The administration of lemmy.ml routinely abuses its rule 1 anti-bigotry policy to conduct political censorship, deleting documented facts regarding the ukraine invasion, holodomor, and xinjiang abuses under false pretexts of imperialist propaganda, misinformation, and nazism while leaving pro-Kremlin talking points untouched.
Verifiable public moderation logs prove this systemic shielding of state propaganda, down to moderators inverting standard geopolitical context, such as noting that fringe extremist units do not make an entire democratic nation fascist, to ban dissenters under the explicit excuse of being a Nazi.
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=25800386 and https://lemmy.world/modlog/446?page=1&actionType=All&userId=20355358.
The Europe community moderator (https://lemmy.world/u/geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml), who focuses exclusively on criticizing the West and never Russia or China, banned me as a Nazi.
I decided to block the lemmy.ml instance entirely to avoid any further interaction.
I see that there are dozens of relevant posts; you can find the relevant report posts here
- https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
- https://lemmy.world/post/5697017
- https://lemmy.world/post/50302822
- https://lemmy.world/post/13238608
- https://lemmy.world/post/43978041
Log screenshots
The comments in this post are turning nasty and I’ve already banned two users for their behavior. Locked.
Who cares? Join a different server and move on, that’s the beauty of the fediverse.
The issue is you can block the .ml instance, but not their users from bleeding into other instances. On top of that .ml is a default instance, and a lot of the times trying to get people to join the fediverse, the first thing I hear from them is, no thanks it’s filled with tankies.
Basically it’d be like trying to get people to join truth social because there are sane people on it but you’ve got maga and the orange shit turd posting crazy shit on it. Lemmy has a stain attached to it in the form of two tankie devs and a tankie instance they run.
Who also absolutely refuse to separate funding for future development of the Lemmy software vs. operating costs of the Lemmy.ml instance.
Also if you study its modlog, the amount of time they spend each day curating that content is high, to say the least. Not every dollar (or ruble or whatever) spent goes towards the latter, but it seems that a goodly portion of it does.
The devs themselves are the very ones tying the development of Lemmy with the operation of Lemmy.ml - this is not hidden in the slightest.
I see… Maybe time to move to piefed then? I was tooling the idea to switch on my instance but never did.
I run a piefed instance, it’s great!
I can move posts from one community to another!
Yeah. But .ml douchebacs still come to other instances to run their Putin-sucking mouths. It’s like whack-a-mole trying to block them all.
And don’t forget the alts they make on other instances, which they then proudly mention in certain spaces (like on lemmygrad) how they evade such instance bans and user blocks.
They are very proud of their ability to remain not only ungovernable, but people who willfully remain insensitive to others needs as well.
Fucking Christ. We aren’t on .ml but you wouldn’t know it from the number of people absolutely obsessed with them. Just ignore it if you don’t like it. Join a de-federated instance, block the communities, whatever. Bitching here has absolutely no impact.
Finally, based .world
I share this to raise awareness, I can block the instance entirely! the more people see their abuse, the better for public awareness. If you don’t like this post, just downvote it or block my account,so you will not see anything like this again!
Continue being incredibly cringe in a very public way. Whatever you post, I wont be making a post every day complaining about you.
censoring facts and attacking tone instead of answering arguments prove my point
Counterpoint - if we were on .ML these people would be blocked - they’re exercising their freedom.
We’re not on Reddit, Facebook, or X and you’ll find whole communities of haters for those sites, too.
Believe it or not, negativity tends to spread further than positivity in general as we are a risk-averse species, and it’s one of the documented harms of social media in general. You’re probably gonna find some version of this style of bitching no matter where ya go, it’s a human thing.
I mean. You can also just go to their front page and read the “about this instance” paragraph where they clarify that they support a specific political ideology and will not tolerate dissent.
They explicitly built a walled garden. Don’t be surprised they maintain the walls. There are other instances.
