The administration of lemmy.ml routinely abuses its rule 1 anti-bigotry policy to conduct political censorship, deleting documented facts regarding the ukraine invasion, holodomor, and xinjiang abuses under false pretexts of imperialist propaganda, misinformation, and nazism while leaving pro-Kremlin talking points untouched.

Verifiable public moderation logs prove this systemic shielding of state propaganda, down to moderators inverting standard geopolitical context, such as noting that fringe extremist units do not make an entire democratic nation fascist, to ban dissenters under the explicit excuse of being a Nazi.

https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=25800386 and https://lemmy.world/modlog/446?page=1&actionType=All&userId=20355358.

The Europe community moderator (https://lemmy.world/u/geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml), who focuses exclusively on criticizing the West and never Russia or China, banned me as a Nazi.

I decided to block the lemmy.ml instance entirely to avoid any further interaction.

I see that there are dozens of relevant posts; you can find the relevant report posts here

• https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
• https://lemmy.world/post/5697017
• https://lemmy.world/post/50302822
• https://lemmy.world/post/13238608
• https://lemmy.world/post/43978041

Log screenshots

You must be new around here. This is old news and a reason a lot of places block ml

I think it's common knowledge at this point that it's a deranged *tankie instance

I knew that lemmy.ml is tankies, but removing comments/posts that don't serve their agenda is new to me.

Yeah. If you're not familiar with !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works, they have people submitting posts pretty similar to yours for lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml there.

Thanks, I will check

Sure. There's also !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com, but that's more-generalized to discussion over whether-or-not something is mod or admin abuse of power, and doesn't deal specifically with those instances.

Every Marxist state (USSR, China, Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam) produced authoritarian regimes with mass deaths, poverty, or corruption. None achieved Marx's stated goal of classless, stateless society. China and Vietnam abandoned core Marx principles for market mechanisms to survive economically. I do not support capitalism or imperialism of USA, Israel and Europe, neither approach is good for humanity! No one them think of labor class

by 🐭 Labor Class@lemmy.world
reason: Imperialist propaganda

Well this is pretty standard right wing, often US, propaganda so the reason isn't far off. 😄 Sure they are pretty trigger happy but parroting right wing propaganda (whether or not you consider it such, and whether or not you consider yourself a capitalist) in an self-avowed leftist space won't get you hugs and kisses. Especially in this day and age when everyone is looking at whay the US is doing and catching up on world history as a result. If it were me I wouldn't delete and ban, instead I'd post references to read. But it is what it is. 🤷

I am seeing your comment from the future??

A lot of instances are curated, they're the supreme mods after all. Some delay your posts until they can curate them, and some just remove them. It's the way it be.

Who cares? Join a different server and move on, that's the beauty of the fediverse.

Why do we care? If you don't like it, don't use it. That's the beauty of the fediverse. You can hop instances and lose basically nothing.

It’s good to have this documented, thanks. It’s one thing for everyone to “know” they’re Tankies, it’s another to have compiled evidence and A/B examples like this to point to.

What part of "tankies" do you not understand?

This isn't said and understood enough. Instances on the Fediverse aren't free-for-all, apolitical places without ideology. Some try to be (with varying success) but being active in the Fediverse and especially running an instance is in itself a fairly ideological and political act. So chances are instances reflect their owners' ideology. And that is great because one has places to be if an instance doesn't suit them, unlike corpo platdorms where one ideology drives most of them.

It's important to document their behavior anyway, because not al places block ml.

There used to be several of such posts, in this very community iirc, though most ended up being removed for whatever reason, sometimes after being locked for toxicity in the comment section.

Particularly when those "try a Threadiverse instance at 'random'" websites send people to Lemmy.ml (the main one sends people to either Lemmy.ml or hexbear.net ~90% of the time - btw that is not hyperbole, try it and see), people who joined here truly will not be made aware until after they arrive and almost inevitably find out the hard way.

I believe this is the secondary reason (after overall lack of content) that Lemmy's active user community is not growing even as Reddit continues to degrade.

Applying this same logic, why did you bother to write your comment?

If you did not like the post, you could have continued to scroll onwards without further interaction... as you propose that OP do.

In large part that is what the word "tankie" means - denial of reality, instead substituting their own, which can only be done inside of a controlled echo chamber. Tankie is no way is synonymous with Communist.

Think MAGA but on the left - it's otherwise identical in terms of behaviors, merely different talking points.

You may find this illustrative:

Theory doesn't work in real life.

Some of what they deleted is just taking out the trash.

If you want to challenge them without getting deleted, ask them why Russia doesn't conduct themselves more like China when it comes to foreign aggressions.

The only thing that bugs me about it is that the largest instances can control what most people see.

