Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
I was super into the idea of lemmy.ml and actually had some extensive conversations with them and with lemmygrad when I first joined Lemmy. I didn’t agree with them on practically anything, but whatever, it is fine. Then, lemmy.ml mods started deleting my comments when they decided that I was expressing the incorrect viewpoint and that viewpoint needed to be deleted to clear the way for the correct viewpoint. That’s kind of a red line for me in terms of whether or not I feel like fuckin with a particular instance, and I pretty much turned my back on it.
This was my exact experience. I was pretty excited for a community well to the left of reddit, only to discover that they had no knowledge or interest in leftist theory beyond Lenin and Mao. Then I got run out of town for basically challenging this orthodoxy.
First of all, the complaints are not without substance. Some of their admin decisions are highly questionable and obviously politically motivated. However I think the idea of defederation is a huge overreaction.
What do people think about lemmy.ml?
They have always been left-aligned, despite officially being privacy/FOSS focused. This is largely due to the history of Lemmy, which was created by leftist developers and existed in relative obscurity for a couple of years prior to the reddit API exodus a year ago. They have received a good number of relatively apolitical users since the API exodus due to their branding, but many of those users eventually chose to leave to other servers.
These screenshots from 7/16/23 and 9/5/23 show that lemmy.ml experienced a massive bump in users that quickly ebbed away in the following months. This happened with all Lemmy servers, but beehaw and lemmy.ml had the biggest drop offs.
Right now they are sitting right around 2.5k MAUs, same as us.
Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically?
I don’t believe it creates problems for Lemmy users, but I can see the argument for why it does. I think there’s a misconception that lemmy.ml is still the flagship instance or new users are being drawn to them, but I just don’t think that’s the case. People dont really recommend lemmy.ml to new users, because it’s already common knowledge about their political leanings. And they’ve never prioritized promotion of that instance on join-lemmy.org or anywhere else that I’m aware of. This is borne out by the data I just shared, which shows their share of the Lemmy userbase has steadily declined over time.
For sh.itjust.works specifically, I don’t agree that it’s creating problems for our users. Our server has literally grown in the garden planted by lemmy.ml users. We are less dependent on lemmy.ml today than ever before, and now is when people decide they want to defederate? That seems really lame and somehow duplicitous.
I think to the extent that there are problems with the lemmy.ml userbase, they have come more recently after hexbear got defederated from most of the fediverse. I think some long time users on hexbear and lemmygrad who got a taste of the wider fediverse decided to move over to lemmy.ml so they could keep pushing their ideology. That’s not ideal but I don’t think defederation of the whole server is a proper response to a handful of hexbear trolls up to their old tricks.
For me personally as an admin, I can confidently say that I don’t feel like lemmy.ml users have been disproportionately involved in bad behavior or trolling. I’ve removed my fair share of hostile comments in political arguments, but no more offensive or combative than stuff I see from our own users, lemmy.world, lemm.ee, or any big server. I haven’t seen them brigading communities or threads, aside from the ones located on their own server, which is obviously fine.
In terms of their admins, I have to acknowledge that they sometimes make mistakes with moderation. But moderation on Lemmy is also a really difficult task. One important factor is that they host a disproportionate number of communities and especially political communities. Here on SJW, our most active communities tend to be fairly non-controversial. I cannot imagine the moderation burden for active political communities such as those hosted on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, and I’m thankful they’re doing it instead of us.
TLDR Lemmy.ml is basically alright with me, aside from some minor annoyances. I think it’s kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them. But that’s just my personal opinion, I will of course abide by the wishes of my fellow sh.it.heads.
It’s good to know that ml users aren’t disproportionately causing problems. That was the impression that I got - they have their overzealous trolls with their own ideological spin but they don’t have disproportionately more trolls than other instances - but I’m not a mod anywhere so I don’t pay attention as closely.
I think ml does have moderation issues, that post on the technology community is not the first time I’ve seen overly aggressive mod actions from them. I’ve left several news and politics communities on ml due to certain users and moderators creating an environment I prefer not to be in. Being a moderator is a hard job, but I genuinely appreciate the transparency and even-handedness from the mods in other large non-ml communities and they show that we can and should expect better from our community moderators.
