Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
This whole lemmy tankie dev thing has been discussed ad nauseam here for the past year or so. Not sure what solutions you suggest, but if I were to filter my software by who’s an asshole dev and who’s not, that list will end up really short.
As far as the ml instance goes, I don’t agree that we should start defederating left and right with any and all undesirables, but to each their own. At least people now will be in the know, and it might take some weight off lemmy.world
I’ve only been on Lemmy a month, and this shit is already exhausting. Isn’t a main point of this whole fediverse thing that you can just block entire instances as well as users? Why is this even an ongoing topic that spans multiple communities?
Isn’t a main point of this whole fediverse thing that you can just block entire instances as well as users?
You can do exactly that. OP wants everyone to do it.
I’m new here, so pardon my lack of understanding. But if this lemmy_.ml place is engaging in such disagreed upon behavior by so many people, why hasn’t it been banned so I’m not even seeing it in the first place? I’ve recently learned there are whole lemmy servers ignored or banned by most other civil lemmy servers due to their bad behavior, why not ml?
If this really has been going on for over a year, and so many communities are against it, why is it not banned?
Who would “ban” Lemmy.ml? There isn’t a “master instance” over all, each instance is an island.
Lemmy.world is currently discussing whether or not to sever ties with Lemmy.ml, just like Literature.cafe alreay did.
Lemmy.world has already defederated from Lemmygrad and Hexbear, the 2 largest Marxist instances, so Lemmy.ml is the last major Marxist-friendly instance that Lemmy.world interacts with.
For clarity, Lemmy.ml is seen very positively by some servers, and negatively by others. You are getting viewpoints largely from Lemmy.world, whereas other communities like db0, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, Blahaj.zone, or otherwise may have different or opposite stances.
That’s the beauty and messiness of federation.
Please bear in mind that I’m a lemmy.ml user (though not a tankie, nor marxist, nor even socialist.)
Look at OP. How many lines are about smearing someone for their politics and beliefs (Even the subject line covers ONLY that), and how many are about the need to improve moderation practices at .ml (precious few, not even the subject line).
IMO that’s one reason. The discussion rarely ends up being about moderation practices even when that’s the stated goal. It ends up being about not liking someone’s views.
The other reasons - you can personally block that instance if you choose, but for it to be hidden from EVERYONE on an instance, the admins of the instances need to make that decision. (To defederate.) There are lots of potential reasons not to do so, and I think many of them boil down to not throwing out the baby with the bathwater since there are plenty of users on ml like me who are not tankies and are just having the same discussions we’d have anywhere.
I got a 3 day ban from one single community at .ml within my first couple days here for using the term “whataboutism” - I suspect it was an automod action. I wasn’t really happy about it, but eh? shrug
I have the same answer for folks now that I did when social media was somehow full of US conservatives claiming they could no longer speak their minds on social media. No one is obligated to give me or you or anyone a platform. If Lemmy.ml is that much of a shithole, it will eventually get defederated broadly, and everyone who isn’t a tankie will stop using it.
The occasional thread like this, or someone complaining that my opinion is invalid because I’m an ml user (has happened maybe three times) are the only times I ever think about it really.
This would make a ton of sense if your choice of Lemmy instance were not just that; a choice. It’s not a characteristic innate to your being that you’re born with or something.
You can choose to associate with whatever instance you want and swap it up with another account somewhere else if you want at any time (you can prob keep the same username if you want too).
(you can prob keep the same username if you want too).
Unless it is already taken on the new instance, you absolutely can. Usernames are namespaced similar to email addresses. So,
example@lemmy.worldandexample@lemmy.mlare considered two different users. This means that there is no technical reason preventing it.This would make a ton of sense if your choice of Lemmy instance were not just that; a choice. It’s not a characteristic innate to your being that you’re born with or something.
Either I don’t understand your objection, or you don’t understand my point. Legitimately it could be either of those. I don’t see what this has to do with most of what I said above.
You can choose to associate with whatever instance you want and swap it up with another account somewhere else if you want at any time (you can prob keep the same username if you want too).
OK, yes… Are you saying I should move my account elsewhere because OP (or some other people) don’t like that my account says .ml at the end? Or because I’m only supposed to have an account on instances where I agree with the political leanings of those who run it?
There’s an awful lot of political views around that aren’t tankie.
And it’s less about the users and more about the kind of lopsided, censorship moderation that happens on .ml
Tankie is a pejorative. We should stop using that - I am not sure what the best replacement is, authoritarian? Fascist?
