cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531

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/[email protected] 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.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    Yeah, a little suspect OP’s account is a week old with barely double digit posts/comments if you combine them and most are from this post…

    I’m guessing their favorite (of many) accounts got blocked by .ml, so now they don’t want anyone going there.

    I don’t get the .ml drama tho, never have. I realized it was a silly place long ago, so I blocked the whole instance.

    I did the same for a couple others. It takes like two seconds.

    Who cares if it has bigger communities than others? If that’s all I cared about I’d still be on Reddit

    I think a lot or people (like OP) can’t drop this mindset because they’re not on the fediverse willinging. It’s probably the only social media site where IP bans aren’t a thing. So people IP banned from the big ones, are gonna trickle down here and do dumb drama hunting shit like OP.