I think the post over on Technology has the right idea - move the non-political communities off of ml to other instances, the politics communities already have active alternatives due to the mod issues. The Star Trek communities show this is totally possible, but the non-political communities are the least likely to have issues with overzealous moderators (unless you’re foolish enough to engage in politics elsewhere over there and get a blanket ban from all of ml for bullshit reasons…). But a community call to action is harder than a blanket defederation.
I think the moderation issues are more than a minor annoyance, but I agree that defederation, at this point, would be excessive. And I think we’re all happier not addressing the elephant in the room because, well, we wouldn’t be here without them.
It’s good to know that ml users aren’t disproportionately causing problems.
Yeah, precisely. It’s a very different situation compared to hexbear, who would flood threads on our server and deliberately try to rile up our users. The problems with lemmy.ml mainly come from users going into their communities and saying things that go against the grain.
If you get banned from lemmy.ml in that situation, I feel like it’s not a bad outcome. Just join the equivalent community somewhere else. Defederating them is almost the equivalent of banning yourself anyway, if you think about it.
I think the post over on Technology has the right idea - move the non-political communities off of ml to other instances […].But a community call to action is harder than a blanket defederation.
I think the moderation issues are more than a minor annoyance, but I agree that defederation, at this point, would be excessive. And I think we’re all happier not addressing the elephant in the room because, well, we wouldn’t be here without them.
Very well said. I completely agree that it behooves us to move a good chunk of communities off lemmy.ml. I think I missed touching on that point in my original comment, thank you for expressing it so well.
The problems with lemmy.ml mainly come from users going into their communities and saying things that go against the grain.
This is overwhelmingly the case from what I have seen.
I think it’s kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them
Yeah, embarrassing for them
People picked their fediverse option over others. Had Lemmy not been there, we’d all just be elsewhere. They got the popularity, but are clearly actually disliked by a lot of their users. They should probably self-reflect with that knowledge
Sure, but there’s no reason it can’t be both. They caused an issue with their actions, but we can either continue to make the situation worse or begin to repair the damage, depending on how we react.
I had a different reply typed out but I’ve decided to change it because:
This is such a weird reply. It really feels like you’re claiming that people pointing out that abusing mod powers (objectively a thing being done) are somehow in the wrong for doing so just because the people abusing the power are those who coded the site it’s being done on.
The choices users have to deal with an issue like this are to block (per-user, so they have to discuss it), defederation (a big decision, so discussion), or leaving entirely (in which case theyd want others to come with, so discussion). That is unless shaming the people doing it works, but they’ve kinda shown they don’t care as this is far from the first time this has come up.
How is it at all embarrassing for the users of a forum to discuss on said forum one of their few methods of recourse to people with power on that forum abusing it?
It really feels like you’re claiming that people pointing out that abusing mod powers (objectively a thing being done) are somehow in the wrong for doing so
Huh? I never said anything remotely like that. This discussion isn’t about pointing out mod abuse, it’s about potentially defederating lemmy.ml. I support everyone who points out mod abuse, but defederation is a whole other can of worms.
The choices users have to deal with an issue like this
Most users don’t have any issue at all. It’s a vocal minority that antagonize (either deliberately or accidentally) the lemmy.ml users and communities that have been subject to the moderator actions in question.
How is it at all embarrassing for the users of a forum to discuss on said forum one of their few methods of recourse to people with power on that forum abusing it?
It’s not. I said it’s kinda embarrassing, because of the possibility of the discussion actually leading to defederation. If we discuss and decide against defederation, I don’t think it’s embarrassing at all. But if we ultimately defederate lemmy.ml just 12 months after joining Lemmy, I would be slightly embarrassed by that choice, yes.
I would see it as a failure of our ability to solve problems and continue to build Lemmy up, and I don’t think lemmy.ml has done anything egregious enough that we have no choice. So ultimately I would see it as an overly sensitive reaction to a fairly pedestrian internet moderation saga.
This discussion isn’t about pointing out mod abuse, it’s about potentially defederating lemmy.ml.