OP seems to believe that the unfair admin/mod practices stem from their political beliefs. e.g., going against their very own Code of Conduct, the amins in question used subversive database manipulation practices to eliminate the mod-log explanations for their actions, and also preemptively banned various people from communities that they had never (even so much as once) commented in, in the past. The latter is EXTREME, and the former is disingenuous.
Oh, but the admin is an authority-loving fascist, hence it suddenly all makes sense: “service to stated principles that serve the community good” give way to “whoever has the power to accomplish things does whatever they want”, in that world-view. So they are not entirely as disconnected as you might wish in a purely mathematical & theoretical world. This is the real world, where it gets messy, and EVERYTHING gets political. But okay, what if OP made a poorly-written post - b/c their heart jumped out ahead of their brain - what then? It doesn’t mean that it’s not true, or a good thing to do, even then, and moreover what to do about it now? Re-word it if you like and write and post a new one? But this is the one that we have. Yeah, again, irl gets messy sometimes.
You missed some stuff yourself btw. As individual people block you - by which I do not just mean personally but your entire instance of choice - increasingly you will find yourself speaking to an echo chamber consisting of fascists + those who are more neutral towards authoritarianism. You will reply to people, and wonder why so few ever reply back to you - but it won’t be b/c they don’t like you (well maybe some, I dunno:-P), and rather they won’t even see your replies unless they happen to visit that section of the comments for some other reason. They can do so, but they will not be notified so they will not be made aware of your desire to communicate.
This event is happening, like it or not, and one way or another. This OP at least gives us the chance to talk about it, before things go too far and even this much communication becomes impossible. i.e., the Western world is offering you this lifeboat, to let you know what is coming. Truth Social surely does far worse, and when Elon took over Twitter and renamed it to X, he didn’t warn people, and instead just started removing and banning at will/whim. But the rest of the Fediverse isn’t going to remain associated with fascism just b/c some innocent people have an account on Lemmy.ml.
Btw, in your Settings under “Import/Export Settings” there is a large button Export that can make a JSON file, and in a new account you can Import it, for easy transfer of your settings. You’d lose all your past comments/replies/up-/downvotes, but if you also transfer your iconic avatar and keep the same name, many people may not even notice.
I am sorry that this is upsetting to you.
First, thanks for the thoughtful and thorough reply.
I am sorry that this is upsetting to you.
It’s not upsetting to me, it’s just annoying. I strongly support the block early/block often culture that seems to pervade the fediverse, even when that is folks blocking me. I also support the ability to defederate, and strongly support (for example) pre-emptively defederating from threads.
Indeed, such decisions at the user or instance level are potentially messy, but the whole thing just seems self-healing over time to me. There’s an equilibrium that needs to be reached, I think, and I doubt we’re anywhere near it yet. Some instances are going to end up isolated, either by themselves or by others, and some won’t. New instances will spring up, instances will shut down, etc etc. People will move around to find a new instance when needed. It’s all really sloppy and the outcome for any one user or instance isn’t necessarily going to match the outcome for another. That’s freedom to me. And not in some maga “free speech means I get to be a jerk but no one can call me out” way, but in a “we’re all empowered to influence our own experience here” way. People can block, instances can defederate, people can deploy their own instance and make it as open or closed or personal or public as they want to. Hot damn.
And all that is going to create friction and people are going to disagree with each other about how to do it and what the right way is, just like we’re doing here.
But, despite your very reasonable rationalizations for OP, and regardless of their intent, this very subconversation and others are evidence that this isn’t what a discussion about moderation practices looks like. It’s what a discussion about publicly calling someone out with a pejorative term for their beliefs looks like. Expressing that opinion, and defending it when required, is the extent of my involvement or concern. I don’t share the beliefs of OP nor their target. Whether folks want to change how they are discussing the issue or not is up to them. That’s also freedom, in my opinion.
I might migrate instances at some point, I might not, we’ll see how things go, but it’s not going to be because of this post from OP. Folks can run their instances as they see fit. They don’t owe me a platform, nor OP.
It’s what a discussion about publicly calling someone out with a pejorative term for their beliefs looks like
Tbf, that’s b/c that’s what you turned it into… I think? You brought it up, hence we are now discussing that. Tbf that is what you saw within the OP to begin with, so I am not saying that the discussion was not worth having. And I did mention that OP might have done a lot better in their wording choices.
However, I am suggesting to look past the format of the OP, to more clearly see its content, even if OP could have made that process a lot easier from the start by having chosen a different name than ‘tankie’. Which starts not here but from reading the linked posts too - I know it’s A LOT of comments (~800 iirc at last count), but at the very least start with just the top-ranked ones. It’s not good. OP presumed that people already knew that, and just in case, gave those exact links so that people could catch up to that, before getting into depth into this post.
