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.
Do you know the political views of the developers of every piece of software you use? Why is Lemmy different?
Seriously
Because it’s not just any political view, tankism is part of the ideologies that support regimes which unmistakably restrict the freedom of speech. This could be an issue for an internet forum.
It’s actually not different from having a right wing billionaire buying a social media. It’s very much the same thing, and most people on the fediverse are there to avoid this kind of political influences on the platform.
The difference with X/Twitter is that if you want to use it, you’re stuck with Elon Musk and the types of people that still use it.
With Lemmy, you can join an instance that has values you agree with, or even run your own instance and defederate/block any instances or people you don’t want to see. You’re not forced to see any particular communities or people.
I am employed as a Software Engineer in the real estate sector. I’m also a commie. Many ultracapitalist assholes are using my software and they have no idea about my political views. I’m sure there are a lot more of us than one would normally think. It’s just that most of us are tired of having the same discussions with the same arguments over and over and over and over again, so we just don’t out ourselves 99% of the time :)
It’s the radical moderators and developers of Lemmy that censor and delete posts and comments that fit their narrative. They are trying to foster authoritarian views and perpetuating lies (like tiananmen square didn’t happen, or Ukraine invaded russia). It’s a big mess that causes problems when people voice opposing views or even sourced material and get censored and banned. Using Lemmy feels like we have to accept their cooked views. I’m hoping there will be a fork or new federation project that doesn’t have baggage. Many moved here because of the reddit bs, and now there is extreme communism baggage.
The entire point of Lemmy and other decentralized and federated systems is that no one entity is in control of it. It’s not like a site like Reddit where the whole thing is controlled by one company.
They can only delete posts and comments from servers they’re moderators of. That’s probably just a few servers out of the thousands that exist. Nobody’s forcing any user to use those servers. If you don’t like the moderation on one server just move to a different one.
Why fork it if the software works well as-is?
You can run your own Lemmy server and defederate from every other server if you want to, or only federated with a few hand-picked servers.
Because anti-communists will bicker about every single thing they’ve been taught not to like about communism and remain quiet in terms of criticism to the current system
Seems more “anti-authoritarian-communism” than anything.
It’s cool to be an anti-authoritarian communist. It’s not cool to spend half of your breathing time to talking shit about past leftist projects which were by all metrics less evil than capitalist ones.