Because of mod abuse. By ignoring that you’re reframing the whole situation as something else.
Most users don’t have any issue at all
Lol
It’s a vocal minority that antagonize (either deliberately or accidentally) the lemmy.ml users and communities that have been subject to the moderator actions in question.
LOL
So your opinion is based on complete bullshit, gotcha
My concern is that the devs have shown a willingness to keep their finger on the scale and use .ml as a tool for this ideological end in any way possible. If, eg, there is a way for a malicious instance to modify federated content from other instances and republish it, I would confidently say that the .ml devs certainly have the ability, and have shown a willingness to engage in that kind of agitprop. At the very least I think we have to take this threat seriously.
Furthermore, If .ml were to be treated as a state espionage actor, federating with them is exposing your users to very significant risks, as it would be trivial for them to collect identifying information via federation, and to promote malicious or compromised websites by modifying their feeds, or even the feeds of individual users. They could very easily collect identifying information from a target, and then modify a web application to serve malware to that specific user, which they push to the top of that users feed in various ways.
This is an aspect of the fediverse which generally makes me uncomfortable. Even if the core code is safe and audited, there is nothing stopping a malicious admin from running modified versions of the front end or forum code. Again, it would even be possible to only serve such malicious content to individual targets, and federating content with them provides an incredibly convenient threat surface for performing this kind of targeted analysis.
The biggest thing stopping this kind of behavior would be “who the fuck would bother?” And the scale needed to provide cover for the operation. Who? Well, an admin who openly admits they are waging information warfare in the fediverse, that’s who. Or perhaps a dev who appropriates the name of an infamous murdering zealot as a symbol for his “cause.” How? Maybe via one of the largest and most visible instances on the fediverse?
Of course, I have no evidence that this actually happens. It would be incredibly difficult to detect such targeted threats. But the whole combination of the way the admin and devs handle themselves, and the adversarial way they interact with the rest of the fediverse, just triggers all sorts of red flags in the secOps part of my lizard brain, and it bothers me that people don’t seem to be taking these threats seriously.
I hear you. My perspective may be slightly different from yours because I have more faith in the devs. I believe them when they make statements about supporting privacy and open source. I understand that they have some extreme beliefs regarding political ideology, but I think it’s unfair to use that as evidence that their ethics are compromised in other aspects. They certainly have an agenda, but they also ultimately have principles and I would be quite surprised if they committed such a betrayal.
It’s like the old adage about conservatives being pro-life right up until the baby is born. People compartmentalize their feelings on different issues and parts of their life, and I think that within the compartment of software development, the devs seem quite ethical. Within the compartment of sociopolitical theory, they have opinions that many would characterize as unethical. But I don’t think the latter implies that the former is likely to be compromised.
I’m not really well versed in software, so I can’t offer much in terms of discussing potential vulnerabilities on that level. I’m glad that someone is worrying about it though.
And that brings me to my second point, which is that the Lemmy userbase is chock full of techies, skeptics, and critical thinkers. Even if they did have some grand scheme to propagandize us, I just don’t think it would work. It’d be similar to what’s happening now, with people independently calling them out and then collectively dealing with the issue.
The time when the Lemmy devs could hope to control the evolution of this platform is long past. They’re outnumbered and there is a substantial negative sentiment about them amongst the userbase. I’m really not too worried about the harm they might cause. I’m more concerned about making a rash decision that creates more problems than it solves.
I am not worried about propaganda. I am worried about a state actor performing pattern analysis on my user, trying it to a specific IP address, and then serving me targeted malware. The fediverse is unique in that sense because of the nature of federation exposes a significant amount of user telemetry to a huge number of different internet hosts.
At this point I am 100% convinced that if hexbears could perform cyber attacks at the behest of China, they would do it enthusiastically. And .ml Admins protect hexbears. To me, that’s motive and opportunity, and it would be naive and foolish to trust them given the adversarial nature of the way they interact with the broader fediverse.
What problems does defederation even cause? Do we have sympathy for this tumor? The very fact that they are openly willing to engage in information warfare, and are being marginalized for it only makes the threat bigger in my mind. If they feel like they are losing this war, their behavior will only grow more extreme. I would again like to reiterate that “Dessalines” is literally the historical poster child for “extreme ends justify any means.”
