this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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Asking for proof of what is an open secret on lemmy seems disingenuous.
I think that instances like hexbear, lemmygrad, and lemmy.ml are very bad advocates for Lemmy and will most likely end up damaging it more than anything else, keeping the "normies" out.
They argue in Bad faith, say the most radical stuff they can think of, and purge anything bad said about totalitarian regimes they idolize. China, Russia, Iran, all considered victims of the evil west..
I was banned from lemmy.ml for posting a meme about the fact that gay characters are removed from movies in China. Not even by a mod. By an admin. I'm not remotely surprised they're pro-shitheap in general
There is an admin on lemmy.ml that seems to be banning anyone who says anything negative about China. If I'm thinking of the right person, they are also a large contributor to the Lemmy codebase. That person is why I stopped donating to the Lemmy devs.
This kind of stuff is making me consider stopping my donations to the Lemmy project, and instead donating to the Sublinks drop-in replacement developed by the programming.dev instance admins
Hey, I'm the founder of Sublinks. It's a huge collaboration of several major Lemmy instances like lemmy world, beehaw, discuss.online, programming.dev, and quite a few others that wish not to be named until the release.
Some admins are directly working on the project while others are providing other types of support. @Ategon@programming.dev is certainly a major contributor and has helped develop the new front end in many major ways. You can follow some progress updates here: !sublinks@discuss.online
We have several different teams of developers:
There is an active community on Matrix where all of us chat: https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks:discuss.online if anyone is interested in joining. We also have weekly touch bases to discuss progress and next steps. There are tons of people contributing.
We are currently taking donations only through Github: https://github.com/sponsors/sublinks if you're truly interested. We're all working on this part-time in our free time and making fantastic progress.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Thank you for the extra info and clarification!
Hexbear loves to dogpile as well. I've seen a couple of raiding threads linking to other threads in Lemmy.ml making fun of whoever. But in reality they're just directing people over there to shit on someone. At least, that's what I saw last year, so I'm very distrusting of them.
That and the Lemmy.ml AMA thread where one admin was all buddy buddy with Hexabear users during their federation.
I abandoned an old account because Hexbear bullies followed me around and downvoted everything. Come to think of it, I haven't posted a single thing since then, and I had a bunch of posts with hundreds of votes.
This literally cannot be true, because hexbear accounts cannot downvote.
If so maybe it was lemmy.ml, I get them confused sometimes
Check my history, I called them out for the NATO one today and they threw all sorts of random shit at me that was off the central point, just looking for a mistake in my wording.
Yep. They were claiming that Putin invaded Ukraine to stop fascists. And that they were liberators. I was like, why would one fascist care what other fascists do? In the US, our fascist, wealthy Republicans largely supported Hitler till pearl harbor. But I did agree with them that the Soviet Union absolutely liberated many countries against their will post WWII. And that those countries still hold it against them to this day.
The gulags were mentioned and they were like, but but but America jails more! To which I told them that was bad. But the West doesn't kill millions of prisoners the way they did. And all for political dissent, reminding them of just two weeks ago when Putin had Navalny killed for political dissent.
The absurd thing is, I'm one hundred percent down for Marxism. And largely agree politically with his theory plus some modernization. So technically we would agree on a lot of things there. It's just the Engles and Lenin bullshit I disagree with, and has shown to have failed. Or caused their downfall historically. But they are primarily leninists, dedicated ideologically to authoritarians and strongmen above all reality.
How can you agree with Marx and not with Engels? Engels practically did a large chunk of the philosophical heavy lifting for Marxism.
I know right, it's almost like they're two different people. gasp Wait a minute they are!
Also, I wouldn't call might makes right heavy philosophical lifting. There are less objectionable bits that Engles contributed. But some of the worst bits that led to the authoritarianism and brutality common in Marxist leninist structures is pretty strongly attached to him.
Are there any particular texts from Engels that you disagree with? I would be interested to know where you think the split is. From my reading, Engels was mostly involved in the philosophical and scientific side of the development of dialectical materialism and it's application into Marxism. Eg. "Dialectics of Nature", "The German ideology", "Feuerbach and the end of German classical philosophy","anti-duhring" etc. I'm not sure where the apparent "brutality" is coming from here?
Why does that mean they should be banned? Is speech that we agree with the only permitted speech?
Just because you think they're wrong doesn't mean they should be banned. Banning them makes it look like we're afraid of people reading their points, which gives them power and credibility
I have not commented on whether or not I think they should. Frankly I'm ambivalent. Considering many of the others that have been defederated. I think it's kind of hypocritical that Lemmy.ml hasn't. Personally though I don't have need or desire to defederate them. It's pretty easy, if annoying to poke holes in their arguments where important.
However it's important to remember that each server is answerable to it's community and ownership. If world defederated from lemmy.ml you'd be unaffected. And seeing the disdain lemmy.ml has for many types of speech. I'm not overly motivated to make any case to keep them around either. Offering them what they deny others.