Not only that but they explicitly said years ago that they WANTED someone to go make a liberal instance for liberals to use and do their own thing. Which is what happened. Yet people continue to throw a fit that .ml maintains its policies. The entire point of lemmy is that you can choose the instance that works best for you! The entire reason many of the original people came to lemmy was that reddit banned Marxist-Leninist (what you would call “tankie”) communities. And even many just vaguely leftist spaces. So people made their own thing where no one person controls what is allowed and what isn’t. That’s what federation is all about. If you don’t like that there are instances that disagree with you on a fundamental level and ban you for your opinions then you don’t actually understand what the point of federation is to begin with. I mean ML is in the name. What did you expect?
(edit to clarify I’m asking the OP not the commenter I am agreeing with the commenter.)
Recently there seems to be some of misunderstanding what the lemmy.ml instance is about, especially from newer users.
Lemmy.ml has always been a niche site, and it will most likely stay this way. We don’t have any intentions to turn it into a mainstream instance, or set a goal of getting as many users as possible. Our goal is simple: make an instance that people like to use. I would say that we have been successful in this, but obviously it is impossible to satisfy everyone.
The reason for this is that @dessalines and I are paid to develop Lemmy, while donations from lemmy.ml users only make up a negligible part of our income. Besides, having more users would force us to spend more time moderating, and less time for development. Lemmy works quite differently from big tech sites like Reddit in this regard: while they get more money with each extra user through advertising, for us it is the opposite. So we would much rather have a smaller, non-toxic, and friendly userbase, than a large one.
Part of the problem might be that lemmy.ml is described as “flagship instance”, which can certainly be interpreted to mean “mainstream” or “general purpose”. I struggle to come up with a better, more accurate description. If you can think of one, please comment here.
If you dont like the way lemmy.ml works, thats okay. Federation exists exactly to solve that problem, let different groups have their own instances, with their own rules and political views. You can see the list of existing instances, and instructions for setting up a new one on join-lemmy.org.
In particular, I would like to see someone (or a group of people) create a mainstream, or liberal instance. That should help to avoid further drama, and avoid attempts to turn lemmy.ml into something that it is not. @dessalines and I would certainly be willing to help with any technical problems that such an instance runs into, and include it on join-lemmy.org (just like any other instance that meets the code of conduct).
The problem is that it’s the developers’ instance and they promote it as a default general use instance and not a explicit political ideological instance so it has a significant portion of people just trying to join the network.
I would recommend someone looking to join the threadiverse to use piefed over Lemmy for that reason (of course piefed has its own problematic “features” with regards to default mute lists and transparency)
In my experience it’s not an explicit political ideological instance. I’m there all the time and never get called anything because I think this or that, except when I’m outside of ML, where I get “tankie” a lot.
Anyone who uses “tankies” unironically is a braindead basement dweller keyboard warrior who has zero critical thinking skills.
Why is it a problem? Literally every single major social media platform has an ideological slant. Twitter (X) is the nazi one, reddit is the like omega liberal vote blue no matter who one, facebook is mindless reaction, etc. If lemmy.world was considered the “default” instance I could say the same thing about it being different than my own political beliefs.
I think the problem is that people can’t handle seeing places they aren’t welcome anymore. Marxist-Leninists are allowed to have their own spaces, and do not have to cater to other peoples views. There is ALWAYS going to be a dominant ideology and a set of rules on each instance. You don’t agree with the ones lemmy.ml has. That’s okay.
Algorithmic social media silos people into their little boxes where they only see what they want to see. People are so used to that now that imo they’ve forgotten how to handle being faced with a place/group of people who just fundamentally disagree with them, and are not open to hearing what they have to say. Yet that is just reality. People need to learn to deal the fact those places and those people exist.
Supporting the heavily anti LGBTQ imperialist state of Russia is not liberal.
Anyone who supports Russia is explicitly anti LGBTQ. You cannot be pro LGBTQ whilst supporting and defending a fascist government that treads on LGBTQ rights.
Neither is it liberal to claim that supporting the existence of Jews, whilst explicitly denouncing the genocide state of israel is a “zionist stance”, which geneve_convenience, the mod mentioned in this post literally verbatim did, and then banned someone over.