What problems does defederation even cause?
We certainly lose a ton of active communities and users. Potentially, we continue to exacerbate an ideological divide that ultimately results in the complete disintegration of Lemmy, forcing us to start over on another platform and lose many of our gains from the past year.
Do we have sympathy for this tumor?
Yes. It’s not a tumor, it’s an internet community with a large number of communists who want to take down Western capitalism. It’s a couple of developers who had a vision of a link aggregation platform for the people, by the people. I have plenty of sympathy for them, even though I understand they could potentially be dangerous due to their political extremism.
It seems like you’re aggressively trying to eliminate a hypothetical problem, while discounting the very real consequences of defederation. Even if we go through with it and it goes relatively well, it would cause a significant dip in growth and activity, which we desperately need.
It’s a couple of developers who had a vision of a link aggregation platform for the people, by the people.
I would be much more sympathetic to this idea if they had not shown time and time again that it simply isn’t true.
They have shown absolutely no interest in small-d democratic ideals, and instead continuously double down on small-a authoritarian ideals.
They literally just got kicked off reddit and built a platform that they could control without any interest in higher causes, as far as I can tell. If this was not the case they would not do things like mass ban users for mild dissent, over comments made in other instances. Their interest is entirely self preservation. There is no evidence of service to any higher ideal. They are dead weight, and it’s only a matter of time before they do something which is going to harm the fediverse far more than slow growth will, if they haven’t already.
Ok, I disagree with your assessment of them as people but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
You raise some interesting points, and I don’t think they should be dismissed out of hand. I have some questions though (some of them are re: your other comments here):
[…] some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content.
Could you speak to this in a little more detail? Does what you are seeing inherently require functionality beyond what Lemmy’s public release offers natively, or is beyond the scope of something like an automod tool? Asked honestly, I am not an IT professional.
[…] if .ml were to be treated as a state espionage actor […] it would be trivial for them to collect identifying information via federation and to promote malicious or compromised websites by modifying their feeds, or even the feeds of individual users.
This is obviously a very serious accusation, but let’s put that aside for a moment.
My (limited) understanding is that as a function of using the ActivityPub protocol, it is already trivial to collect identifying information on users of federated services. What makes lemmy.ml unique in this regard - couldn’t a bad actor do this just as easily by other means? Simply it’s comparative size to other instances/services that can be leveraged for this purpose? Aren’t there lower profile means of accomplishing this same thing?
I don’t know enough about how federation works from a technical perspective to speak to feed manipulation when viewing a ‘rogue actor’ instance from a place like sh.itjust.works, but welcome comments/clarifying questions on this point from smarter people than myself. Want to know more, just don’t know what to ask.
Federation exposes potentially quite a bit of user telemetry data through a few different vectors. For example, simply loading a thumbnail from another instance exposes a user’s IP to that host instance. The exact ability for a third instance to tie a specific web request or usage pattern to a specific user is unclear, but is not a large leap. I am working through some specific exploit ideas on a test server I run, but I don’t have a ton of time these days, and it’s difficult to model some of these vectors without real traffic. I can say that so far, if a user interacts with a post soon after making the content request, it’s pretty easy to grab their IP, especially on low traffic content. So if I can see that a user interacts with a niche community (because votes are federated for some strange reason), I can target them that way. I should also be able to set a cookie via the content request, as well as do all the typical browser fingerprinting tricks. Once that association happens, it becomes trivial to serve malicious content to an individual user. This is a very serious threat vector specifically because it’s easy to hide what you are doing from the rest of the world, so it requires vigilance by the target to uncover. If it is done rarely it would be all but impossible to spot.
The broader point is that there is clear motive and plausible opportunity here. From a cyber security perspective, that’s enough to take preventative and protective measures.
The one hand, it’s important to explore the conversational landscape in order to enrich one’s perspective. I am always interested in calm, composed, respectful discussion of even controversial topics.
