A thread "Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression" on Mastodon
Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression
Please don't put any hate comments against the developers of lemmy or against the person who posted this.
I am also unhappy about what the main lemmy instance is doing.
What are your thoughts?
I'm sorry to see people somewhere on the Internet coming out against Lemmy. First of all, let me say that I sympathize with the China issue. I'm a Muslim and I have been concerned about the Uyghurs for a very long time. This is not some bandwagon that I am jumping on, and I have ties to the region as well. I moderate the Uyghur sub on Reddit, created #uyghur on matrix.org, and on lemmy.ml I have registered communities like c/uyghur and c/xinjiang. I did that mainly to promote the welfare of Uyghurs and guard against whitewashing of the situation in Xinjiang. Obviously I am pro-Uyghur, and I feel that the admins of lemmy.ml have been gracious enough to respect me as a user and a mod. I have also not seen them engage in censorship of opposing viewpoints on this issue, and we have at least once that I can remember disagreed on China's Uyghur policy here on the site. This did not result in any problem.
Please don't cancel Lemmy, because the software is amazing and the creators really are nice. I don't have to agree with them on politics in China. As long as they're not crazy about it, the situation is manageable. So far they've always been fair.
Even suppose that one day they implement a policy on lemmy.ml that says they won't allow anyone to post pro-Uyghur things. So what? It's their Lemmy instance, they can decide what's on it. I can go start my own instance. I really don't think lemmy.ml has any obligation to do what the community wants. They've already done enough by creating the software and making it FOSS.
Besides, you know how many people posted pro-Uyghur content on c/uyghur since I created it? None. So if you're concerned about how the issue is being represented on this site, maybe you could come post something sometime, or argue in the comments.
Anyway, at present I'm not recommending any other Reddit alternative and probably won't.
This kind of drama happens on Mastodon all the time, and within a few days everyone forgets about it. Apparently thats just how the platform works, so no need to get worried.
I believe it is a mistake selecting that particular instance for those communities.
The risk isn't just that they shut it down, there's a much worse thing that could happen: pinpoint elision (or even editing) of reporting on the genocide.
I would post in that comm but my main contribution would be to add a conspiracy theory about how China did engineer the virus but targeting the uighurs (and their own elderly) not Americans based on an entire crackpot web a la iasip including everything from blood types to reports of people who have survived the camps saying they were injected with unknown substances but I can read the room well enough to know where my tinfoil hat belongs.
There is a difference between people advocating for human rights abuses and people saying that some actor does in fact not engage in human rights abuses. The difference is stark and even there, if the actor would in fact in engage in human right abuses.
An open society must tolerate the later. I.e. we must tolerate that people dispute that human right abuses occur or occurred. This is because you cannot judge someone purely due to getting the facts wrong or not knowing them.
If we wouldn't allow this, we would de-facto argue for a totalitarian state, since we wouldn't allow people disputing facts (which can be proven or disproven). We would have to nominate some entity that judges what is fact and what isn't, which is the opposite to gathering evidence and engaging in an open, society wide discussion.
To be clear: Allowing discussions around whether abuses occur is notably different to letting people get away with advocating for abuses. The latter is what needs strong responses. The former is what requires engagement.
I don't see anything on lemmy or in the mastodon thread that shows that human rights abuses are advocated for. What I do see is that there are some fractions that show sympathies to China which you would otherwise only see for the USA. I think its useful to compare these sympathies because they seem to express themselves in similar ways.
With all that said, I think the opinion expressed in the mastodon thread is not particularly useful. It, in many ways, minimises real human rights abuses that occur world wide, day to day, in China, USA, and many other countries in East and West.
Let's call out the abuses, let's discuss and present the evidence for them, let's not alienate people and create polarity that looks like us-vs-them.
Very well said. Also, if these people disagree with the rules on lemmy.ml, they could create their own instance, with their own rules. Thats the whole point of federation.
There is a difference between people advocating for human rights abuses and people saying that some actor does in fact not engage in human rights abuses.
The main difference is, that one practice gaslighting as a means to justify such acts.
They will claim "it was just joking", or explain how in fact the abuse is something good, hence they aren't for human right violation because they are for something that they just defined as something good.
I haven't seen this. What I've seen is that people say that the abuses do not occur.
show instances of lemmy.ml users saying "I was joking" or "saying that abuse is a good thing" during a discussion about any alleged genocide, abuse or disater.