Super liberal, basically stating that Jews as a people, regardless of any individuals opinion, don’t deserve to exist, just because many of them are zionist. By that logic members of every major religion, as well as every single cis white male don’t deserve the right to exist as a people.
If you knew .ml, you would have known that they ain’t so solid on being labelled as liberals lmao.
Not from Voyager iirc, which also iirc is by far the most used third party app? Also, for multiple years that what is Lemmy.ml link did not work - it pointed to a post, which I think a later version of Lemmy.ml allowed communities to be made private, and then they never bothered to check what would happen for anyone not logged into a ML account, so it would just give like a 404 not found error for everyone else.
Agreed that it’s not impossible to find out who they are - just that ML makes an exceedingly poor representation of the Threadiverse to people coming over here from Reddit. So when they see “death to the USA”, and they are… you know, in the USA, they often nope right out and not only never come back, they spread the word to anyone who will listen that that is what “we” here who use Lemmy are.
Btw, in case you were not aware, we are a tankie bar (see: Paradox of Intolerance).
Also, despite all the curation they perform within their garden, they won’t allow people to block the Lemmy.ml instance - so it’s not entirely a walled garden so much as it is a delivery system for the messages shared by Lemmy.ml users.
So when they see “death to the USA”, and they are… you know, in the USA, they often nope right out
I say death to america all the time and I live here
same. Honestly if I didn’t live in the US I would probably be less anti-american. Living here is very radicalizing.
I don’t live in the US and you’d bet that I’m more hostile towards your state than you, I can bet on that. If you see what your state has done from a developing country’s eyes, your mind will be broken.
I think you are underestimating me, but I’m glad you are against America. I won’t say what I think because that probably wouldn’t be such a good idea for my health. But trust me we’re on the same page.
I do want to thank them for vaccinating me from their ideology. Interacting with them made me realize that I’m a social democrat and not a full blown socialist
Any other self affirmations you wish to share with us?
Nah. Do you?
Funny, I just had a thread going about the same thing happening in the “LateStageCapitalism” instance……
u/godlesscommie, where are you? Gonna come onto this thread to bitch and moan as well?
This literally just happened to me in the memes instance of .ml
Being banned by those shit-heels is a badge of honor and intelligence. Congrats!
I’m more curious how .ml users feel about that mod’s idea that rape is an acceptable action to do in certain contexts, for example if a woman served in a Western military.
I can understand all their political positions and opinions but that one seems beyond the pale.
Geneva is more of a radlib and Bad Empanada stan than a principled communist. 80% of what they post is decent to good, and a solid 20% is horrendous.
My opinion is that geneva_convenience has been going off the deep end, getting worse and worse lately, and definitely should be removed as a mod, honestly just banned. He’s an edgelord who’s taking things to unreasonable extremes and trying to pick fights with everyone.
i agree, can’t stand them either and it’s only been getting worse
I only really saw it for myself when I said, “I’m completely opposed to the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel. I don’t have a problem with Jews existing,” and they responded by accusing me of being a “liberal Zionist” and “supporting genocide” and then blocking me.
I remembered Cowbee saying something about them before, I just looked it up and I gotta give props as always because he was calling them out 9 months ago for not reading theory of doing praxis and just watching Bad Empanada, and for apparently calling Hexbear “transzionist” and accusing them of defending Contrapoints’ stance on Israel, which is just bizarre.
It’s honestly very unfortunate. Geneva has had ample time and advice to move onto a better, more coherent worldview, when they seem to be taking the opposite path.
If youre viewing posts and comments on .ml, youre actually in our house not yours.
I’m just a user here but three days ago I was banned from some community without any explanation. Some moderator accused me of being a rapist because of one comment that they deleted and no one could read. After some comments trying to find out what was happening, I was banned. I didn’t see before, but in that community, in the blahaj something instance, they warn something like ‘no tankies’. I’m in lemmy.ml, and I guess that makes me a tankie.
These instance wars are bullshit.
Did you randomly join Lemmy.ml without knowing what it was? If so, that sucks. If you’re not too attached to your account, you could just create a new one on Lemmy.today or something and be rid of the ml baggage.
I mean when I joined .world I didn’t know it was going to be a neoliberal smorgasbord. I just stick around due to laziness mostly.