So what? If it was wrong to defederate from those other instances then this can be wrong as well
Or, more accurately, answerable to the appearance of a community and ownership. All of the major instances are heavily astroturfed by various state and corporate entities. Which includes both the United States/West and China/Russia. World is western aligned and ML is not. It's a proxy war in cyberspace, same as occurs on reddit and Twitter and elsewhere. The solution to such a proxy war is not to cede all ground to the West - such action would not promote truth or critical thought
It could be. It's not. But it could have been.
And do you have any proof of that? I've not seen anything of the like. I'm Marxist myself. Just not Leninist. I have no major issues on world. I tend to get downvoted about equally from capitalist to leninist. Up voted too. I've not noticed any anti-left trend. Anti ml? Sure. But they are not left in any meaningful sense beyond nominally. Authoritarians always ape populist political trends. In order to take advantage of society. Hitler did it, Lenin and Stalin did too. Though, unlike Hitler, I believe Lenin actually genuinely wanted a good outcome. Despite his bad ideology.
People should have free speech, governments shouldn't have the ability to degrade our platform with shills and LLMs, especially if they're spreading propaganda for dictatorships.
I agree, but that is exactly what the United States and the West does.
China, Russia, and Iran do it as well, of course.
"The west" has been caught flat-footed in the modern disinformation game, they have nothing comparable.
That may have been true in 2014.
It is no longer true in 2024
Said the anonymous account without citing any source.
Literally everyone on this site is an anonymous account. Why would you possibly think that is a relevant point? Plus your account is less than 30 days old, so if we're going to start questioning users' motives and origins then perhaps we should start with you
And I watch congressional hearings with intelligence agency leaders. They have affirmed that our messaging (propaganda) efforts on the internet have greatly improved since 2016. Which is evident just from comparing Reddit today to reddit in 2015
The most powerful country in the world is just a little guy! It doesn't even know what it's doing, it's just a little guy!!
Are you serious with this shit? If you want to see someone steeped in propaganda, take your head out of the bowl of kool-aid and look in a mirror.
Insulting me because you have no reasonable response?
My response was plenty reasonable given your unreasonable claim that somehow the most powerful country in the word with the most sophisticated media machine got "caught flat-footed" in the modern disinformation game. They were heavily astroturfing reddit as far back as 2013 and have probably been at it for longer: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html
You know, unless you think the eglin air force base were just superfans of reddit. That's just reddit, now imagine more important platforms.
A sophisticated media machine that can't even hide the real location of it's shill accounts? And you're the one mocking me?
Some operations are more careful than others and I'm sure lessons have been learned since 2013. Meanwhile you think somehow China's and Russia's operations are more sophisticated because your media uncovers them?
It's totally reasonable to ask me to cite my reasoning.
I would like to see proof of how a community doing its own thing of sharing their radical views on their instance is damaging.
I haven't seen any rampant behavior of lemmy.ml users going to other instances and dogpiling certain posts or comment section. That may be defederation worthy.
The denial of having seen it yourself, is something I don't believe. Therefore I don't believe you made your reply in good faith.
Not all of lemmy.ml is a cesspool filled with poisonous cretins, but they (tankies) control the instance at conversational, moderation and administration level. So it will not change, only get worse.
Just like we see with the MAGAts... Once you start drinking your own coolaid.. the sky is the limit.
If it's so rampant that you find it unbelievable I haven't seen it, then it must be very easy to prove. Can you please provide a proof?
It's their instance. That's not proper grounds for defederation in my opinion, when the damage is contained within their instance.
As I stated in my preface, no thank you.
And if it is contained in their instance.. it does not matter that the borders are guarded by deFederation.
No worries. I never expected you to have the proof anyways, but I wanted readers to be aware that you don't.
That's fair. I think most people can make up their own minds looking at the thread, posts contents and then their own experience in the .ml scape compared to the rest of Lemmy.
IF lemmy.ml is admin'd by the Lemmy devs, themselves,
AND their ideology/prejudice is being obstructed by the Lemmy-verse,
THEN wouldn't it be rational for them to engineer-in to Lemmy, itself, protections for their ideology?
Breaking the Fediverse's ability to "manage" them?
or breaking the Fediverse's ability to have any alternative-ideology be its core??
I'm thinking they could either adulterate privacy, deliberately, or they could force blocking to be porous, or something..
IOW, I'm thinking that it is strategically-incompetent to allow tankies to own our core tech, exactly as it is strategically-incompetent to allow right-wing highjackers-of-our-countries to do so.
?
They could, but it’s open source software. People can just fork it and not follow along such self destructive paths.
Yes, but for example if everyone is running the mainline code, and .ml decides they are going to run a version which does not respect federation updates under certain conditions, they could quietly poison the entire fediverse by spoofing updates from other instances. It's very obvious that they are already selectively federating their modlog, for example. And some other instances already play games with how votes get reported. There is a lot of trust baked into the federation updates, and nobody knows how to exploit that better than dessalines, who is clearly very interested in using the platform to push a specific ideology.
I am absolutely in favor of forking Lemmy to get this out of their hands, fwiw. Specifically for this reason. I think they've shown that they are not above poisoning the code base exactly like this.