I don't agree with presenting the Chinese or Korean goverment in a good light and manipulating facts to reach that, but I do firmly believe that everyone deserves a space to say it.
Lemmy is a good thing, albeit I may not agree with developers/admins on many point. That thread on Mastodon come off pretty obtuse in most of those comments.
Keep up the good work!
haters.. Everywhere
If someone doesn't want to use this software because they disagree with the developers' politics, it's their loss. I wish them luck in finding ideologically pure projects in the future.
They have problems with the word filter? The word filter keeps the bigoted reactionaries away, did they not notice that? If they would rather talk to bigots than to us, then they shouldn't join us.
if we were talking about lemmygrad, I would agree, but personally lemmy.ml is a place for me that I enjoy browsing and posting to. anyway I think it's the best opportunity for anyone interested in making a centrist or apolitical instance and get the label of "flagship instance" on joinlemmy to help it grow and become as big as lemmy.ml, it will also make it easier for people who don't like the politics of lemmy.ml to choose an instance knowing that it has no strong political affiliation.
but I agree the folks on lemmygrad can be a little bit ... let's say annoying.
also interesting that their only problem seems to be about the "genocide".
Hmm, I didn't noticed any of this behaviour. But Lemmy is still a "great" software. We need to be mature enough to separate the "pice/product" from the author. So if the instance gets toxic or what ever, we could easily move to another and just that
I've been struggling the whole day about how to respond to this.
My first reaction was disgust, as the thing going on with Uyghurs in China pretty much looks like a genocide, regardless of semantics. "If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is a duck".
When it comes to discussion about the subject, I however have to agree with @jazzfes@lemmy.ml.
To be clear: Allowing discussions around whether abuses occur is notably different to letting people get away with advocating for abuses. The latter is what needs strong responses. The former is what requires engagement.
No promotion of oppression or bigotry has in this case happened. I'd rather allow people have these discussions as long as they can behave like in a furnished space.
I'm fine with the developers' political views, as the Lemmy software is more important.
Of course Lemmy has now a certain kind of PR problem as this FediTips fella is making big accusations and wanting people to stop using Lemmy altogether.
But it's not that easy. Having a "discussion around whether abuses occur" implies allowing being apologetic towards those acts which might be abusive.
I'm sure fascists don't think of fascism as abusive, even if it is. Would you allow discussing that?
At some point you need to set a clear dogmatic/axiomatic definition of what's not allowed (with examples from different geopolitical positions) and don't allow anyone to put that in doubt, abiding by that definition should be part of the rules.
Of course this makes it much harder to discuss things openly, but that's the price to pay if you want to have a rule that claims zero tolerance.
Good points!
Highly recommend reading this recent report from Italy regarding Xinjiang.
Let's not fool ourselves, denying Uyghur abuse puts you in the same territory as holocaust deniers.
Would you deny white genocide? You should. The reasoned denial of a supposed genocide is not equivalent to the ideological denial (or fabrication) of the same. Holocaust denial is not the same as scepticism of the genocide which is supposed to be taking place in Xinjiang. To equate any genocide with the Holocaust is an ideological tool used to avoid analysis of the subject.
Yeah, okay, I'll just say it: the admins can't care less if a bunch of reactionaries don't use this platform. None of us are getting ad revenue or any sort of money from more users, and we have no incentive to, nor want to, cater to a bunch of US propaganda spewing haters.
As for the devs being communists, yes. Dessalines and Nutomic are ML. I'm at least Marxist myself. We have not, and are not going to hide this fact to placate the haters and we honestly don't care if that makes people leave or boycott this project.
Me personally, I've realized how much my perception of socialist countries has been warped by capitalist propaganda and I'm reluctant about believing anything that western media says about these countries.
I was in the same boat before I joined Lemmy and talked to actual socialists and communists. I was staunchly anticommunist and anti-China without even knowing all the facts.
There are lot of lies about communism but not every thing that comes anti-communist along is actually anti-communist.
It is most often directed at the authoritarian and totalitarian communists and gives a really bad image to any other communist, because unfortunate it often lumps it all together.
FediTips and the commenters in that thread make some good points. The fact that this Lemmy instance federates with Lemmygrad (which, if you look at the front page, is full of denialism about the Uyghur genocide) is an atrocity.