Yup, same here!
well, lemmy.ml has a significant userbase acting as “tankies”, and in turn other instances are overly suspicious of anyone from ml, but I can’t blame them for that. the “tankies” they speak about just make new accounts when they find out people started blocking them. It’s such a shame that new users mostly end up on ml. the devs are enjoying that they can use it to spread their politics, and make controversy in the fediverse.
They should defederate. They are treating everyone in ML like shit. And why would I change to an instance that treats people like shit, anyway? Isn’t that the problem in the first place? What I do is just strip apart the instance part in usernames and treat everyone as equals, fuck, I must be a commie. BTW, my account is 6 yo, you know, when lemmy.ml was basically the only instance with some certainty around.
I think it’s common knowledge at this point that it’s a deranged *tankie instance
They aren’t truly communists. They are leftist MAGA. Russia, China, and North Korea are nowhere close to either communist or socialist.
Correct about the deranged part tho - no notes there.
Nobody says the Russian Federation is socialist any longer, but the large majority of communists do agree that the DPRK, Cuba, China, Vietnam, and Laos are socialist, because they are all run by the working class with social ownership as the principal aspect of their economies. Cuba is often seen as an example of “socialism done right,” and they share this same exact sentiment towards the DPRK, PRC, Vietnam, and Laos. Are the Cubans not “true communists” either? Who on Earth does qualify?
Why do we care? If you don’t like it, don’t use it. That’s the beauty of the fediverse. You can hop instances and lose basically nothing.
Applying this same logic, why did you bother to write your comment?
If you did not like the post, you could have continued to scroll onwards without further interaction… as you propose that OP do.
Touché
The mods do whatever they want, many break their own posted rules with regularity.
In my experience, in Lemmy they are more apt to delete a comment then ban, so that is nice.
There’s no logic to it. I’ve said “The nation ___________ says this, their motto is ___________ … (and then repeat their own slogan from their own officials).”
Delete. 100% true, easily verifiable everywhere, public information pertaining to the discussion, deleted.
So, if you’re censored or banned, that just means that you’re a thinking person with reasonable opinions who bases your conclusions on the factual information available to you.
It’s a good thing. Thank God.
If they agree with you, please get help immediately. Time is short.
It’s good to have this documented, thanks. It’s one thing for everyone to “know” they’re Tankies, it’s another to have compiled evidence and A/B examples like this to point to.
People need to start realizing that users like you are flamebaiting to get banned and then make hate threads about .ml
You spout right wing propaganda while insulting users and then whine about “tankies” when you get banned.
Was anyone hiding being a “tankie”? I mean I don’t really use the term I just call it Marxist-Leninist but if that’s what you want to call it I’m fine with that. I mean I’m clearly not trying to hide my political views if you look at my username. Not sure what you needed “evidence” for. But more power to ya i guess.
I mean, you shouldn’t. “XiJinpingStanAccount” is a glorious handle. I salute you, comrade.
lol thanks
There used to be several of such posts, in this very community iirc, though most ended up being removed for whatever reason, sometimes after being locked for toxicity in the comment section.
Particularly when those “try a Threadiverse instance at ‘random’” websites send people to Lemmy.ml (the main one sends people to either Lemmy.ml or hexbear.net ~90% of the time - btw that is not hyperbole, try it and see), people who joined here truly will not be made aware until after they arrive and almost inevitably find out the hard way.
I believe this is the secondary reason (after overall lack of content) that Lemmy’s active user community is not growing even as Reddit continues to degrade.
This is the main reason we have to get a fork up to feature parity with all the major clients. I don’t want to recommend Lemmy any more, I want to recommend some other threadiverse alternative that does the same thing.
PieFed is leagues ahead of Lemmy at this point. The main thing that it lacks iirc is a great search function like Lemmy has. Mind you, third-party app support is minimal, but that’s an issue with each one of those choosing whether or how fast to catch up, which will never end - the same as they do for Lemmy’s features also.