True. It's definitely not a perfect, problem-solved thing. Merely an (significant?) improvement from the corporate status quo.

This. Just imagine if all of Lemmy was like one instance or another. The whole point of the fediverse is that there can be multiple instances, and you can just gravitate towards the ones that align with your own views.

Does anyone need evidence? Their leadership sucks, and we all know, or should know it.

The communist regimes were all set upon to the point where authoritarians took over, and never gave it up. It's not a rebuke of communism that cuba wasn't a utopia, with the US on it's ass.

That said, I think a mixed socialism capitalism society could work best, but with strict 1950 style controls, taxing the rich 90% on obscene profits and all that. Enforcing anti trust laws, and so forth. Not doing those is not capitalism, it's crony capitalism/oligarchy.

What the person said above is true though. None ever got to statelessness like Marx intended. If you ban the truth because that same truth is used by people that also say things that are not true, you're really no better than they are. That being said, I feel most US propaganda is just "socialism is communism and that is bad." Most of the time they can't even define socialism or communism. But if you just ban everyone that has a different opinion or wants to just have a discussion about what the best approach is, you've created an authoritarian instance anyway and pretty much exemplify the biggest issue everyone has with states that have tried communism. Sets a really bad precedent.

ha, duh?

Hah, yup. They replied an hour ago to a comment you only posted 3 minutes ago. And now your response was posted… -13 minutes ago?

This is the main reason we have to get a fork up to feature parity with all the major clients. I don't want to recommend Lemmy any more, I want to recommend some other threadiverse alternative that does the same thing.

i dont have that kind of energy at my disposal.

i suspect some kind of localized timezone conversion failure.

The great thing about lemmy's design is that that's not really true. I'm seeing this criticism of .ml despite being on .ml, because most of the posts that I see on lemmy are not on my home instance. At least half the time, I'm having discussions outside of my "home turf."

When you have a space that agrees on certain base assumptions, it becomes easier to have more in depth and thoughtful discussions, because you don't have to focus on just proving or advocating for those basic assumptions over and over again, and watching every word you say to make sure it can't be twisted or misinterpreted to paint you in a negative light. By contrast, sharing a space with ideological opponents often means people tend to dig in and just make snipes at each other, everybody's just grandstanding and trying to get owns in, and the level of discussion is brought down to name-calling and accusations.

At the same time, yes, echo chambers are a concern. If you're never exposed to opposing viewpoints, obviously that's not great either. We can see that happen on any number of subreddits. And if we were on different subreddits instead of on different instances, I wouldn't be seeing this criticism, and you wouldn't be seeing my response to it.

The way the fediverse is designed inherently addresses both of those concerns. You can have a space where the discussions assume a shared ideology allowing for in depth discussions, but then you're also federated with other spaces with different shared assumptions. The "tankie" creators of lemmy designed it this way on purpose, for that reason. To allow minority views (including but not limited to their own) to have spaces for discussion, without becoming isolated. To allow for higher level discussions with shared assumptions while also allowing for interactions between groups with different assumptions.

This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml's censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies, and that is not in spite of what the .ml's admins want, they literally designed it that way on purpose.

The only censorship that really matters on the fediverse is defederation.

Piefed?

Although i write from lemmy.lm, i have no clue what Marxism/leninism is all about. What i CAN say is that you are most definitely just regurgitating the most ridiculous and infantile US propaganda from the big western echo-chamber, and i for one - not being a 'baad baad Tankie' - are happy to have you and similar gullible (no offence intended) western moral aggressors blocked.

There's too much infantile propaganda and hence too many angry mob people in the Western media-sphere/echo-chamber, and I'm thrilled to have found a place where i don't have to see or hear that evil warmongering stupidity and childish unsupported claims again and again and again.

It is very easy to debunk all the infantile claims about all the enemies of the US fascist Oligarchy (any country in the entire World where US elites power is restricted, is their enemy), but you didn't bother - at all ! In short, you are regurgitating what the Epstein+ class want you to regurgitate, and thus you are just supporting the Western fascist Oligarchy - no matter if the puppet admin is Trump, Biden, Bush, Obama or any of the other psycho people put in place (..you HAVE realised that we don't have 'Democracy' in the west right? ..right?!). Please educate your self on how the US elite have been behaving globally throughout history, how they colonize and oppress western societies/people, how the US propaganda machine actually works and THEN come back and we'll openly discuss the world situation again from there. Until then, your regurgitations are nothing but uneducated noise coming directly from the psychos benefitting from it. Again, no offense intended.

So, enough about you and your storytelling.

Thank you to all geo-politically educated mods on all instances, for keeping my feeds relatively free of US/western propagandist echo-chamber warriors that don't/won't bother checking anything they are told by their Epstein class rulers and their for-profit lying media sphere. Sad but necessary work inside this imbecile western lynch-mob. Love you all !

