I'm hearing Lemmy itself, the .ml instance and some others are ran by Tankies that censor criticism of russia and china. What are your thoughts on this?
That's why I'm on Lemmy.World. I made a new account as soon as I found out they were removing posts from people for orientalism.
It's great the modlog is so transparent. The greatest thing about having instances run by different people unassociated with each other is you can just do that... go to a different instance where things are much more aligned to you morally.
You have less to worry about here than you do on a place like say Reddit where they can do it pretty discretely and you'd be none the wiser until it happened to you.
The ideological leaning of the developers means nothing on a federated network. What you care about is knowing the ideology of who runs your instance.
You can just as easily fall into a right wing echo chamber by joining the wrong instance. And one that censors any kind of pro Russia or pro China sentiment, which is equally bad, in my opinion.
Propaganda can come from both sides. Just keep your eyes open.
Just like with Stallman and his contributions to software, I can justify using Lemmy to myself due to it being open source and the devs not directly financially profiting from the spread of Lemmy (although it certainly raises their public profile).
Well, lemmygrad for sure is run by tankies, that's kinda the point.
Most of it doesn't matter. It's not like they can control anything that happens on other instances.
That was the main reason why I switched to lemmy.world; never looked back. Plus, Ruud (the admin of this instance, runs also a Mastodon instance) and actually upgrades the server so it can handle all new traffic. Lemmy.ml is often down because it can't take the heavy load.
There's a public modlog at the bottom of the page; you can use that to see what mods are doing on whichever instance you're on. If there's any truth to that, you'll be able to find proof there.
There are plenty of other instances to join if you don't like the .ml servers' opinions. From what I can see, all tastes are catered for. Just find another server.
And, no, I'm not affiliated with the .ml instances nor am I a so-called Tankie.
I joined via lemmy.world because at the time the stats just looked favorable, with the limited knowledge I had (uptime mostly).
As someone with experience in software engineering you learn to differentiate between the product and the dev.
It's especially easy with Lemmy, because every instance has its own vibe it seems. Would I join lemmygrad or how that instance is called? Probably not, but because it's the users who in the end define the direction of an instance I see no problem.
Freedom of speech is important and if all those tanky instances are about is their agenda, they will end up in an echo chamber sooner or later, as more regular people migrate and simply drown them out.
I just won't post on the tankie instances like I didn't post on the tankie subreddits. And if the instance I'm on starts censoring like that, I'll make an account on a different one.
I know the lemmygrad.ml instance claims to be Marxist but I don't think they're generally taken that seriously (and not to be confused with lemmy.ml) - is that what you're confusing? Apart from that, the federal nature of Lemmy means it doesn't really matter what the creator's political beliefs are.
Well today I had someone support the Tienanmen Square massacre, another say the war of aggression in Ukraine is a denazification campaign, argue that nothing is happening untoward to Uighur's in China and assert that Pussy Riot "is a CIA op" lol. Yeah. It's over run with brain dead tankies. They suck. That instance will get defederated eventually if Lemmy actually takes off, and good riddance
@Kasrean From my experience it's more like a soft censoring. But yea, censoring does exist. I've interacted with Lemmy (specially lemmy.ml initially, since it was the largest instance containing all the communities I needed) even before the Reddit exodus. Back then there were only a handful of people creating content and the narrative they were spinning was something along the line of Look how bad the West is! Now look at how great China is!. Not to mention, the same people are against supporting Ukraine.
The problem was that it was really easy to make anti-russian or anti-china (edit: or to be, somehow racist against these, only by criticizing their governments, although not the same was applied to the anti-US posts - it was totally okay to be anti-America) posts or comments (in mods' views) and you were usually banned for it. Nowadays, tho, the situation is changing, and they get a small dose of their own medicine, lol (but you can still see the comments of these guys, many of them downvoted tho).
issue would be if the code is compromised as a result mainly. there are other networks on the protocol and others can implement servers as well. its not an exclusive protocol.
What is even the purpose to censor info on what I'd assume was a foreign govt? What's the logic?
"Well this late stage communism makes my own ideals look bad?" Laughable and pathetic.
Personally, I don't care. What someone does, politically, with their free time on the internet doesn't affect me, at least in this instance. I'm not givin money to them, keep it movin.. tbh it's their loss if that's how they wanna live.