People need to realize you can use alternatives
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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First I created account there and then landed on my current instance, because lemmy.ml's admin views looks sketchy for me. Been living in ex-ussr for all my life I just cant accept all that communists and marxists and the fact that lemmy.ml has /c/Communism on it.
I know that's silly but that's why I'm not there anymore.
It's not silly at all. I also made an account there before realizing the admins are tankies. It honestly sketches me out about Lemmy in general considering they're the two lead (and currently only?) devs. Casts a big shadow over all of Lemmy when the devs are posting Xinjiang genocide denialism and their instance is at the top of the recommendations on join-lemmy.org. With lemmy.grad pretty high up there too.
Yeah that’s what Lemmy started out as. The thing is with all the Reddit refugees flooding in it is diluting out the tankies. Besides, lemmygrad.ml is blocked by many instances. As for the values of the devs the great thing is that Lemmy is FOSS so if they go rouge someone will just make a fork of Lemmy.
At least with the way Lemmy is designed it doesn't seem like even the main devs can have much of an impact.
They even write themselves that if they made changes to the Lemmy codebase that some instance admins didn't like, then those admins can decide not to upgrade their instance. The code is also open sourced so anyone with some tech know-how can fork the codebase and remove whatever they don't like.
Are you familiar with the Nayirah Testimony?
Profit motive ruined Reddit so you’ve come to a place created by communist then get upset that the people who made and operate it are communists. Yeah that’s more than a little silly.
There's a difference between being a communist and blindly supporting authoritarian dictatorships wearing communist masks.
I've not really looked into it too deeply because every single mile-long screed about this "controversy" starts off by clutching pearls about communists. Can you link me to where this is happening without paragraphs of dissembling preamble?
This is the lead dev on Russia's invasion, total support here and other comments:
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheGangGoesLeft/comments/tcu04j/whats_with_all_these_totenkopf_symbols_on_your/i0g1itl/
A few months later, they've apparently flipped on the issue entirely and now support US aid:
https://old.reddit.com/r/SocialistRA/comments/y2rzhg/interview_with_anarchocommunist_combat/is5yno0/?context=1000
I'm not very concerned with the "communist" or tankie part fwiw. And while I do have strong opinions on Russia's invasion, I'm far more concerned with the 180 shift in position displayed here, and I have yet to find an explanation. I don't think he wants to talk about it, but a quick "I changed my mind because xyz" could alleviate my concerns. Clear communication is important if you're gonna have such strong opinions imo.
I'm not trying to villainize him or cancel lemmy, he seems like a decent person and we've even had a brief interaction here... But I hope you can see why I'm cautious about things. The whiplash is my main issue, not which side he picks.
And I'm not here to stir the pot, it's just that you specifically asked and I had already personally looked into things.
Mods: I won't be spamming this, just wanted to put it out there once.
However... if the platform prospers and attracts enough other devs, none of this even remotely matters, and that's why I'm still here, I want to believe this can be set aside.
undefined> I’m not very concerned with the “communist” or tankie part fwiw.
Then why were you doing the "red fash" spiel just a single comment earlier if you don't care about it? No one thinks Russia is communist except a minority of senile Republicans who literally forgot about the founding of the Russian Federation.
I'm not that_one_guy, this was my first comment on the topic. I suppose I changed the topic a bit, since I didn't and won't address the accusations of "authoritarian regimes under a communist mask". My bad.
Ah, my bad. Making no pretense at possessing the virtue myself, I respect the choice to hold one's tongue on certain subjects.
I appreciate it. This is not as damning as I would have expected, to be frank. I won't say I fully agree with that interpretation of the war but it's a lot more nuanced than just blindly supporting an authoritarian regime "wearing a communist mask". Russia is not now nor does it even pretend to be communist in any capacity.
To be honest even with this hot take on Russia i'd say his politics are still probably more closely aligned with any given Redditor than they were to the people who run Reddit.
Yup, I'd agree. But again our politics shouldn't need to align, that's not my yardstick at all. It's more the whiplash/volatility between such opposing strong opinions that spooks me.
Yeah, it's just funny that some people are using that yardstick here and now when it never seemed like the political views of the Reddit admin were a problem until they took away the mobile phone apps.
That's true, and the Reddit administrators are ardent neoliberals, but that's just the thing: People don't call things "political" until it's "politics that I disagree with" [or, sometimes, explicitly dealing with the topic of politicians/elections]. The reddit emigrants had no problem with neoliberalism being pushed hard on reddit with zero transparency because they themselves are liberals.