They don’t owe me a platform, nor OP.
Oh absolutely 100% agree. The Fediverse is what we make of it, as you said, and we are doing that right now.
So if we are past the poor wording choice, the real issue (imho at least, perhaps OP themselves disagrees) is that those linked posts describe a situation where the admins are using database manipulation to edit the mod logs. Think about what that means. Slightly less but still extremely offensive, those admins are also mass- and preemptively banning people from communities that they have never so much as commented in even once, for a comment made in some other community that said something negative about China. This is not okay. People are not going to put up with this. The former is actually a deceptive practice, and the latter isn’t nearly as bad but is still abusive, on the level of Reddit.
These posts calling for defederation of the rest of the Fediverse from Lemmy.ml aren’t going to simply disappear, unless those admins step down. Instead, some instances will defederate from them, others will proudly remain federated with everyone, and overall a new equilibrium will be formed, but in the meantime there will be much turmoil.
Read the linked posts - most especially https://lemmy.world/post/16211417. This is not just about OP disagreeing with them politically. They may have worded it to look like that, but that is not all that is going on - it’s not even the half of it. THAT post at least is about how modding should be done. And this one seems to have been meant as the next step. Though if you want to make a new post to replace OP’s wording choices with your own, it may help? As you say, OP made the mistake of wrapping the real issue inside of an easily-dismissable minor one as if they were one and the same.
Edit: Oh but I should have said: and if you choose not to make such a post, that’s fine. At least we are enjoying this conversation about it all:-).
Because the Lemmy user base is still relatively small, so the drama in one corner takes up a nontrivial amount of the total area. If it were the size of reddit or tiktok, you wouldn’t pay threads like these any mind.
It’s all over because it’s a pervasive problem, and it’s obviously off putting to a lot of people.
And it’s especially a problem when there are random communities peppered in your feed that you simply can’t participate in randomly, even though they may be the largest of their kind.
Ive been banned from communities I have yet to participate in, for no reason, and without any responses from mods when I ask what happened.
It’s making it so the entire platform becomes toxic unless you actively persevere through their unfair practices.
It’s important to me because I really liked Reddit back in the day, and before that the disperate forums that existed all over. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are interested in those same things, but are put off when they inevitably say something “liberal” in a meme space and are attacked for it. It’s toxic and it is counter to growth.
Not to mention how blatant an echo chamber it creates, and how naive users can be indoctrinated to misinformation without even a hint of counter discussion being allowed.
Edit: desperate to disperate
I can’t even see what instance you’re from, but your account is only a couple months old. Why not create one on a different instance?
I’ve been banned from several .ml subs, some of which are so popular they appear on All, and I didn’t know I was banned until I tried to upvote, but I’ve never participated otherwise in them, it was punitive for other comments and discussions I’ve had where I have debated politics and, propaganda, and media with mods.
I may actually be banned from the instance, but i don’t know how to investigate such things. But .ml came up an awful lot when I was looking into how to join Lemmy, obviously, and I had no idea how bad the mod practices and ideological bend would be on what amounts to one of the “main” instances.
I’m on shitjustworks, which I really like. But before I knew how different instances worked, I just assumed Lemmy was Reddit power tripping mods 2.0 across all of Lemmy. I’m glad I persevered a little bit to get to more communities.
You are, for the next 7 days. This is your modlog actions on Lemmy.ml:
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=9504078
Some of that stuff would get you banned from shitjustworks though too - e.g. civility.
I had a conversation with the mod who deleted my comments for being uncivil. A troll reported me being an asshole to him, as he trolled. If you look at the deleted thread, you can see their deleted comments.
it’s not my proudest moment, but I firmly believe that assholes should he confronted by assholes, and I took it upon myself in that moment.
Aside from that single interaction, I have abided by the rules of the forum and been polite, within reason. But I have, without remorse, questioned bullshit and disinformation.
Well I hope it helps that now you know how to check your modlog actions:-). You put your name in the box, but the hard part is figuring out which modlog even has the record of the event - though usually the instance where the community is located at.
Yeah I wonder how much assholery those admins bring upon themselves by being that way to others first, it’s like they almost do it on purpose and then use it as an excuse - e.g. Russia will say “poor me, the Ukraine is attacking me, it’s so not fair boo-hoo” :-P.
It’s because they’re on the same instance as you (and me)
Ooh, good to know. I’m still a noob here, lol
OP wants to feel like a saviour of us all from tankies.
OP has been here two months, and they were shocked to find out an instance literally named after Karl Marx and John Lennin would pretend to be on the left but support authoritarian governments…
And they assume since they just “discovered” it, no one else knows.
