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 was among reddit refugees a year ago and it took me a moment to notice what was going on ml and their communities were more significant in comparison to what we have today.
One of the reasons I'm on sopuli.xyz now is that it was one of the first reasonably big instances to defederate hexbear outright. Hesitance and outright hostility to defederate it from some instance admins was also worrying.
I'm not new to Lemmy but only just recently started being really active. Can you explain to this OOTL user (and perhaps others like me) that don't know what went down with hexbear?
Welcome back!
Hexbear are known to be quite argumentative about politics, leading to most people blocking the instance overall at the user level.
That's basically it, if you want more details you can have a look at the instance itself, you should get what I mean quite fast.
I regret looking haha but it was enlightening. Almost literally every single comment was someone angry about someone they've never met. It was like they were manifesting their ideal enemy in their comments to be angry at them.
Whew. Definitely avoiding that.