Since they didn't really answer your question, I can say that the people complaining are basically the type who are "As Progressive As They Come" who think it's evil and indicative of brainwashing or ulterior motive to speak positively of China, Venezuela, Cuba, etc. They just can't help but immediately jump to buzzwords instead of concretely describing people's positions.
I'm not upset about their political views. For me its just too painful to read something like "Russia didn't start that war, its NATO" while I'm currently fleeing from conscription to Russian army to fight against Ukrainian people I respect more than citizens of my motherland.
So, I make only choice I find suitable in that situation: avoid places where this behaviour is fine for mods and gains upvotes.
No that is not silly you got a fair point
This is why I didn't choose lemmy.ml as my local instance.
Is it possible to move instances once I'm registered or do I have to create totally new account on other instance?
You'd need to sign up for a totally new account. There is talk of adding a migration feature but obviously that'll require a bit of patience, they've got a long list of feature requests!
I just saw on GitHub it's the feature is low on their priority list. I guess I'm gonna register to another instance. 🤷♂️
Understandable enough I suppose, there's more crucial things atm! I do hope they get there eventually though, it's a handy fallback feature over on Mastodon.
Unfortunately an account transfer feature is pretty complicated to develop so it might still be a while. Devs need to make sure it doesn't cause issues with federation when content changes home instances and domains, and transferring live user content over while retaining points, interactions by other accounts, and while having the same timestamp but now being hosted on a different instance, while ensuring there is only one canonical location/URL of the content on the fediverse, is not easy.
Oh no ;_;
Any recommended communities? (or ones to avoid)
I'm currently on lemmy.world. You can create communities and people are chill over here.
Everything from beehaw.org is nice. Even stuff on lemmy.ml is okay as long you don't bring up politics. Stay away from news or politics subs on this instance. And I hope we will get bigger communities on other servers than lemmy.ml or beehaw.org.
Beehaw is not nice. Just look at their "rules"
Users from beehaw can't even see this comment, nor yours if you reply to this one.
The rules being "We reserve the right to ban you whenever we want.” are not rules, just check their modlog, they're ban-happy.
All I know is that you should avoid lemmy.ml. In their /c/WorldNews community, an admin gave a four day ban to a user for posting an Axios article about the Chinese succession plan for the reason of "Orientalism". Those guys are tankie shills. In my experience, lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.one seem solid. Obviously I personally went with lemmy.ca. But you should check out the admin profiles before you join any instance. That will tell you most of what you need to know. That and the modlogs (found at the bottom of the page) that will tell you what posts have been taken down and what people have been banned by mods on various communities.
Who are they shilling for?
I recognize you, you're an old head around these parts, you were there during my battle with that one CHEF_KOCH fuckface, I like you.
That said, you've been here at least as long as I have, semantics regarding the word "shill" aside you know this place is (kinda was) a majority State Communist, or "Tankie," echo chamber, and they pushed it relentlessly. It's why you only ever saw me in c/linux, I don't like political evangelism to the degree it used to be found here. C'mon lol.
Is there any reason you don't say Marxist?
Because as I understand it Marxism is a stateless society, but most of the people here were supporting State Communism, so not Marxism.
I would strongly recommend researching . Marxism before declaring self-proclaimed Marxists to not be Marxists.
Now do "State Communism"
Do Marxists always simp for Stalin and Mao?
I think that's a bit reductionist as even 'tankies' have varying opinions on many issues. I used to hate dealing with them, and disagree with their apparent love for the old soviet bloc more times than not.
However, I have to say, pretty much EVERYTHING they say about the US government and their allies is 100% factual. That also applies to a lot of the stuff they say about current communist countries, most of what you're fed about them from western media is meant to incite rage and hate towards asian countries in order to keep your attention away from the atrocities committed by your own government.
No I still disagree with them and it is through arguing with them, not "western propaganda" unless that is what they themselves are following. Not that I agree with the US gov's atrocities either, but it is possible to disagree with more than one thing of course.
China and Russia. Thus censoring legitimate western media articles about China. There's also a lot of anti-NATO bullshit. Here's the Axios article they banned a user for posting.
Out of idle curiosity, do you self-identify as a leftist?
I generally align with the left most of the time, but I hate making one label the basis for your entire political opinion. I am very against censorship. My greatest pet issues have to do with censorship and democratic principles. In terms of American politics, I will never vote Republican. If I feel a Democrat has let me down in a big way, I would consider voting third party, but 99% of the time I would vote Democratic. Centrist Democrats piss me off more than leftist ones. My foreign policy stances are probably the least in line with the further left. I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn't perfect. I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.