Unfortunately PieFed by default also shadow-censors people’s contributions, plus other anti-social media type features, which doesn’t affect someone running their own instance (for that purpose PieFed is unquestionably far superior) but does affect anyone posting to communities located on an instance running PieFed where that opt-out feature is left enabled - including users currently on Lemmy, Mbin, Mastodon, Friendica, nodeBB, etc. Many planned migrations - both user accounts and whole communities - were cancelled as a result.
Therefore a new fork was born - not of Lemmy but of PieFed - called PyLova. Last I checked it has even more features than PieFed, though PieFed recently borrowed many (though not all) of them.
Lemmy, as far as the bleeding edge of new features is concerned, has been left behind in the dust, and seems unlikely to ever catch up (writing in the Rust language I hear is quite slow). And PieFed and even more PyLova are running circles around it.
There’s also Mbin, which few people use except those who want to access both threaded conversations and user microblogging style content from the same account on the Fediverse.
Piefed still can’t show me my upvoted and down voted content on voyager and Alexandrite. I need to test this on pylova.
Voyager offers only beta, rudimentary support for instances running PieFed, and therefore PyLova as well. In general, third-party app support for PieFed is rather poor imho - see https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app.
Just use piefed
Piefed?
Recommend some instance that defederates the Tankie Triad. Problem solved?
And beside that, maybe choose an instance that is running PieFed, PyLova or mBin?
There are no major Lemmy instances that defederate from Lemmy.ml in particular.
Lemmy.zip comes the closest, not fully defederating but something similar. I forget if programming.dev does similarly as well. (Edit: ah, I forgot - only 2 of the 3 tankie triad instances are thus blocked by default, so here too there are zero major instances that block Lemmy.ml in particular.)
There’s also PieFed.zip by the same excellent admin team as Lemmy.zip. So Lemmy.zip and PieFed.zip are excellent general-purpose recommendations to offer to people. (Edit: despite how they don’t block the triad - but at least PieFed.zip allows individual users to do so, if they wish. And after they figure out how, and that there is a need for such, which nobody it seems will officially recommend to them.)
Piefed is not without it’s issues (mainly that rimu has the social skills of a grapefruit) but it’s wild how violently .ml users hate it. I know they’re from the dev instance so some bias is understandable, but holy cow some of the shit that gets made up to scare people away from it is absurd.
I feel the mbin devs must be watching the shitshow from within a popcorn filled bunker, just praying nobody remembers they exist long enough to drag them into it.
Yeah the vast majority of criticism is completely made-up, and even after it was proven to be falsehoods nobody seemed to recant (that I saw anyway). Instead, people continue to point to the debunked conspiracy theories despite the months and months that have passed since then. It really underscores the point about how an echo chamber functions - facts truly do not matter in the slightest to some people.
And it’s especially odd given how PieFed has more recently shot itself in the foot by shadow-censoring offered upvotes, but people still cite the long-debunked conspiracy theories rather than such an actual reason for criticism of the software.
Tribal. Sad(ge). Bad.
Recommend some instance that defederates the Tankie Triad. Problem solved?
You would think right? Unfortunately their “problem” won’t be solved till everyone’s block list looks exactly like theirs. Who is censoring who again?
How come?
A block allows the tankies to see the normal person’s comments and to reply to they. The only effect of a block is that you won’t know someone has replied to your comment and can badmouth you freely. So yeah, regarding blocks you are right.
But a defederation works differently. Users of a defederated instance do not see the comments on the otger side of the breakage at all, and therefore cannot troll under them either. If your instance fully defederates from the trolls, you really do get a better experience. There’s no need for everyone to defederate for defederation to benefit the instance’s users.
Defederate lemmy.ml
edit yes, I can instance block them and obviously have, but that doesn’t stop the users. If only it did.
Why do you need the admin of your server to manage your block list for you? Perhaps youre unsure of how to take personal responsibility of your own lemmy account. Dont worry stranger, I got your back.
Welcome to a tutorial on how to block .ml on your personal account.
In the top right corner of the top of the page, there are 3 horizontal white bars. Click it.
This will open up a drop down menu. At the bottom of that menu, you will see your username. Click it.
This will open another drop down menu with 3 options. Click “Settings”.