… John Lennin?
Father of the gulag, founder of the Beatles
“Imagine no private ownership of the means of production, I wonder if you can”
It’s crazy to think about, but even after all these years, people insist he was bigger than Jesus
Imagine all the Pol Pot…
I’m the walrus
John Lennin. Rofl Mao
It’s as if people are joining and learning things.
Been here an almost year and literally just learned that from the above post.
It’s not named after Lemmy from Motörhead?
They probably mean the
.mlpart.
Yeah, like linus is a known cunt to work with, i’ll still update my kernel regularly though
Not defending his behavior but I would note that he has been actively seeking to remedy his cunty-ness after becoming aware of how problematic it was and the problematic people that it attracted.
i’ve been on the receiving end of his cunty-ness in person as a lowley tech support minion that he was forced to work with, as well as several other well known pioneers; i can tell through this thread that dessalines is an angel by comparison and i’ve never met them.
I’d certainly say so. I’ve yet to see him even coming off as dismissive without trying to clarify why in a polite manner.
I had to block a handful of bad actors, maybe around 15, and don’t have much issue now. As usual it’s a very small, very vocal minority that’s doing most of the shitting in the pool. Unfortunately many are also mods of communities like politics@lemmy.ml, so generally not subscribing to stuff there is a good policy too.
Not sure what solutions you suggest
That’s why I included this section in my post:
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances: https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
They were wondering about the dev thing. Having a lead dev be an asshole isn’t that big of a deal. It’s open source, so any code that would somehow benefit them would also benefit you.
It’s the Vampire Castle phenomenon of online leftist spaces. One dev and instance admin of Lemmy has problematic personal beliefs, so now we aren’t allowed to be on Lemmy anymore because it’s failed an ideological purity test that OP decided for the rest of us. In other news, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is a hardcore Ayn Rand style freemarket libertarian, so I guess we should all ditch wikipedia and each buy a 400 pound Encyclopedia Britannica set. Because that’ll show him to believe things I think are terrible.
I got a 14 day instance ban for calling a tankie a tankie on ML. Their authoritarian ideology is dangerous and it needs to be quarantined.
You are more than welcome to block any and all content from that instance. You can do this by going under your user settings and clicking on the “Blocks” tab and searching for lemmy.ml in the Block Instance section. That’s the thing about Federated content. You have the power to selectively engage with the content of your choosing. You don’t get to quarantine others because there is no centralized authority that gets to say “your instance gets stuck in an internet ghetto where it isn’t allowed to interact with other users.” You have to quarantine yourself by excluding content. If that doesn’t work for you, then maybe it’s less that you dislike their authoritarian ideology and more that it isn’t the same flavor as your own.
I blocked ML months ago. I’m still going to keep calling for large instances to defederate, because sticking my fingers in my ears doesn’t make the problem go away.
Yes, that will happen when the “problem” lives solely between your ears.
It’s all so melodramatic. I’ll take a jaunt into the comments sections of these posts once in awhile to see what the libs are clutching their pearls over now. Today we have:
Oh nooooo, a dev is a ban happy shithead! How unusual and extreme! Better raise the banner and gather the troops, the tankies are coming for us all! We must defederate and/or fork a parallel Lemmy because only tankies have weird ban happy power trips! This will solve all the issues!
On the bright side, block op and the surprisingly small number of the other more vocal tankie drama lords and it gets a lot quieter.
On the bright side, block op and the surprisingly small number of the other more vocal tankie drama lords and it gets a lot quieter.
Getting worked up over a Lemmy instance upholding principles misaligned to yours, while Lemmy constitutes 3% of the Fediverse and the Fetiverse is still unknown to the vast majority, is a pointless waste of energy.
Yeah, I honestly give very few shits about the political opinions of the lemmy devs as long as it doesn’t taint the project itself -and if it did at some point in the future, forking an open-source project is stupidly easy.
I even donate a smidge of money to the development effort via librepay - man does need it to live after all.
Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.
Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.
I’ll add that they’re also generally quite pleasant when I see them on Lemmy. And I haven’t seen either of them involved in being ban-happy. Some will argue otherwise based upon misconstruing the relationship between FLOSS devs and FLOSS consumers as a business/customer relationship (expecting customer service and product manager input on software that’s donated free of charge). But, I think that those folks are just not yet familiar with how FLOSS development works.
I had my first ever comment, in decades of forums/reddit usage, get mod deleted because I was critical of China and the USSR. It was a fairly mild criticism. That action turned me off the whole instance.