On the other hand, echo chambers aren’t really valuable to that end, and lemmy.ml is edging up past that threshold. I feel as if engagement with lemmy.ml users is, more frequently than not, typified by emotional antagonism out of the gate, and only becomes more accusatory and divisive as time goes on.
I had hoped, after all the hexbear nastiness, that lemmy.ml might emerge as the more rational and respectful leftist space. I consider myself a leftist, and I enjoy engaging in polite and nuanced leftist political discussions. But the prevailing sentiment that I personally encounter is the sort of strawman nonsense you’d expect from bad faith actors trying to fracture leftists.
I’m no mod, certainly no admin. I just like having interesting conversations with people on the Internet. I can’t speak directly to censorship or specific logistical problems with Lemmy as a whole, or sh.itjust.works specifically.
All I can say is that I find conversations with lemmy.ml users to be petty and exhausting more often than not, and the writing is on the wall in multiple other instances. This seems like a band-aid rip moment on lemmy at large.
This was my only meaningful personal interaction with lemmy.ml that stands out. It was not a good experience. It became very clear, very fast that I would simply have no meaningful discussion with these people. So I left some downvotes on the awful comments promoting violence and stopped engaging.
I haven’t blocked the instance or any users. But i am considering it.
To be fair to lemmy.ml, that post came from a lemmygrad.ml user. Lemmygrad is worth amputating and blocking wholesale on your account, but lemmy.ml tankies tend to keep their ideology inside their bubble for the most part.
It’s a tankie shitshow that I’ve personally blocked because you can’t have unbiased discussions.
Their users are overwhelmingly shitposters or actually believe what they say, which is downright scary. Of all the users I’ve blocked, half of them are from there (the rest about 50:50 between lemmygrad and hexbear).
Just chiming in to say a lot of communities I participate in are hosted on ml, I’d be pretty bummed losing access to those. For that reason I’m against wholesale defederarion. I do think the communities need to explicitly diversify away from the instance though, ml admins seem demonstrably untrustworthy.
Late edit: after continuing to interact with their communities over the months, I now believe most everyone on Lemmy.ml instance is either braindead, or acting in bad faith. Their administration is biased, they’ll remove any discussion they don’t agree with as “misinformation”, while their admins actively spread real misinformation and inflame division. Whatever community they’ve fostered is a negative for lemmy, at large.
Defederate and leave them in an echo chamber to rot.
At minimum the .ml admins have shown a desire and willingness to keep their finger on the scale of the broader fediverse, which makes them a clear existential threat and possibly even a cyber security risk. In addition, they protect hexbear and lemmygrad, which openly state that their intention is to wage information warfare on the fediverse. We also see some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them some special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content. This alone is extremely concerning. The idea that we can individually block their instance does nothing to mitigate the ideological or security concerns I have.
My personal experience is that they protect propagandists and do not enforce their own rules evenly at all. My bans have been for me extremely petty things, and even for thing I have said on other instances. Meanwhile I have been called names, told that my family deserves to be tortured and that my country deserves to be nuked by .ml users (or hexbear proxies). I also find their defense of Russian and Chinese autocracy personally offensive, as I have family who have been directly impacted by both. It would be one thing if this was happening in a forum where these issues could be debated, or defenses mounted against misinformation and historical revisionism, but that is simply not the case. Even the most modest pushback against these ideas results in quick bans. This is not something we should associate with.
I was working on a Lemmy instance here at Eskimo.com, but ran into some technical issues because rather than having Lemmy installed on the same server as the web server and rather than on the same server as the database, I have them all different machines and had to find where it looked for localhost and change to the appropriate hosts, but after seeing the general behavior of the Lemmy userbase, I’ve decided to shelve this project for now. When I initially approached Mastodon a year ago I was met with a similar situation but it turned out to be transient, hopefully this will be the case with lemmy as well, only time will tell.
Hello! I’m a guy who decided to join lemmy a few months ago, specifically because I was absolutely enraged by how moderation on Reddit worked. I am also taking part rather vigorously in the conversation about how much I dislike .ml moderation practices! I think I might be a little bit of an agitator in all this, because In joined lemmy after about a medium bit of research, and then jumped into it full tilt with the idea of “why not, I spent so much time as a revolutionary, myself!” And then I hit whatever the internet/globalization has done to what I recognize as leftist political spaces.
