Source: https://lemmy.world/comment/18403270
Modlog: https://photon.lemmy.world/modlog?user=13439339
Join the lemmy.ml boycott today and help foster a better Lemmy-verse! No more posts, comments (except to counter their propaganda ofc!) or upvotes on any comms on the Lemmy.ml instance!
And consider donating to individual instances instead
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
(caution of biased source)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism, Islamic Terrorism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.
Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users as it handwaves their extremism.
Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.
Off-topic Discussion — Do not discuss unrelated topics to the point of derailing the thread. Stay focused on the direct content of the post as opposed to arguing.
You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.
Welcome! This comm serves as a place for documentation of tankies on the Threadiverse. My megathread here has a slightly longer intro
But, in a nutshell, lemmy.ml is one of 3 instances that are mostly run by Tankies (Those who simp for authoritarian governments that merely claim to be communistic (China/NK) or otherwise "fighting against the evil west" (Russia)) known as the "Tankie Triad". So they'll do things like spread the Russian narrative that Ukraine is "full of Nazis".
They'll also censor you (and later, ban) if you post things they deem to be against their "ideology" under one of 2 instance "catch-all" rules. Rule 1 - "No Bigotry" or Rule 2 - "Be respectful.
Yours got censored under catchall rule 1, no bigotry.
The unfortunate problem with .ml is that it also has the notoriety as being the "dev run instance " as well, so most instances are quite hesitant to defederate from them, unlike the other 2 instances (Hexbear and Lemmygrad) who are largely considered to be worse than .ml and widely defederated from. The main devs, dessalines and Nutomic are, unfortunately, hardcore Tankies. Nearly all censoring actions on .ml though are done by dessalines and another admin, davel.
So the next best thing we can do as users is a general call to "boycott" their instance and not post comments or posts on a .ml comm. To choose to post to and grow other alternative comms that are off-.ml, no matter how big the comm on .ml looks (this also just leads to a better overall healthier Threadiverse). And to document things as we go, like I've done here
Wow, I had no idea about any of this. Thanks for putting in the effort to inform me.
This is probably a super simple question so sorry on advance, but why is an open source project held hostage like this? If it's a code issue, can't it just be forked? If it's a Lemmy specific issue, why is being federated with .ml more important than the health of the wider verse?
That's not actually that simple of a question, so don't feel bad lol
It's not a code issue, but Lemmy is written in Rust and while being a pretty decent language, it is also a bit of a difficult one to master. So there's just not a whole lot of open source capable Rust devs out there who can take on such a commitment. If Lemmy had been written in any number of popular languages, like JavaScript, C#, Python etc it probably would have been forked awhile ago just because of the .ml issues
There are a few reasons that crop up, 1) .ml still has some very niche comms that haven't been created elsewhere and heavyish traffic (which I hope to fix with the boycotting) and 2) if an instance "burns the bridge" there's concern that dessalines would take it personally and be less likely to help an instance admin on technical issues
Many think that migrating to PieFed long term will be the way forward which is an alternative to Lemmy without any political baggage. That or someone rewrites Lemmy in a more opensource friendly language and then it can be a drop in replacement for instance admins lol
But yea, there's concern that this Tankie culture they cultivate as currently preventing wider uptake and damaging the outside rep of the Threadiverse
I think that forks for idealogical reasons will always fail, until their political opinions start getting in the way of development, a fork isn't going to work.
It's like the anti-woke forks of things, like redot.
I really appreciate the time you took to write it all out. That does make sense, I definitely oversimplified the issue. Hopefully the tankies don't ruin this wonderful space for the rest of us