Sad that you chose an .ml community to come back to. You can’t talk about Russia or China at all without getting deleted there, unless it’s saying that Tienamen Square never happened or something like that.
They learn from who they are worshipping. Exactly how the CCP control the narratives.
They learn from who
they are worshippingpays them and might disappear them if they say the wrong thing.
Same here, but they tried to claim I called a Steam Deck a “Rice Burner” as a racist insult when I randomly chose “rice” as the title for this meme to fill the mandatory title block.
Like, bro? Even if that was my intent, which it wasn’t even a term I had ever seen applied to a computer, it doesn’t make sense.
I looked at your downvotes because I see you at -2… Wear this like a badge of honor!
Most of the downvotes I see are lemmy.ml users. Which I find funny. Rice exists in so many countries outside of china, but because it reminds them of China it’s instantly bad since you’re using is negatively. It’s absurd.
LMAO!! Thank you! I’ve got them blocked but the fact they’re even voting me down is silly. It wasn’t even an insult because if I was even mentioning “ricing” it was the better of two options.
wow, you can see who up/downvoted a post? how do I do that?
Host your own lemmy instance. Or use Kbin(shows up as likes).
For some reason they decided that even though other activitypub services can see it just fine, lemmy will not show these things to normal users.
I thought it only showed Reduces from Kbin users? But then Kbin.social stopped showing any Reduces at all, and now Kbin.social is defunct for several days.
I tried Kbin.earth and Fedia.io but both show the Reduces as greyed out, at least for https://lemmy.world/comment/10490177 that I used as a test. I will try creating a login and see if that unlocks it.
Apparently its to do with a sport car scene where the Chinese couldn’t afford such luxuries but still want to participate and westerners or Americans would call these vehicle mods ricing
Now with linux theming we call ricing and that carries a racist connotation. How racist it actually is I am unsure but either way thats the reason people get upset.
Regarding lemmy.ml: yes, you should avoid it. It does not make sense to create politically-neutral communities on a politically-oriented instance.
Regarding Dessalines: The great thing about Lemmy is that I don’t need to give a shit about the lead developer’s politics, because he’s not in control of how Lemmy is used, and if he ever tried some kind of heinous cross-instance power grab, it would get shut down before it got started.
Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦
As a fellow communist, I was always bewildered by this urge of many tankies to prove by all means, against any evidence, that China is socialist and ultimately good.
It’s neither. China turned to markets, privatized many industries, and really did commit atrocities on Tiannamen square and in Xinjiang.
Doesn’t mean socialism as a system is dysfunctional. United States are directly responsible for insane atrocities all over the world, and we don’t need to deny that either.
We need to learn from the experience and strive for it not to happen again. Not close our eyes, scream “blah-blah-blah” and pretend it never happened.
China and the Soviet Union were responsible for acts of genocide, mass murdering/starving people, etc.
Doesn’t mean this didn’t happen in a capitalist world, and doesn’t mean we should close our eyes on that to defend the good look of the system. If anything, this does the opposite. Problems need to be solved, not ignored.
Are there people that don’t know that Lemmy is developed by Marxists, and their instance is run by Marxists? Thought that was common knowledge, that’s why Lemmy exists in the first place, it was developed along Communist principles.
If you’re new to Lemmy then it won’t be common knowledge at all.
Because Lemmy is usually marketed as the Fediverse alternative to Reddit, not as a communist platform.
Plenty of people try Lemmy then promptly leave when they realize it’s run by “Marxists” (i.e. people pretending to Marxists as a facade for spreading CCP propaganda).
Great. now we have fediverse Stalin :D
The way comments and users are purged from ml would make Stalin proud!
Are you referring to me? Or Dessalines?
That’s not quite correct, they are Marxists Leninists, who are the more Authoritarian and reactionary counterparts.
Bruh, Lemmy is a federated clone of Reddit. And tankies did not come up with the Fediverse or Reddit. If anything Lemmy is closer to a classic capitalist structure with the communities being owned by the admin (boss). Users have no control of any community no matter how much they contribute. I guess since tankies are state capitalists anyway they feel right at home.
I’m glad that this is the controversy on Lemmy, and not things like Reddit had with r/JailBait.
I’m perfectly fine with just avoiding interactions with lemmy.ml communities. They can exist, even if I disagree with them. And if I wanted to participate, I’d probably be welcome so long as I follow the rules. Unlike r/Conservative, which required proving yourself to the mods to get a pass to enter or something…lol
But yes, it’s definitely good to know what the .ml stands for, and to keep that in mind whenever one sees Lemmy.ml.
Good thing that Lemmy is an open source federation, then. It’s not like Spaz on Reddit, where one dude can ruin the whole damn thing for everyone with a few bad choices.