AMA, I guess!
For some background about myself, I’m an older millennial, who grew up with disparate web forums which were generally hidden behind a random website. My favorite haunt was punkbands.com, and loved LAN parties and early MMORPGs. Anyways, I had to get off the internet for a while to make a living, but eventually got to a spot where I could again visit the world wide web during working hours. One of my coworkers introduced me, through my first “smart phone” (an android, like, whatever was around in 2011 and cheap as fuck but still let me get online) to reddit. I really loved that old(ish) school internet, where people could spam and insult eachother within limits, and the community policed itself through a somewhat democratic process. I was legit excited to join lemmy, given how far I think reddit had fallen and how much disinformation had infected it, and how similar it appeared to the older, more democratic internet of my youth.
However, I found that a large part of lemmy is dominated by people who profess to be leftists, but ambush you with ideological purity tests and subsequent abuse if you don’t pass. I questioned a post on the .ml world news sub that came from a source that is literally a Syrian and Bolivian governmental news outlet, which alleged that the US military was stealing crude oil and raw wheat from Syrian oil derricks/Syrian farmers. I used mediabiasfactcheck.com to support my questioning of this source. I also appealed to logic, questioning why the US would steal things that it exports. A mod there (I believe the username is davos) engaged me in a conversation spanning hours, where we exchanged information about whether mediabiasfactcheck.com was a reasonable source to help assess the validity of media. While the conversation was uncomfortable, we each exchanged information and links supporting our arguments. Because I did not accept his outright rejection of medibiasfactcheck.com as a way to assist with the judement of media, I was banned and all of my comments were deleted.
Since then, I have met another .ml mod (username yogthos), and engaged in a long conversation about this same topic (.ml censorship). It was in a meta sub, hosted on the .ml instance. The conversation I am referring to has since been deleted, and I am not sure if it is possible to find it again, since my own history has disappeared; I will be happy to answer questions of anybody with the tech savvy to retrieve these exchanges. Anyway. In this meta thread, I engaged several users about the issue of unfair .ml moderation, alongside several other lemmy users. During the course of this exchange, a .ml user made an assertion that the OP (who was complaining about the “tankie problem”) was banned from the .ml instance because they had, somewhere undefined, insisted that the Tienanmen Massacre had actually happened. As a note, please understand that this was about a week before the start of June, and nobody so far in this thread had mentioned Tienanmen Square. Anywhere. Anyways, I questioned this particular statement, and yogthos suddenly butted in with a ton of weird sources that supported his claim that Tiennenma Square never happened. They insisted that the whole thing was a Color Revolution that was sponsored by the CIA, and that actually the students of the Tienanmen Square had attacked the Chinese Soldiers. I insisted that this was inconsistent with prevailing evidence, but was told that I simply needed to watch the various videos and read the blogs to understand that it was all untrue. I also engaged with some uders about my own ideology, where I was insulted as a “lib” for stating my intense distaste for authoritarianism. yogthos, the .ml moderator who I spoke with, told me that “libs don’t understand” that authoritarianism is ok if it is in defense of fascism… but did not expound as to how fascism was defined.
As for my evidence, I have shared it in some of the other posts. However, if you’ll look at the moderation history of .ml, under my user name, you will see that I am banned from several subs, and I think from the whole .ml instance. It will be for “Rule 4,” which from what I can tell is spam, or advertising. I have never taken part in anything that resembles spam or advertising. I have, though, had comments that insist that there was some kind of violence surrounding Tienanmen Square, or debate the validity of news from Syrian government media sources, removed from .ml instances. You may also notice that I was banned from subs like palestine and usa, which I have never actually participated in, aside from upvoting or downvoting.
You will also, looking back, hopefully find the initial conversations I reference in this post. If you have specific questions, I will try to figure out how to find them, using the mod log.
This is a long post… and I’m sorry. I guess I just really don’t want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.
I’m sure I have missed a ton here, and paradoxically written far too much. I am happy to answer any questions or critique, as long as it is relatively polite and relevant.
