@Kasrean From my experience it’s more like a soft censoring. But yea, censoring does exist. I’ve interacted with Lemmy (specially lemmy.ml initially, since it was the largest instance containing all the communities I needed) even before the Reddit exodus. Back then there were only a handful of people creating content and the narrative they were spinning was something along the line of Look how bad the West is! Now look at how great China is!. Not to mention, the same people are against supporting Ukraine.
The problem was that it was really easy to make anti-russian or anti-china (edit: or to be, somehow racist against these, only by criticizing their governments, although not the same was applied to the anti-US posts - it was totally okay to be anti-America) posts or comments (in mods’ views) and you were usually banned for it. Nowadays, tho, the situation is changing, and they get a small dose of their own medicine, lol (but you can still see the comments of these guys, many of them downvoted tho).
Your description is succinct yet accurate : i know since i was there many months last year.
The ideological leaning of the developers means nothing on a federated network. What you care about is knowing the ideology of who runs your instance.
You can just as easily fall into a right wing echo chamber by joining the wrong instance. And one that censors any kind of pro Russia or pro China sentiment, which is equally bad, in my opinion.
Propaganda can come from both sides. Just keep your eyes open.
I joined via lemmy.world because at the time the stats just looked favorable, with the limited knowledge I had (uptime mostly).
As someone with experience in software engineering you learn to differentiate between the product and the dev.
It’s especially easy with Lemmy, because every instance has its own vibe it seems. Would I join lemmygrad or how that instance is called? Probably not, but because it’s the users who in the end define the direction of an instance I see no problem.
Freedom of speech is important and if all those tanky instances are about is their agenda, they will end up in an echo chamber sooner or later, as more regular people migrate and simply drown them out.
This is going to be why Lemmy doesn’t take off long term.
I mean, reddit’s CEO used to mod that sub. Reddit and redditors were still fine after it blew up. Why are there different standards? The sub may have been banned already, but I doubt spez has changed much. Reddit admins have gotten away with a lot like editing comments, refusing to ban certain subs until there was media coverage, etc. Personally, I haven’t encountered any censorship due to political affiliations (yet). And if it happes, I’ll change instances.
They don’t control the fediverse just as much as they can’t control which instance I join/create.
I don’t think it will keep it from taking off, but I am not sure that all the most popular communities should be on lemmy.ml.
I appreciate that the devs/admins for the most part do encourage dissent.
Idk would you sign up to a place you’d heard was run by tankies? I sure wouldn’t.
Good thing most instances are run by other people, then.
Doesn’t matter if most people here “run by tankies” and don’t understand federation.
Please excuse my ignorance: what’s a “tanky/tankies”?
It’s a term mostly used to distinguish left-authoritarians from left-anti-authoritarians, particularly in the context of the cold war West. ‘Tankies’ notably tend to defend their left-ideology by talking up major authoritarian or totalitarian regimes (like Stalin’s or Mao’s) that also called themselves Socialist (despite such claims being problematic in doctrinaire terms). Originally used to describe the self-proclaimed communist/Stalin apologist, the modern tankie supports pretty much any authoritarian regime that opposes the West
The term originates from controversy among UK Communist labor-unionists over support of the Soviet Union, in its violent occupation of dissenting Communist countries Hungary and Czechoslovakia — when Khrushchev sent tanks to suppress popular revolutions against Soviet control of their countries.
Notably, this was Communist-on-Communist violence: the revolutionary Hungarian and Czechoslovak regimes were still run by their Communist Parties. Thus “tankies” were, originally, Communist labor-unionists who endorse or tolerate violent suppression of other Communists to secure the power of the Soviet Union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
More recently it’s been used to refer to supporters of authoritarianism in China, which is associated with tanks by way of the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre.
Derisive term for communist authoritarian who support left wing ideology and also state violence to maintain their power.
Common themes include whitewashing Mao and Stalin history, and dismissing current state sanctioned violence against minorities in “communist” countries.
Informative, thank you
Well today I had someone support the Tienanmen Square massacre, another say the war of aggression in Ukraine is a denazification campaign, argue that nothing is happening untoward to Uighur’s in China and assert that Pussy Riot “is a CIA op” lol. Yeah. It’s over run with brain dead tankies. They suck. That instance will get defederated eventually if Lemmy actually takes off, and good riddance
Thought I’m on NCD for a moment here lol
Where did you hear this from? That’s pretty dumb, honestly, if it’s true.