At the top of your screen you will see 2 tabs. Click the one that says “Blocks”.
Here you will see “Block user” “Block community” and “Block instance”. Click the down arrow below “Block instance”.
This will open up a search bar. Type “lemmy.ml” and click it after it shows up. That’s it! You’ve blocked .ml and will never see content from the instance.
But wait, we aren’t done yet in this menu. Click the down arrow under “Block user”. Now type “UltraGiGaGigantic” Make sure you select my .ml account as the other ones I no longer use. Thanks, appreciate it.
I had one .ml mod delete a comment of mine because I listed events that disagreed with them minimizing the horrors of 1986 republicans. They stated your average '86 republican was further left than 2026 average dem. So I blocked that mod and that channel.
So I guess .ml are apologists for the '86 gop now?
Tankies: we’re leftists!
Also tankies: Reagan wasn’t that bad
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
Y’all really need to come to terms with the fact that tankies are just conservatives larping.
There needs to be a list of instances that defederate lemmy.ml by default. It’s not just a single community, it is at the admin level.
Be the change you want to see in this world. Make your own instance and defederate.
You must be new around here. This is old news and a reason a lot of places block ml
Im glad youre taking the steps to enjoy lemmy your way. Take care stranger.
I knew that lemmy.ml is tankies, but removing comments/posts that don’t serve their agenda is new to me.
A lot of instances are curated, they’re the supreme mods after all. Some delay your posts until they can curate them, and some just remove them. It’s the way it be.
This isn’t said and understood enough. Instances on the Fediverse aren’t free-for-all, apolitical places without ideology. Some try to be (with varying success) but being active in the Fediverse and especially running an instance is in itself a fairly ideological and political act. So chances are instances reflect their owners’ ideology. And that is great because one has places to be if an instance doesn’t suit them, unlike corpo platdorms where one ideology drives most of them.
This. Just imagine if all of Lemmy was like one instance or another. The whole point of the fediverse is that there can be multiple instances, and you can just gravitate towards the ones that align with your own views.
Except it would be nice if the instances were honest about their rules, or at least that they would be described somewhere written down, rather than people having to continually find out the hard way (such as OP).
The only thing that bugs me about it is that the largest instances can control what most people see.
The great thing about lemmy’s design is that that’s not really true. I’m seeing this criticism of .ml despite being on .ml, because most of the posts that I see on lemmy are not on my home instance. At least half the time, I’m having discussions outside of my “home turf.”
When you have a space that agrees on certain base assumptions, it becomes easier to have more in depth and thoughtful discussions, because you don’t have to focus on just proving or advocating for those basic assumptions over and over again, and watching every word you say to make sure it can’t be twisted or misinterpreted to paint you in a negative light. By contrast, sharing a space with ideological opponents often means people tend to dig in and just make snipes at each other, everybody’s just grandstanding and trying to get owns in, and the level of discussion is brought down to name-calling and accusations.
At the same time, yes, echo chambers are a concern. If you’re never exposed to opposing viewpoints, obviously that’s not great either. We can see that happen on any number of subreddits. And if we were on different subreddits instead of on different instances, I wouldn’t be seeing this criticism, and you wouldn’t be seeing my response to it.
The way the fediverse is designed inherently addresses both of those concerns. You can have a space where the discussions assume a shared ideology allowing for in depth discussions, but then you’re also federated with other spaces with different shared assumptions. The “tankie” creators of lemmy designed it this way on purpose, for that reason. To allow minority views (including but not limited to their own) to have spaces for discussion, without becoming isolated. To allow for higher level discussions with shared assumptions while also allowing for interactions between groups with different assumptions.
This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies, and that is not in spite of what the .ml’s admins want, they literally designed it that way on purpose.
The only censorship that really matters on the fediverse is defederation.
Why are you writing tankie in quotes?
Because I disagree with the term. The admins are not “tankies,” they are Marxist-Leninists.
