I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, …
As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.
I posted a comment in this thread linking to “https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs” (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.
This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:
Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say?
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”
The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there’s nobody to discuss anything with.
I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
I fucking hate tankies, but.
The problem i have, every time this conversation happens, is that cutting them out doesn’t solve anything, and that I don’t want to be coddled.
The 2 main issues we have, as lemmy at large, is that there are some wildly uneven standards enforced across instances and that we have no say about that. There was that hugbox instance that would ban people for being rude and yeeted itself into the void, there was hexbear that got de-federated for its mods actively encouraging being subversive (despite its users receiving intolerable psychic damage after 5 minutes in any lib space where people are free to call them names, or was that lemmygrad?) and now we’re talking about removing lemmy.ml for the fact that its mods are somehow sentient pieces of actual shit.
And while I agree to all of those reasons, I don’t think defederating is the answer.
Every time we fragment the fediverse we make it overall worse.
Average users don’t even understand what they’re looking at when it comes to decentralized networks, let alone can they understand that there’s politicking between instances and such. If I were told “you can make an account on instance x or y, but they don’t talk to eachother so if you want to see stuff on instance y you can’t make an account on instance x” as a rando, I would go back to reddit, the only reason I didn’t is that i really hate the app and I am tech/net savvy enough to handle this.
I am a tad more radical when it comes to speech than most, and I accept that, but I do believe that these people have no power so long as they can’t abuse moderation, so the answer to the question “how do we handle open propagandists”, to me, is to create perhaps a “moderation neutrality charter” and making it very clear which instances subscribe to it, having each instance’s moderation team maybe be required to weigh in on appeals to bans from other instances to ensure a certain amount of balance.
That would take care of that real quick. They can subscribe to the charter and start abiding by neutral moderation standards agreed to across the board by some democratic standard, or they can defederate themselves.
That’s actually something twitter does right with the idea of community notes, that for the note to be published it needs to be agreed on by multiple parties that don’t usually agree in those votes, to ensure there is a bipartisan agreement.
I know this is perhaps too lofty for a ragtag group of essentially microblogging self-hosters, but a man can dream.
Tankie mods don’t moderate in good faith though, to do so would entirely undermine their political objectives. That’s kind of the point of the thread here – to defederate so that the tankies aren’t deciding what people can or cannot see and say.
I don’t see how the charter idea would actually help with that but maybe I’m not understanding the mechanics of how other mods “weigh in” on ban appeals from other instances.
Yeah, that’s why I’m suggesting making mods of other instances review ban appeals.
If you ban someone because you’re butthurt your precious red-brown alliance is being besmirched, mods from instances that don’t suck Stalin’s dick on the daily will hopefully call you out on it and force you to reverse the ban or defederate.
My hope is to make it so defederation is not something we do to undesirable instances, but that they do to themselves.
The latter is preferable because it requires an instance to be so ideologically far gone that its own denizens would agree with this over replacing the mod team, whereas the former only really needs a bad enough opinion of the instance from its neighbours, which IMO is not a good standard.
Would there be able to be some sort of online meeting for the different instances with someone mediating to try to find a way to fragment less but also not ban certain views?
Or could there be a settings option to let readers view all deleted posts on certain instances that would make everyone happy?
It’s a good point you’re making about fragmentation and the problems it could create.
Man, I genuinely don’t know.
I’d expect this to be some sort of public cross-instance structure that is readonly to users so we could spectate the conversations and maybe up/downvote, where you could see what essentially amounts to the meeting minutes in the form of a normal thread?
But before we even get there there’d need to be an agreement and either a fork of the core lemmy code to implement this or we’d need to get the lemmy devs on board and LMAO good luck with that, we’re literally discussing creating a system to divest them of their power and they’re ideologically authoritarian.
Only if your conception of better/worse is focussed on user count rather than user quality.
Refraining from defederation won’t change that.
No, decidedly not. Unless out there there is an instance whose users are all all-around paste eaters, every instance has some users worth keeping in some conversation, furthermore political alignment says nothing about insight or competence in fields unrelated to politics.
A nazi is just as likely to know how to fix an obscure bug in some game or program than a tankie or a liberal, people are more complicated than their political allegiances and blanket removing an instance does us a disservice as much as it does them.
Refraining from making the fediverse an archipelago where people refuse to talk to anyone who had the misfortune of picking the wrong instance is going to make that better, yes.
Not everyone who made an instance on lemmy.ml is a tankie. I almost did, and the only reason I didn’t is that they very gracefully and clearly state that Lemmy.ml is the flagship but not the largest instance.
That doesn’t contradict what I said.
The fediverse cannot now be made that because the fediverse is already that.