Yeah this is the origin of Lemmy. Reddit banned some far left subreddits years ago and so some Communists went and made Lemmy.
Just block the instance if it bothers you. Jeez.
I may not agree with the devs political view, but I think their work developing lemmy is excellent and made me subscribe to monthly donation on opencollective. Lemmy is an open source project where the devs have absolutely no say over how the software being used, as evidenced by so many lemmy instances defederating from lemmygrad and lemmy.ml. Their political belief won’t affect other instance.
I‘m glad that the fediverse resists excessive moderation and silencing of unwanted political opinions. I‘m not a fan of some of the things said or done on .ml but we wont do anything which is awesome. You can make your own instance and defederate, ban, block whoever you like.
To make my point clear, I made a large donation to the lemmy devs as I think they are doing awesome work. @dessalines@lemmy.ml especially is a tremendous help for the open source community.
But of course you‘re entitled to your opinion. Have a good day.
Nice comment, have a good day too
Yes let’s all just pretend their propaganda is actual opinions held by real people.
- how will you prove they’re not „real people“?
- you‘re using a platform made by them
- the post itself is also propaganda since it pushes for a „solution“ against „tankies“.
-
Hold my hand and we’ll go visit their house and ask them
-
Creating something doesn’t give them the right to spread lies, and they probably funded it specifically in order to spread propaganda
-
This post isn’t a systemic campaign of disinformation… a single person saying we should do something isn’t propaganda. I’m talking about government-driven efforts to change thought and opinions. In this case, from a government with a long history of murdering and oppressing people.
I‘m not saying you cant be right. I still dont agree with your assumptions. Have a good day.
-
This entire thread glows and is extremely consistent with CIA goals.
You’re beyond naive if you think the Marxists are brainwashed, yet you and the “people” in this thread aren’t.
I don’t think Marxists are brainwashed at all. Can’t you contribute without putting words in my mouth?
Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares.
It’s one of those things where the very tankies you’re talking about made it trivial for anyone not wanting to interact with them, their instance, or anyone in specific can just block whatever. And then there’s the instances that defederate from .ml and/or grad, which is a decent amount of them.
They may be assholes (though they tend not to be in interpersonal ways, only in their political views), but they’re assholes nobody has to interact with for very long.
You’re beating a dead horse with this one
That horse fucking deserves it though. He knows what he did.
Yeah honestly let’s make an example out of that horse
I mean, we should probably care at least enough to make sure they’re not smuggling in any backdoors that would allow them take over the entire Lemmyverse.
I know it’s open source so that’s somewhat difficult to accomplish but not impossible (see the recent stealth attack on SSH/OpenSSL). At the very least, it requires people from outside their echo chamber to regularly review commits being made made before admins begin rolling out new updates.
That’s a valid point, imo.
But there supposedly are people doing just that. Been too long since I ran across it here, but when the last big version change happened, some of the instance running folks looked over the code, and found nothing hinky. I know my asshole cousin has his own instance, and he said he scanned through it a little out of curiosity and “it ain’t the prettiest” was the worst he had to say about it. Which, second hand info like that is like toilet paper, but it serves okay for a casual conversation like this.
I would hope so, since it’s THEIR hardware it’s running on (or in case it’s rented, responsible for).
But as long as they don’t put anything iffy into the code and leave their political opinions separate from that, they can certainly run their own instance however they please. That’s the whole point of Lemmy after all.
Jesus christ.
I’m not sure if He knows Rust well enough to do that, and having some sort of background in infosec would likely also be helpful.
Oh come on downvoters, that was funny! Haha
Thank you, I tried.
Tough crowd, eh?
Well, things have turned around! Haha
Guess it was just a slow burner then
Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares
The 730 people who upvoted this post do care.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them. I understand that awareness of why people want alternatives is important for those alternatives to have a chance at attracting users, and being discovered in the first place. I just have yet to actually see these alternatives receive the care they (imo) require to justify switching to them.
The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody.
Maybe it’s too soon to make such a judgement call, we’ll see over the next few days as people get the chance to see this post.
The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them.
Agreed. Maybe I should try creating and managing a community some day. (hopefully this didn’t come off as sarcastic)
The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody.
This is a wildly misleading and unfair comparison. Let’s take the Trump verdict as an example. The most upvoted post about this had ~2700 upvotes. But that’s only 6% of the MAU! Is that “nobody”? Obviously not. 2k upvotes is a huge deal on a rather small community like Lemmy. How often do you see posts with more than 3k upvotes?
~500 upvotes is already a moderately large number of upvotes. You need to compare this number with how many upvotes a post typically gets.