To me, this is like Richard Stallman and certain reprehensible actions and opinions](https://rms-open-letter.github.io/).
Just like with Stallman and his contributions to software, I can justify using Lemmy to myself due to it being open source and the devs not directly financially profiting from the spread of Lemmy (although it certainly raises their public profile).
It’s definitely unfortunate that they’re Tankies.
devs not directly financially profiting from the spread of Lemmy
Aren’t they though? Even if we ignore the obvious aspect of getting donations and exposure, they will also get more contributors for their project which will push them even further ahead of other competitors in this space.
I agree people might be blowing it a bit too much out of proportion at times, but then again we shouldn’t pretend that it doesn’t matter either.
Don’t like it, don’t read it. The price of freedom is that it is freedom for everybody even for those you (or I) don’t think should be free.
But the point of censorship is: if THEY don’t like it, YOU don’t read it because you don’t know it exists.
You can see what instances your server has blocked at {instance_url}/instances, there’s also a link in the footer. If you’re unhappy with your home instance blocking too much content, you can always make an account elsewhere and sub to the same communities as before. Account export is a feature that’s currently requested on the Lemmy Github so maybe that process will become easier soon.
Well, lemmygrad for sure is run by tankies, that’s kinda the point. Most of it doesn’t matter. It’s not like they can control anything that happens on other instances.
Don’t underestimate my vitamin B12 deficiency induced mind powers!
Is … is this a thing? B12?
The mind powers probably aren’t but the vitamin is; as I understand it, basically the reason why all the vitamin numbers and letters are wacky is cuz we weren’t great at identifying them; for B, it turned out that a bunch of things did similar stuff so we called them B1, B2, B12 etc., where as some other letters were reclassified.
A fellow vegoon!
I’m vegan btw!🌱
My thoughts are that you should use an instance that is in sync with your ethics. That is the freedom you have with opensource.
I wish. Beehaw isn’t sending out confirmation emails and I can’t find any other ones that block the tankies.
Like I don’t mind communists and socialists, they tend to be great people. But this? “hey everyone come over from reddit! You TOO can be insulted constantly for not adoring Soviet Russia!” It’s an AWFUL look.
The things on Hexbear and Lemmygrad aren’t “communists and socialists” though. They’re just supporting straight up authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose “the west”. It’s just people shilling for Xi Jinping and Putin because they think they somehow still represent Communism.
Read a book, bloodmouth
@MyOpinion Relevant username
Here’s a discussion about this: https://lemmy.world/post/24798
TLDR :
That post is great and mostly respectful, it has 160 comments at the moment // it is involving hardcore Marxist-Leninist administrators of Lemmy.ml
in my opinion it demonstrate the hypocrisy of those administrators.
Do you have any proof of that? Just curious where you got that from (:
No proof, I just heard about it. A buddy and someone on reddit told me about “tankies on lemmy” which I dismissed as drama at first, then I heard it’s actually the main devs too, then I did a quick google search and search on lemmy here, it seems universally agreed upon at least in those threads from what I can see.
I can’t verify their censorship, but they also run Lemmygrad. If you take a look around there you’ll find literal propaganda. The solution is to not interact with lemmy.ml at least that’s the solution in my opinion.
Not sure about any censorship happening either, I’m just wondering even just what rogue devs could do once lemmy gets bigger, and I do worry about the social capital they get, afterall they promote their servers prominently on the main lemmy site. I can somewhat tolerate far right or far left on my social media (well not directly, but in the other room next to mine) as long as it’s contained, follows ToS in good enough faith and doesn’t spread too much through cryptic messaging and memes. I wonder if this crosses that line for me already, I’m not sure, and not sure what the facts of the situation actually are, hence the post.
Unironically using the word “tankie” in a derogatory way gives off major lib vibes btw. And you know what happens if you scratch one of those.
that’s pretty aggressive. noone is forcing you to identify with the bad parts of socialism.
No is forcing you to side with fascists either…
There was some discussion just before the Reddit influx, actually: https://lemmy.ml/post/1167199 Edit: Also read through the history of Lemmy for some info on the motivations. I have no problem with the admins of their instance running it however they want, and they made a really cool project and I appreciate that for the most part they do not have a problem with people who disagree with them. I think people should think twice before re-creating all of their favorite reddit subs on that instance though.
There’s a public modlog at the bottom of the page; you can use that to see what mods are doing on whichever instance you’re on. If there’s any truth to that, you’ll be able to find proof there.
