The developers who created Lemmy are leftists, and they run the lemmy.ml instance. The lemmy.ml (.ml is for Mali, btw) domain was allegedly chosen because ML can also stand for Marxist-Leninist.
I'm not an expert on the subject, but lemmy.ml users are known for being tankies. People don't like that.
However, some of you whipper snappers don't know that those of us with really old accounts joined back when lemmy.ml was the most popular instance. I just like FOSS things.
Edit: added "allegedly"
lemmy.ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad users verbally fellate contemporary and historical autocratic mass-murderers they deem to be “leftists”, or "great leaders and allies to the cause", most recently being Vladimir Putin, Xi Jingping, and Kim Jong Un.
They are, in reality, bitch-made invertebrates who don’t even have the arm-strength to lift their Molotov-sippy-cups out of their premium-outdoor-brand backpacks, let alone form meaningful opinions on economics, political philosophy, or geopolitical reality.
Okay, so for some context .ml is run by the Lemmy devs and the devs are openly tankies (authoritarian communists). .ml, along with Lemmygrad (also run by the devs) and Hexbear are known as the Tankie Triad. While not as bad as the other two, .ml still has a lot of tankies compared to instances that aren't part of the triad. Additionally, .ml used to be the recommended instance (until .world came along), making it one of the more populated instances. Most other instances defederate with Lemmygrad and Hexbear, but not necessarily .ml.
Basically, there's a lot of extremely opinionated and often combative people there and provoking them (intentionally or not) is very easy.
That's my understanding of the situation anyway.
Basically, .ml Tankies (I don't consider all .ml users to be Tankies just because they're a .ml users) are authoritarian
bootlickers“communists” pretending not to be who routinely deny the human rights violations of the CCP/Russia and hold them up as the gold standard. They refuse to recognize China, Russia and even NK as being authortarian regimes or if they do, its OK/Neccessary because it takes down the west/capitalism. If you have a historical fact that puts any of those countries in a bad light, they’ll probably deny it happend or is just “western propganda.”So they believe and spread things like the Russia narratives on Ukraine (When it happened they were parroting the whole “special military operation” thing, the current thing is that it was “just a diplomatic maneuver to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table”)
Hex and Grad are very in your face about it, but .ml tends to be more subtle, often opting instead to remove dissenting comments and ban users before letting threads get out of control. So, as a result many instances defed from those 2.
.ml is run by the head Lemmy devs who are, unfortunately, hardcore Tankies themselves and tend to enforce the Tankie mindset throughout with more subtlety through mod/admin action. Or allowing known propaganda outlets to fester
You can check out !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works if you want to see some documentation of their actions, words and censoring. What I've linked here is but a mere sampling of what's been collected there
Because even as the Earth burns and the Fascists march directly due to the capitalist's class conquest, domination, and occupation, even many Americans who believe themselves to be politically leftwing think they can dunk on socialists and communists for their "silly" ideologies based in social cooperation and mutual social benefit where... Gasp... You can't grind yourself to death under the toxic aspiration of attaining immoral levels of wealth to live larger than is reasonable within the finite shared habitat known as Earth.
They of course conveniently forget all the military actions the US has taken over the last century to destabilize nations that wanted to become such societies in order to keep their resource markets open to our capitalist's exploitation.
Oh, and get ready for the hottest summer of your life... So far! 🔥🌎🔥
(Takes a deep breath, clears mind, gets into character)
This meme format is a product of capitalism, posted to a capitalist instance, and you should be ashamed. Instead of posting an image of a capitalist pig, why aren't you out in the streets burning shit down??/? There's no good capitalist. If you're not out in the streets overthrowing capitalism and burning everything down, RIGHT NOW, you're part of the problem! Rabble Rabble Rabble, guillotines, violence violence violence.
In a nutshell, anyway. Or at least that's how it was from users there on every 3rd post/comment before my instance finally defederated.
Many (not all) ml users are fairly rabid when it comes to their own flavor of propaganda. If you ever casually chat with them on Lemmy, just understand that they have a completely different world view so don't mention things related to politics, country borders, history, government structure, major battles during WW2, sparrow populations or what color the sky is and you should be fine.
The problem is .ml’s rules are inconsistent. Criticism against China is put under the rule “be respectful”, but you can criticise any other nation or group, except for maybe Hezbollah.
If they would just write it in the rules, like they did on their old PeerTube instance PeerTube.social, I wouldn’t mind.
You can see it for yourself.
Write a comment/post critical of china in any community from the lemmy.ml instance.
For example about the Uyghurs or the mass surveillance or whatever is your topic of choice.
See how much time it takes for them to ban you/remove your comment under their rule of "no xenophobia".
Went there first since I consider myself a leftist. Seen multiple thirstposts for Stalin and the likes: pretty picture with a popular quote. Comments all in the realm of "yes daddy".
I hate capitalism as much as the next guy, just don't see a point of swapping it for an equally bad form of repression.
They are part of the Fediverse Tankie Triad and therefor a bunch of insufferable gobshites. For more context, enjoy what the other people in this thread will tell you. I blocked lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net.
It's a peaceful life. :)
It’s capitalist and pro-war propaganda.
I didn't knew about this, thanks
I've only blocked a few ml users but I made sure to block that instance.
Because it's not cool to be Malian /s
