censored.
One ban example that caught my eye:
The whole "USSR allied with the Nazis" thing is actually Nazi propaganda and historical evidence proves this repeatedly. Before the war started, Stalin offered to send 1 million soldiers preemptively to England and France, together with artillery and aviation, if they agreed to a mutual defense agreement against Nazis. The soviet union wasn't prepared industrially for a war like that, again as proven by the 20+ million deaths in the war, and wanted to postpone it as much as possible, and join the allies as soon as it started, but France and England were too eager to see communism destroyed and didn't care about mutual defense, especially England. The fact that the Soviet Union later invaded some countries to the east of Germany was in preparation for war, to prevent Nazism from rising in these places and the military there allying with Hitler, as Finland did for example (there were plenty of Finns sieging Leningrad). Equating Nazism and the USSR is a revisionist, fascist talking point based on purposeful misinterpretation of some data like the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and outright omission of other data such as the attempted Collective Security policy attempted by the USSR since the early 30s to protect Europe from fascism, that England and France conveniently didn't agree to since nazis and fascists were enemies of communism as they were.
Reason: Misinformation / Harassment
That user was later banned.
This comment has a source (The Telegraph, might not be the best, but still). Seems more interesting to keep the comment, show them why they are wrong, so that people reading the whole conversation can see which side is more reasonable, than removing the comment and banning the user altogether.
My point was that posting those kind of links in reply to comments that are suspected to be propaganda could counter their argumentation without having to silence them.
My point was that posting those kind of links in reply to comments that are suspected to be propaganda could counter their argumentation without having to silence them.
Platforming lies is platforming lies. "But someone further down in the thread refuted it!" doesn't really matter when the entire fucking point of this kind of misinformation is "Repeat a lie loud enough and often enough and people will believe it's true". It's no more worthy of staying on to show 'both sides' than contrasting vaccination with fucking anti-vaxxers.
On the other side, banning people is encouraging them to create their own echo chambers (lemmy.ml being obviously one from the recent instance bans). I guess different communities will have different stance on moderation strategies, which is the way the Fediverse is supposed to operate.
People need to be free to be how they like. e.g., if a mod is forced to have to read constant Russian (or Chinese, or Israeli, or American, or UK or whatever) propaganda with horribly offensive active disinformation, then likely they will quit being mods. I'm not saying they are holding their efforts hostage to their preferences - but I'm not not saying that either (it is factually accurate if unnecessarily adversarially phrased), just saying that it's the normal default of the world and we would do better to bow to natural principles than to wish and hope that things were not that way.
It is really, REALLY hard to find common middle ground - and sometimes it cannot be done. Echo chambers are a natural result of how people with opposing viewpoints choose not to tolerate one another.
Intolerance is uniquely important, bc being intolerant to intolerance is not the same as generalized intolerance!!! In fact, the opposite is true: anyplace that is even somewhat vaguely neutral towards intolerant behaviors, in general, will quickly become intolerant overall. Imagine a room with screaming toddlers - those who scream loudest get noticed, and the behavior spirals forward feeding off of the other behaviors to become more pronounced, not less so. A space quiet enough to be heard is not normal. Entropy must be fought against if order is desired. There is a balance somewhere between letting toddlers do nothing at all fun, vs. letting them do whatever crosses their minds at any given moment, thus inflicting their tendencies upon others nearby.
Take Chapotraphouse for instance: I would not dream in a million years of trying to shut that place down. Maybe I should? But I don't. That said, neither do I want to go there, and the Fediverse would be a much more welcoming place overall if it would warn people about what goes on inside of it. If they are willing to be fair-minded, they could even contribute towards writing up the content text of such a warning? They should not be solely in charge of that endeavor, ideally, yet neither do I see any legitimate reason to lock them out of such a process?
I don't know how the Fediverse expects to survive when we mix together the equivalent of 4chan and Wikipedia, but don't label any of it, and then try to get people to come and enjoy their time here. Especially with it being so confusing - e.g. was a comment removed by a community mod or an instance admin? (fortunately v0.19.4 looks to entirely solve that latter one, yay dev efforts on that one - they really do so much for us all, for free!:-D)
Note I am not advocating for a common middle ground here - I do not believe such exists (e.g. if someone wants to make fun of me, but I don't want that, why would we presume a "middle ground solution" should be the default?). I am rather advocating for labeling things what they are. Imagine going to a website to watch videos, but some videos are porn and your friends are all prudes, or moreover let's even imagine some are nonconsensual pedophilia - will you send them there? Sending people to Chapotraphouse, or a place that federates with it - crucially: without labeling it - is like that.