Fwiw (our disagreement aside), moderating a community anywhere online can be a very rewarding, and very thankless job. And it really can be a thing that feels like a job if the community is active enough.
But I would still recommend at least trying it for a few months to see if whatever subject matter you make it around draws users. That’s when you get a real feel for moderation, and have the best chance at helping the overall fediverse work well.
I also think that moderating a big community would change your mind at least partially regarding vote numbers as a measure of anything significant. There’s behind the curtain stuff that usually gives a better indication of how a given post/subject is being received by the individual community. It depends on the tools available, and lemmy is a wee bit scant on tools to help moderators gain understanding of the population of their C/; but it’s still eye opening.
The biggest thing I think you’d notice in comparing people interacting with a given post is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that. And that’s the ones that bother to vote. A lot of people don’t. They’ll click a link, maybe open that post and read comments, but just not care enough to do anything else at all. Back on reddit, that was a majority of posts, and I know it was the case on other forums back in the day.
So, yeah, disagreement about the numbers in this case aside, if you’re this interested in how a vote using forum works, moderating your own would be a very cool experience on top of diversifying the instance/community balance.
[…] is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that.
Wow, now that I think of it, that is indeed how I vote most of the time.
Thanks, I will seriously consider opening a community.
I didn’t necessarily think you were being sarcastic, but I appreciate the clarification.
You’re correct, that was a rather shallow comparison for me to make.
I don’t think raw upvotes give the full story either. I’d be interested in seeing, for example, from which instances the voters are distributed.
I’d be interested in seeing, for example, from which instances the voters are distributed.
That would be interesting indeed! I heard that if one hosts their own Lemmy instance, they can see who voted on every post. Don’t have that for now though.
Votes mean as much as the shit I just took.
No. The shit that you took is more meaningful than fake Internet points.
True, it was a very healthy bm ;)
Usually I’d agree with this, but on this post, the upvote count is a direct representation of how many people care about this issue (out of the number of users who saw this post). That is meaningful.
I don’t have access to traffic data to make a good argument on this specific post. Without the ability to compare total interactions vs votes, as well as the ratio of up vs down, it’s a matter of general principle in my opinion.
It is also my opinion, having moderated off and on since the nineties on various types of forums that pretty much any post is ignored by a majority of users that come across it. Voting really only shows which people are willing to use the effort to hit a button. If a majority of users don’t engage, I think that it is indeed a direct representation of how many people care. Again, I can’t see those numbers, so it’s kind of a moot point to make at all, but I suspect this post is like most posts anywhere.
But I still maintain that votes are meaningless across the board because they’re a horrible metric for anything at all, especially when they’re the only metric available.
Edit: again, fwiw, in the time it took me to type that up, the number of positive votes went down by 3. And, iirc, at the point where this tangent about the value of votes started, or was over 400, which is still meaningless, but taken in isolation would point to a general trend where there’s significant disagreement with whatever it is about the post drawing votes.
I kind of see your point. The information we have is not sufficient, and we cannot really know how much of the Lemmy userbase cares about this issue.
In my view, upvotes are too easy to manipulate to take them seriously or expect authenticity. And I’m ok with that. I think Reddit and the like showed that karma and the like are not great measures of authentic engagement.
Your last sentence is contradictory with the meaning of “beating a dead horse” with the usage of the phrase I’m aware of.
To beat a dead horse isn to waste effort at an impossible or pointless goal.
When I used the phrase, it was with the second meaning in mind, but the first partially applies if op wanted anyone to do anything about the situation because the dev team isn’t exactly open to some kind of takeover. The most that could realistically happen is that everyone leave lemmy entirely. Except for the tankies, obviously, why would they leave?
Since anyone that has spent enough time on lemmy to be called a regular user has run across the whole issue at least once, that means that if OP was wanting to raise awareness, the post was also pointless in that regard because it’s kinda impossible to raise awareness past common knowledge and achieve anything useful.
Now, maybe our usage of the phrase “beating a dead horse” isn’t the same. Language is funny like that. Maybe you just disagree that the post has no point, or that the point it does have might achieve something useful. That’s cool, no worries, disagreements like that are healthy and fun.
I will say that in the first part of your comment, you actually echoed the point that I made; it is trivial to minimize/block instances in one way or another, including defederation. Defederation is an instance decision, not a personal one. But it is also a personal decision which instance/s we use to interact with the fediverse. There are instances that do not federate with lemmy.ml, and there’s a ton that don’t with lemmygrad.