And yes, https://lemmy.ml/modlog does indeed have some questionable entries, such as:
I created the Conservatism community, not knowing that Lemmy (lemmy.ml) became a leftist instance. (Lemmy was not explicitly leftist when I made my account in July 2020. Look at this archive of the front page from November 2020, which does not include the word leftist in the sidebar.) Fine, whatever. But, removing the Libertarian community with the rationale "No conservative communities allowed"? I don't understand that. That's not even politically accurate.
Wikipedia is not a source bruh. In the introductory paragraph on the uyghur genocide article they say that thousands of mosques have been destroyed... But don't mention they have been rebuilt to accommodate more people or because they weren't up to code. There are more mosques in Xinjiang alone in 2021 than there are in all of Europe lol.
Wikipedia has a clear agenda and this is clear from looking at their board of directors and demographics. They are not a source and neither are their sources - - they are carefully curated to offer a specific analysis.
Even US state department denies the Uyghur genocide. Give it a rest already.
You are aware that this is just about semantics? It's not about if those crimes against humanity that some call genocide are happening, it is if those crimes against humanity should be called genocide or differently. Stop gaslighing.
"The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor concluded earlier this year that China’s mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity—but there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide,..."
Some more quote from the article:
“Secretary Blinken and I have made clear that genocide has been committed against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang,”
“I have determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups,”
“For example, the torture, rape and sexual violence committed against Uyghurs likely constitute genocide ‘by causing serious bodily and mental harm’—the second type of genocide recognized by the Convention,
"More than 1 million Uighurs have been detained in reeducation camps, and many have reportedly been subjected to forced labor and sterilization. China has committed numerous crimes listed in the convention as acts of genocide, including the prevention of births and infliction of bodily or mental harm on members of a group and the compulsory separation of children from their communities, according to human rights groups."
No one forces you to use lemmy.ml
So, don’t use lemmy as a software because there are some disagreeable things on one of the instances? Who gives a shit? This is the whole point of the fediverse. Defederate. Go to another instance. Mod. Block. Do whatever because that’s what the fediverse alows.
The logical inconsistency of supporting the fediverse but not supporting a method of accessing the fediverse because of content on the fediverse is very severe.
Seems like a pretty standard free-speech/safe space issue. Move to a different instance and ban the communities that discuss things you don't like? That's kind of the main benefit of a platform like this. FWIW, I just blocked the other one on my instance since it was pointed out.
I made this Lemmy account a couple years ago, stuck around for a while then gradually forgot about it until recently with the reddit fiasco. I recall seeing these kinds of posts (and still occasionally do), but I wasn't aware of the role of these people till now.
probably going to switch lemmy instances or something (kbin looks interesting as well)
The developers of lemmy are self-admidded tankies, what else to expect?
Tankies and the Left-Unity Scam https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-tankies-and-the-left-unity-scam
Since you're clearly ideologically opposed to Marxist-Leninist views, why are you here?
lemmy.ml is also for anarchists, right?
I can be ideologically opposed to anything, and still take the courage to engage with such individuals. I don't want to live in cult, with anyone part of that just going to agree with me. I let my ideas be confronted by those who oppose me. They will either stand or be dismantled. Both will have a positive outcome for me, and that is learning. Either I stand corrected afterwards, or I will have learned more about your habit, thought patterns and communities. This is intel activity, done by an random anarcho[...]
That "essay" reads like a terminally online rant lol, sorry. I was made aware of it some time ago and we had a good laugh about it, because it feels like it was written by an angsty pre-teen, but this is a full-grown adult chasing strawmen in his head and the best examples he can find to illustrate his arguments is online drama and shitposting. I did have a good laugh when he said Raddle was an illegalist space, because I had to look into it afterwards and even other anarchists find this ideology questionable (I still don't really understand how clearly self-motivated gangsters were later found to be anarchists either, because I couldn't find these original illegalists calling themselves anarchists).
Edit: i was actually thinking of https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-eradicate-left-unity, I got confused by the names being similar. Keeping this comment up because ziq is too funny not to share lol
huh, why the downvotes? Because I used the term tankies, but you prefer to be called Marxist-Leninist? When contemporary anti-authoritarians use the term tankie, they usually refer to contemporary Marxist-Leninist. Hope that explanation helps. So when I say you are Marxist-Leninst, I mean you are tankie.