Some places on the Fediverse are like porn - they are (/ may be?) fine to exist, but are considered offensive enough to need to be labeled, if we want to reach out to a more common audience (of e.g. non-Arch-Linux users:-). And then yeah, label Lemmy.World as likely to remove content that goes against Western standards? (Except you picked bad examples imho, being community mods rather than instance admins) And do similarly for Lemmy.ml as well - again, hopefully with their own participation in writing up that label?
The first two are sweeping generalizations that are like that simply not true and only serve to attack the work of the moderators. If you want to critizise something you need concrete examples.
The last one... the historical accuracy is debatable, but was it even posted on a thread that discussed pre-ww2 history? Usually such cut&paste comments are made to derail justified complaints regarding ML propaganda about recent events.
The first two are sweeping generalizations that are like that simply not true and only serve to attack the work of the moderators. If you want to critizise something you need concrete examples.
Ironically, the moderators created those examples themselves by removing those comments.
The last one… the historical accuracy is debatable, but was it even posted on a thread that discussed pre-ww2 history?
It was not, but as you know, the lemmy.ml moderation discussion always brings up political questions.
Usually such cut&paste comments are made to derail justified complaints regarding ML propaganda about recent events.
Indeed. The fact that lemmy.ml bans people about mentioning Tienanmen is still crazy. But that should probably not be a justification for lemmy.world moderators to remove any debatable historical thesis and ban users for that, especially on a community dedicated to the fediverse.
But that should probably not be a justification for lemmy.world moderators to remove any debatable historical thesis and ban users for that, especially on a community dedicated to the fediverse.
Jesus fucking Christ, the users in question are outright denying massacres, a matter of historical fact not seriously questioned by mainstream academia, performed by a totalitarian state in WW2 on a civilian population, but it's okay because the totalitarian state isn't Nazi Germany? It's just a 'debatable historical thesis'?
This is fucked, and it's extremely strange that you don't see that.
The debatable part is that the USSR might have considered it a valid tactic to buy time, which is the main thesis of the specific post quoted above. I think it is a postwar rationalisation and Stalin had no qualms about working with Hitler, but that is also debatable.
What however isn't debatable is that community moderators can and should remove comments that are only made to derail discussions.
The debatable part is that the USSR might have considered it a valid tactic to buy time, which is the main thesis of the specific post quoted above. I think it is a postwar rationalisation and Stalin had no qualms about working with Hitler, but that is also debatable.
Indeed, thanks for pointing it out.
What however isn’t debatable is that community moderators can and should remove comments that are only made to derail discussions.
I read the whole chain of comments, it actually was started by another commenter that mentioned Poland, and then started the whole thing. You can have a look here if you are interested: https://slrpnk.net/post/10244872/9112924
I 100% agree with removing the historical revisionism.
I don't quite agree with banning the first two comments. But I do agree they are misinformation. Unless we can surface mod logs about historical facts the mods/instance admins don't like getting people banned from .world?
I'm with you on choosing a smaller instance, though. I moved to .world after I mistakenly had an account on .ml, so I was still pretty new to Lemmy.
This gets back to the original point made in that thread: I chose to move because I had been banned for I don't even know what. Meanwhile the other person was expressing that any amount of collateral damage to minorities is justified as long as he can see white "crackers" suffer and be killed under a Trump authoritarian government.
"You don't understand!! The USSR was allied with the Nazis because they were fighting the Nazis!!!"
I've seen you post a lot of fantastic stuff on here and appreciate the good changes you're actively bringing to the Fediverse, but I have to disagree on this one.
What was wrong with the post specifically? It all looks true and sourced to me. A non aggression pact is not the same as being allies with the Nazis unless you think Sweden, Switzerland, and the US were allied with the Nazis, too, for a time. The USSR needed time to build up their forces and get a buffer zone since the people they wanted to ally with refused to fight the enemy they were scared of, an enemy they had to prepare for.
It's ridiculous, on its face. They wanted a "buffer zone?" So that gave them the right to violently invade people's countries? Justified the next half century of murder and torture after the Nazis were defeated? Come on.
Regarding the non-aggression pact, if they were scared of the Nazis they would have fought them while the Allies fought them. Hitler broke the Ribbentrop Pact, not the USSR. More revisionism propaganda.