So, based on that, I would even argue that, since we have the freedom to choose our instance (with the consent of the host of the instance of course), trying to get an instance that doesn’t already defederate from lemmy.ml to do so approaches pointless since all of the major instances have been around for a while now, and have already taken part in that debate. Maybe you could change someone’s mind with yet another rehash of the same debate, it does happen. But, again, all the major instances have had this debate multiple times, and the hosts don’t seem open to changing just because someone brings it up again.
New instances? Absolutely have to decide if they want to federate with any of the “iffy” instances. And every user has to decide if they’d rather stick with a given instance that doesn’t match their preferences regarding federation. But, uh, the instance this was posted on isn’t new. The user that posted it isn’t exactly new either. So the fact that they haven’t already made a choice, but instead decided to beat a dead horse (again, using the “pointless” rather than “impossible” usage of the phrase) seems a bit meh.
I have Lemmy.ml blocked and I still see them in other communities all the time.
If that’s the case, then that may be a bug. I advise you to report that.
It’s standard, unfortunately, I’m not the only one
What do you mean by “it’s standard”? As in that is the intended functionality? It shouldn’t be — the whole point of blocking instances is for the user to be able to, well, block an instance, ie content originating from it no longer shows up.
Yeah, the software is set up so that even if you block an instance you still see comments from their accounts on other instances.
Is that stated in the documentation?
I don’t know
Malicious propaganda isn’t a non-problem. I’d like a social media platform that doesn’t have any governments openly pumping their lies into the conversation.
There is always a bias.
There’s always murder, but we still try to stop it.
Wait what? A communism advocate who also develops Free and Open Source Software, which is literally communist philosphy applied to computers?
I’m blown away
Do you know the political views of the developers of every piece of software you use? Why is Lemmy different?
I had never heard so much about “tankies” before I joined Lemmy.
Before, I had heard it so sparingly that I couldn’t remember what it meant.
Perhaps there may be something more to this correlation. Why are people with this worldview so common here? If it’s not more common here than anywhere else, why is it brought up so much more frequently?
Lemmy was made by Marxists, along Communist principles, both the format and the devs attract Marxists and Anarchists.
There is a lot of conflict between leftists and liberals on Lemmy because there are close to no conservatives.
It’s kind of like a Disco Elysium situation, even though non-Marxists can enjoy it and use it, there are going to be more Marxists enjoying it and using it as a proportion, and fewer conservatives.
Why are people with this worldview so common here?
Plenty of them aren’t “people,” they’re simply anonymous accounts used to spread and promote propaganda. Some content generated by people, some from LLMs.
They’re common here because they can run their disinformation campaigns without a corporation interfering. Tik Tok isn’t the CCP’s only attempt to influence people through social media.
If you’re claiming they are bots, I don’t think that’s the case. Judging from the little threads I’ve been reading throughout this post, it seems as if Lemmy was created by some diaspora of Marxists from reddit after reddit banned their stuff. If this is true, you’re not interacting with bots, you would be interacting with actual Marxists. People.
Some are regular people, some are paid shills, some are bots.
That’s the thing, I think they’re all just regular people with more radical views on politics. I feel as if this recent fad of “dead internet theory” which posits the majority of the net is filled with bots, is really an attempts by certain groups to dismiss certain online communities/dismiss the idea that these communities are indicative of some sort of wider trend within society, which is really what I think is an attempts to gain control of what is seen as consensus reality online, dehumanize the other side, and justify the suppression/repression of certain ideas, opinions, and groups.
Lemmy was developed, in part, to be a tankie community and they are around if you go outside of lemmy.world.
Tankie á la .world = anything left of center.
No, it is the Soviet Union did nothing wrong in 1956 definition.
The United States exterminated Native Americans and currently is a systemically racist country that murders its dissidents - see Kent State and Ferguson. It also has the largest prison population in the world.
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Are you trying to argue that the two are moral equals?
How is the United States better given the entirety of its history and current oppression of the working class and minorities? We have a larger prison population than China despite having a far smaller population, and our quality of life has plummeted over the past 2 generations, whereas theirs has drastically improved over the same period
More importantly, why does any of that offend you to hear? You’re so patriotically brainwashed that you can’t tolerate criticisms of the US? Why would that be in a country that is supposedly free? If you’re being oppressed by American oligarchs, then you should want others to point out this oppression so that we can eventually reform our system
How is the United States better given the entirety of its history and current oppression of the working class and minorities?
I was talking about the definition of tankie and how it is different than leftist. I was not discussing the United States nor was I making an argument that the American system was superior.
You will be surprised how much of the open source software out there is written and maintained by lefties and tankies.
Sadly conservatives seem to have either lower education and are not notorious for their sharing and selflessness.
