Discussion about lemmy.ml admins abusing Fediverse moderation tools (with proof)

lemmy.world Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem - Lemmy.World

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 [http://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, t...

https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

Lemmy.ml, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, has consistently been accused of improper Federation practices and many instances have decided to ban one or both of the latter by default, with many individual users having already gone further to block the former as well. However, many individual users on lemmy.ml seem unaware of the accusations of the practices of their admins, and some people go so far as to see lemmy.ml as a sort of default instance on the Fediverse.

This discussion promotes wider knowledge of the situation and what might be done about it in the future, in order to e.g. not turn away new potential Federation members (Fedizens?:-) that could otherwise associate what happens on that instance as something relating to the Fediverse as a whole.

39 comments

Checking up on the Mod Log regularly reveals exactly how petty and unhinged many mods on Fedi are. Suppression of political ideas is the main one.
- One of the best features of lemmy. A bit of transparency is great.
  
  Except when that process gets subverted by someone with admin access to the database, as the OP discussion mentions:-(. But when it works properly, absolutely yes:-).
- Well worth doing once in a while. Though only when you are feeling extra "tough". I just did and saw a lot of hateful comments I'm glad are gone, but also 2 (both from lemmy.ml) that look perfectly on topic. At least we can find out what our moderators are doing.
- I for one go there extremely rarely, and only to look up specific matters. It does not help that something (post or comment) could be removed by either a community moderator, on one instance, or an admin, on an entirely different instance. But I am glad that there are people that analyze it:-).
  I used to be a mod of a small and then another medium-sized (for a niche) community on Reddit. Since coming to Kbin and then Lemmy, I have not volunteered to moderate anything. We need people to, but it's an extremely depressing job.
  It's like politicians: we need them, but the role tends to attract the attentions of those least suited to get it done:-(. And the actual GOOD ones tend to not stay for long - perhaps a year or two, if they actually care about the community that they moderate:-|.
  
  I'm banned-for-life from there.
  Russia invaded/desecrated/butchered Ukraina, & I remember what the vids showed of Mariupol ( sorry spelling ).
  I made a comment on there to the effect that if Putin was the pusher of the war, then making things as politically-difficult for Putin in the election would be a Good Thing(tm).
  ( to me, the obvious implied-point is that it might have ended an immensely-wasting-of-life war that people other than Putin weren't so interested in, and that, by definition, must therefore be a Good Thing(tm) )
  Anybody who pushes Russia's butchering of Ukraina as something which cannot be spoken-against, is fucking terrorist-at-heart.
  Just my opinion, but there I've no right to such opinion.
  The beauty of this?
  It perfectly demonstrates how segregation-of-ideologies allows positive-feedback-loops, which produces extremism.
  Left, right, political, religious, moneyarchist, legalist, nationalist, sexist/genderist, ALL ideologies are self-amplifying.
  There's a book on the US's political-segregation ( "The Big Sort" ) & it looks like that mechanism, ideological-segregation, has only 1 outcome: butchery/war.
  So, given the evidence, it looks like the whole world is going to be butchering everybody within a .. decade or so.
  Amplification, feedback-loop, polarization, and nothing is countering its controlling of the process of this world..
  it's got an outcome.
  And if our world's population won't stop/prevent the "drunk driver" from force-crashing our "bus" with all our world's peoples in it .. well, then we get crashed/killed.
  The Great Filter.
  WHEN one has cancer, THEN is it right to KILL that cancer??
  WHEN one is newly-infected with rabies, THEN is it valid to prime one's immune-system to as violently as possible defend one's life against rabies?
  Or should we just make-nice, live in making-believing, & hope that our hopium works??
  What Russia's been doing to Ukraina, what Hamas got Israel to be doing against the Palestinians & all the journalists..
  do we let rabies overrun our world's life?
  Will the US allow rabies to overrun its life?
  ( yes, obviously.
  The others .. likewise.
  Therefore, Universe's Natural Selection is looking to be .. "pruning" our world from the worlds-in-Universe-with-civilized-life-on-them, this century .. isn't it? )
  _ /\ _

You're not kidding. All social media right now is plagued by extremists who only seem to know how to fight. Even when they lack any real purpose for it they go looking for one.
- And not by random accident either - companies put in HUGE investments into designing blinking, flashing, candied-looking... everything, in order to foster "engagement". Dark Mirror has several episodes illustrating various aspects, trying to warn people.
  In the olden days there was a phrase that "sex sells". Well it turns out, only up to a point - whereas kittens & puppies sell even moar, and getting people angry is an appetite that seems inexhaustible.
  And that does not even begin to touch on how certain actors would very much like to exaggerate certain of those effects, to their own potential benefits. e.g., the likes of anti-vaxxers + never-Hillary-ers got Trump elected, and while both of those movements maybe (probably even) started organically, they definitely have also had their fans flamed both by outside groups and the poorly constructed echo chambers of social media.
  This is just the way of the world, and fighting against it, like death & entropy, is an absolute necessity yet difficult.
  So if that is how they want to be, then fine. But we still need to do our part to call it out like it is, and to warn others away, or else the Fediverse as a whole suffers. I almost quit the Fediverse myself a few months ago, though fortunately v.0.19.3 came out and I simply blocked lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net instead, and now I am as happy as a clam:-).

Thanks for posting it here
- You are very welcome!:-)
  I am never sure about how to do the links - here I went with the instance of the community that it was posted to rather than the poster's original instance where it originated. Lemmy.world is also more populated so fewer people will have to search for it on their home instance that way. One day I hope the tools catch up to allow federated linking to posts and comments:-).
  
  I would maybe add the link to the post (the LW one) at the beginning of the text, so that people can paste in the search bar of their instance and get the post on their instance