They did both of those things because the Kremlin is a violent imperial power that has put many millions of innocent people under the ground, with or without the facade of communism. The gulag isn't just a meme, and there are good reasons their neighbors hate them.
I don't think it gives them right, nor do I think it was the right thing to do, but it does explain it from a real politik point of view, especially after being left alone by western countries. Countries do similar stuff all the time, and I think it's more morally justifiable than the US extending their reach by bombing the hell out of Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, most of South America, etc. They can't even justify those things with self-defense.
They didn't attack at the same time because they were weren't strong enough yet and knew it. I thought that other comment already established that. It makes sense. It would explain why Hitler pushed so far into the USSR on their military campaign. Entering a war is a hard thing to justify for people at home. It's easier when you are provoked. Hell, the US didn't start attacking with their troops at the same time, either, for the same reason. They had to wait until Pearl Harbor. In fact, didn't they even officially enter even later?
The USSR had some major problems, but the issue I have noticed is that people always talk as if the USSR is some extra ordinary evil empire, but when you look at everything, it's not too much worse than the US. The US also had prison labor camps with a vast amount of people in it, except it had a racial component. They also had a huge, surveillance state (just ask MLK, Jr, or Fred Hampton). They also had internal purges (see Hollywood). They also deployed troops and bombs around the world, spreading murder and torture, in an imperialist fashion. The only thing is they don't have to worry about being invaded, so they don't have to make those same kinds of decisions with the fear of the safety of their citizens close to home. And yet no one talks about the US with the same vitriol. I'm kind of appreciating the even handed view of being in the middle of these multiple echo chambers between lemmy.world and like hexbear or lemmygrad lol.
I don't know what thread you're talking about, but rather than pointing broadly to the modlog, why not point out some specific examples. "Banned for misinformation" isn't very helpful without knowing what that alleged misinformation is. If it's genuinely spreading lies, that's very different from if it doesn't match someone's political ideology.
Holy fuck, looking down through, how the hell do you not find these removals reasonable? "Poland forgave the Nazis for genocide, but not the Russians for a bloodless invasion"? A bloodless invasion?! "Poland were the REAL Nazis, the Soviets had to invade them"!? "You're just a racist Nazi Pole"!? What the ever-loving fuck.
Before WW2, Poland was pretty antisemitic. In the 1930s, for instance, youth nationalist movements had advocated for "ghetto benches", so Jews couldn't sit with Poles in university classrooms, following growing violence against Jewish university students. Which given the rising tide of antisemitism in Europe, wasn't exactly shocking, but antisemitism did certainly exist in Polish society. It's certainly different than American university antisemitism of the era, which was limited to quotas (which were sometimes only subtly enforced)--Poland didn't have university quotas at all for several years after WW1, but they returned.
During the war, a great deal of the Holocaust was perpetrated and assisted by local collaborators. However, this was much more common in other countries, like Ukraine and Lithuania, than in Poland.
And after the war, there were incidents of antisemitic violence among Poles. The most famous is the Kielce Pogrom. These effectively ensured that survivors would not return, barring any chance at a revival of Jewish life in Eastern Europe post-war.
On this subject, I would highly recommend Antony Polonsky's My Brother's Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, which is a discussion of essays/articles/etc which were written in the 80s when a flurry of debates/discussions on this subject in Poland occurred.
On the accusation of the Polish commenter being racist against Russians, that seems like an exaggeration from the banned user.
Reading the whole thread again, there doesn't seem to be much "harassment" as stated in the modlog, as much as a heated debate between the two parties.
From a lemmy.ml user perspective (which I'm not), I could see why they would complain about a political bias against the USSR.
One potential improvement point might be for mods to add historical sources to why they consider a comment misinformation. Also, banning this type of users and removing those comments (and leaving the others) might lead to an echo chamber effect on lemmy.world (mirroring the one on lemmy.ml).
I was the guy that was called a nazi pole in that thread. I posted multiple links to counter the "bloodless invasion" bullcrap which they completely ignored to call me a racist nazi. No response to Katyn for instance. Total stonewalling, like they were having their own conversation that didn't include me.
I learned about the Katyn massacre from your comments. Horrifying.
they completely ignored to call me a racist nazi
Yes, I just read the whole thread again, that was completely unnecessary. I guess they just implied that you hated Russians based on your criticism of USSR actions.
The shills don't want a real debate, they want to frustrate, waste time, and distract you from engagement with a real person or in a more visible comment.
Fedigrow
Oldest