Oh, and a special thanks goes to lemmy.lm and all the geo-politically educated people there for sheltering me while its raining stupid outside. You should be proud of being called a 'Tankie' - whatever that childish slur means - you are intellectually far beyond the normal western crowd. A real treat to hang out with you 🙏🏻

In the world i live in, this isnt right wing propaganda. Here right wing propaganda is that the defaults of those states are defaults of communism, and what i understand from this comments corresponds to what i hear anarchist and libertaires saying : that the default of those states were due to authoritarianism rather than communism, because they were implementing only socialism at their very best.

Maybe it's a cultural difference then, but there are some place on earth where criticizing authoritarian states isnt necessarily right or left wing.

Daily reminder to block every instance ending in @lemmy.ml

All the content you see there has been censored out of any criticism to china/Russia/north Korea. If you don't look at the content that passed their censorship filter, their censorship loses all its power. Look at and support communities of other instances instead.

Touché

"Right Wing Propaganda" for a Stalinist ML sure, but pretty much every other left wing strain of thought has some grievances with these countries. At best you can call this leftist infighting

and those other instances can also moderate and delete comments and posts for all other instances unless archived or crossposted. If a lemmy.world mod deletes a comment in a lemmy.world post, I won't be able to see it from over here in db0

A version of this does exist in left-wing infighting but this narrative specifically has been and is constantly repeated by the American right, probably some of the centre too:

Every Marxist state (USSR, China, Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam) produced authoritarian regimes with mass deaths, poverty, or corruption.

It's currently being deployed to attack the insurgent left that's contesting some elections this year, along with the resurgent interest and popularity in socialism over the last couple of years.

Everyone on the left has grievances with these past and present projects. Including MLs.

what do you think of ukraine and poland

One of my first experiences in the Fediverse was mentioning the Uyghur genocide and having my comment promptly removed by the .ml admins. They've been doing this all the time.

Why are you writing tankie in quotes?

Recommend some instance that defederates the Tankie Triad. Problem solved?

And beside that, maybe choose an instance that is running PieFed, PyLova or mBin?

Thank you to all geo-politically educated mods on all instances, for keeping my feeds relatively free of US/western propagandist echo-chamber warriors.

You'd think inside your own echo chamber you'd be able to hear yourself.

Because I disagree with the term. The admins are not "tankies," they are Marxist-Leninists.

What makes someone a "tankie" is that they "defend" certain states. In practice, "defending" often includes just refuting misinformation, for example, if I refute that "everyone in North Korea gets the same haircut" then I'm "defending" it and therefore a "tankie." It can also mean acknowledging accomplishments, saying any good thing about any socialist state, like, "Cuba had a very successful literacy program," which is just an objective historical fact. "Tankie" is supposed to mean someone who blindly supports everything a socialist state has ever done, in practice, it means someone who supports anything a socialist state has ever done.

Before it was "tankie" it was "pinko," and before that "red." That kind of red scare bullshit has allowed blatant misinformation to run rampant, because even rational people avoid pushing back on it for fear of being labelled a "tankie." As stories about how all communists eat babies or whatnot run rampant, it has in turn hurt the reputation of both leftists and liberals, because it literally doesn't matter how hard you try to distance yourself from the far-left, you'll still get associated with it. Joe Biden got called a communist for Christ's sake. To put it another way:

Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice,
having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in
1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had
Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by
some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and
political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being "smeared" as Reds,
Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive
group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.

The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still
attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on
the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that
those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether
they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by "communist
subversives" or "loyal American liberals." All are lumped together as
more or less equally abhorrent.

• Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds

That is why I put "tankie" in quotes.

Piefed is not without it's issues (mainly that rimu has the social skills of a grapefruit) but it's wild how violently .ml users hate it. I know they're from the dev instance so some bias is understandable, but holy cow some of the shit that gets made up to scare people away from it is absurd.

I feel the mbin devs must be watching the shitshow from within a popcorn filled bunker, just praying nobody remembers they exist long enough to drag them into it.

That's the funny thing about echoes: they tend to distort whatever is being said. Perfect for not letting pesky little things like reality get between you and what you want to hear.

That's an awful long-winded way to say that you have no idea wtf you're talking about.

I don't want Lemmy to be in the conversation at all. I want to just be able to recommend Pylova or Piefed

I think there is only one lemmy.ml instance, any community@lemmy.ml is a community on that one instance. But pretty much yeah.

I mean. You can also just go to their front page and read the "about this instance" paragraph where they clarify that they support a specific political ideology and will not tolerate dissent.

They explicitly built a walled garden. Don't be surprised they maintain the walls. There are other instances.