Edit: I’m also just kind of a nerd about propaganda and discourse in international relations, especially in online spaces. I’ve studied it. Ive written papers on it. I find these things incredibly meaningful and important, so I’ve gotten involved here.
I guess I just really don’t want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.
I don’t mean to instigate an argument, but I think this comment illustrates pretty well why .ml might actually be justified in judicious use of the ban hammer. If people are coming in specifically motivated by an ideological disagreement, then maybe they’re well within their right (ethically I mean, they’re within their right just on the basis of owning the instance as it is)
But the person you replied to wasn’t talking about ideological disagreements - they were talking about factual disagreements.
As in, the .ml mods seem to deny facts.
Yes I’m sure OP was having a very rational conversation about widely accepted and not at all contested facts that are not at all important to any ideological perspective.
The Tiananmen square massacre is not a contested fact. It’s just a fact.
Yes, a famously uncontested fact
And I am sure that fact was brought up completely organically and not specifically because op knew it was a source of ideological tension
Truth isn’t an ideology though. You keep trying to draw a false equivalence between the two. Truth is just truth. Ignoring the truth is simply acting in bad faith, and that’s something any ideology can do for any truths. If a group is denying that truth then they are trying to spread misinformation.
I’m not making a statement about the truthfulness of the specific claims being raised, i’m just pointing out that the topic is very famously contentious, and going to that space specifically to raise it knowing full well it is not a welcome one is itself bad-faith trolling and deserving of removal and possibly a ban, depending on how hostile you’re being.
It isn’t your space where you can decide what topics are fair game, and frankly whining about it here isn’t going to change anything about their moderation policies.
Fairly early on, when discussing defederating with an instance called “exploding heads”, I laid out criteria I would consider worthy of defederation, which you can find here
I was primarily concerned with unwanted traffic going out over the rest of the Fediverse, hosting illegal content like child porn, or being a rampant hive of racism and calls to violence.
So far I’ve basically heard people accuse Lemmy.ml of being rather Chinese in their moderation in-house. Is that all we’ve got?
So far, that’s it in a nutshell - barring one account of potential cybersecurity risks coming out of that, which still makes some assumptions re: motivations I’m not 100% convinced on.
I think there’s people on the ‘perhaps defed’ side who would want to argue it on points 4 from your immediate defed list, or 1 on the call to vote list - but personally, I’m not convinced the evidence is strong enough to do so compellingly.
Regardless of the current discussion, it’d be wise for us to revisit your proposed policy as a group and see if we can make that official (with any relevant revisions from pre-vote scrutiny). I stand by what I said back then - it’s a solid list, and IMO worth being made official and saved somewhere broadly visible for later reference.
Because if the complaint is “They ban you over there for failing an ideological purity test” the solution is we have our own Lemmy instance, start or participate in an equivalent community here.
start or participate in an equivalent community here
Yeah, I think establishing non-ml alternatives for communities which happen to be hosted on ml should be the priority here.
something something blackjack and hookers.
I don’t believe that defederation is necessary nor wise. The complaints about Lemmy.ml that I’ve seen have generally revolved around how they moderate their instance and how communities they host are moderated. If one doesn’t like how they moderate their communities, then one should be the change that they wish to see — start a replacement community, nurture it, and try to make it better than what was seen on lemmy.ml. This is the beauty of the fediverse — you aren’t forced to utilize anything on any other instance. And if one really dislikes seeing lemmy.ml users, then they can even block the instance themself. Lemmy.ml provides a steady, and considerable amount of traffic and content to the Lemmyverse. While that isn’t an argument for continuing to use their communities, it is an argument for why it would be unwise to fragment the network by defederating from them.
The only time that an instance should consider defederating from another, imo, is if it finds that users from other instances are violating the local rules at a rate higher than what is possible, or economically viable to handle via administrative action. It shouldn’t be a simple matter of passive difference in opinion.
In general, I’ve found myself happier and discussions more interesting when I replace a lemmy.ml community wo with one from another instance. When there are two competing communities with similar active users, i’ve found the non-lemmy.ml one to be better by pretty much any metric.
So it does work. Make a better community and users will come.