What makes someone a “tankie” is that they “defend” certain states. In practice, “defending” often includes just refuting misinformation, for example, if I refute that “everyone in North Korea gets the same haircut” then I’m “defending” it and therefore a “tankie.” It can also mean acknowledging accomplishments, saying any good thing about any socialist state, like, “Cuba had a very successful literacy program,” which is just an objective historical fact. “Tankie” is supposed to mean someone who blindly supports everything a socialist state has ever done, in practice, it means someone who supports anything a socialist state has ever done.
Before it was “tankie” it was “pinko,” and before that “red.” That kind of red scare bullshit has allowed blatant misinformation to run rampant, because even rational people avoid pushing back on it for fear of being labelled a “tankie.” As stories about how all communists eat babies or whatnot run rampant, it has in turn hurt the reputation of both leftists and liberals, because it literally doesn’t matter how hard you try to distance yourself from the far-left, you’ll still get associated with it. Joe Biden got called a communist for Christ’s sake. To put it another way:
Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.
The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.
- Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds
That is why I put “tankie” in quotes.
This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies
Literally nobody has ever claimed that users on Lemmy.ml are not allowed to see content on other instances - this is not merely a strawman argument but an absolutely ridiculous one.
Please don’t bother to reply to this if this is the level of content that your messages will contain.
For anyone else that is curious, the complaint is about the lack of transparency in describing what content is vs. is not allowed - a community of people discussing FOSS comes nowhere close to mentioning that you are not allowed to come close to criticizing Russia, China, or North Korea - e.g. it is not allowed to state that Ukraine is not the aggressor and that rather Russia is, or to state that Uyghurs are being killed by China.
I really really really really really really really really wish that Lemmy would implement a true instance block so that I did not have to spend time reading such comments as this. But for some reason that option is denied to me. Go figure.
It’s not really a strawman in that I never claimed anyone said it. It’s just that people talk about “censorship” and “echo chambers” and “they have to remove things to keep their users brainwashed” or whatever nonsense, ignoring the fact that the structure of the fediverse, as designed by the .ml admins, makes that more or less impossible.
For anyone else that is curious, the complaint is about the lack of transparency in describing what content is vs. is not allowed
OK, fair enough, they could afford to clarify the rules somewhat. But I don’t really consider that a huge deal. I’ve been banned from communities on .world for things that aren’t enumerated in the rules too. I don’t see why rules have to cover every possible thing.
they have been doing that, maybe you dont visit thier posts often. hexbear, lemmygrad, and ml are all super tankies. others ones you may want to avoid is dbzero, or equivalent, startrek website comm, and some of blahj ones.
What part of “tankies” do you not understand?
In large part that is what the word “tankie” means - denial of reality, instead substituting their own, which can only be done inside of a controlled echo chamber. Tankie is no way is synonymous with Communist.
Think MAGA but on the left - it’s otherwise identical in terms of behaviors, merely different talking points.
You may find this illustrative:
You may find this illustrative:
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Here let me help
Whatever the fuck tankies are -------● doing / / ● Far \ /Right \ / ●----●Center●/ Far Left™Thanks. I still have no idea what I’m looking at though. A left-right scale of some kind - is it just randomly drawn lines in the classic political compass?
It is labeled “stethoscope theory” and the image is just regular horseshoe theory, but with “far left” replaced by Tankies and moved to its own special branch that continues off to the left instead of circling back around.
It’s pro-authoritarian. That means this control is not really a contradiction. They say they’re leftist, but I think it’d be hard to actually justify that based on the groups they support. Russia isn’t leftist. The USSR may have been, but it’s long gone. Russia is anti-LGBT+ and doesn’t protect workers. It’s an oligarchy.
There are only two consistent things they follow. They’re pro-authoritarian and anti-west.
They’ve always done this. “Rule 1” Is pretty much a .ml meme catch all for “you aren’t allowed to use facts here. Agree or be removed”
One of my first experiences in the Fediverse was mentioning the Uyghur genocide and having my comment promptly removed by the .ml admins. They’ve been doing this all the time.
imagine you mentioned the tianamin massacre, it would get thier panties in a wad.
When I first got on here I waded into a thread praising north korea and got so many downvotes for not knowing how awesome the Kim regime is. Fucking tankies man