I'm terminally-online enough that I am used to the paths of most arguments that have appeared on this website about politics, but -- and I say this to be transparent -- this one baffles me and I don't know how to respond to it. I've seen people say it but, well, it gets hard to explain within rule 1.
Maybe if we agree that "NATO is an extension of US foreign policy" we can sidestep the issue for now.
This one I am much more used to. Remembering that NATO is a military organization and not, you know, "who controls the internet," I'd like to just present you with a simple pair of questions:
How many of the past thirty years has the US been at war?
How many of the past thirty years has China been at war?
Beyond that, for all the fearmongering people do, China is remarkably less interested in unilaterally dictating relations than you might think, so explaining things in terms of "which country is the master of the unipolar world order" is not justified. Unipolarity has only been the state of things for a little over 30 years (and only obvious for a little over 40) and was unheard of before that. There is no reason to suppose that the future can only be unipolar, especially if the country that ushered in unipolarity and viciously guards it with world-historic levels of violence (the US) is no longer the strongest force.
China has shown every indication of seeking bilateral development and cooperation. An example in severe microcosm is the US banning China from the International Space Station and China responding by making its own space station which the US isn't banned from, nor most other countries (though I think it is still a finite list and not totally open, owing in part to being a new program). Stories like "debt traps" from China are grotesque projection, as China doesn't do things like forced restructuring or asset seizure, unlike the IMF.
I truly think this sort of "US is the least of the available evils" ideology has a hard time existing except in a subcultural bubble where it meets no challenge at all, because it is an astoundingly flimsy position.
I don't oppose China's right to exist as a power. I do disagree with the US doing things like banning China from the ISS. I also am not blind to the IMF scheme and what it has done to the non-western world and I oppose that. I am quite opposed to the way that Israel has been handled and there clearly needs to be some kind of compromise with Palestine. I'm not even going to try to touch that issue in terms of the way right way for it to be handled, but clearly the solution isn't what they currently have. I am pro-NATO in how they've handled the war in Ukraine. I am pro-NATO in the sense that it prevents attacks on its member nations, which Ukraine in my eyes has been very clear evidence of the need for.
Like I said before, I think checking all the boxes in one political ideology more often than not leads to some shitty, lazy stances, so maybe labeling myself as pro-NATO was a mistake. It's fair to say that the world doesn't need one superpower. In terms of China, more than anything I just wish they allowed for more debate and opposition within their political structure. Again, democracy and censorship are my pet issues. I worry for any world where the mechanisms that allow us to express ourselves and correct our flaws are stifled. The US hasn't been some gold standard for the right way to do it, but I don't see anyone better stepping up to the plate yet.
In terms of my original comment that triggered this conversation, at the end of the day I think it is wrong to ban anyone for posting opinions that a moderator disagrees with. That's political censorship and it's shitty. If lemmy.ml had clear rules about their political stances and what's allowed, then that would be different. But as it is, I think they're misrepresenting what their community is if they're going to censor such content. "Orientalism" in their context implies that any conversations about another country not from within that country should be taken down. Should non-US articles about the US also be removed? Is anyone not from China allowed to talk about China?
As for my original comment about "anti-NATO bullshit", I confess that was a personal opinion that probably didn't belong next to my more objective opposition to politcal censorship. I personally wouldn't join lemmy.ml for their political stances. I objectively would recommend people not join that instance because of their political censorship.
This is a bizarre position. If NATO didn't exist (e.g. if it was disbanded in '93), there would not be a war in Ukraine. If NATO allowed Russia to join back in the '90s, there would not be a war in Ukraine, but of course it didn't because the purpose of NATO is to make western aggression easier to accomplish. If NATO was transparent about Ukraine not joining, there would not be a war in Ukraine. If Ukraine had the leeway with its western masters to even attempt to follow one of the Minsk accords in good faith, the war might have been averted. If the west didn't sponsor a Nazi-spearheaded coup in Ukraine that flipped Ukraine's foreign policy, there would not be a war in Ukraine. If western powers attempted to stop the civil war in Ukraine by means other than extermination, rather than sponsoring Azov, there likely would not be a war in Ukraine.
At every interval, western powers and Azov did not seek to avert the war but simply to cause Russia the most damage, because that is America's interest in the war. If the west gave a shit about Ukrainians, they would be seeking to negotiate a peaceful end to both the invasion and the civil war that allowed the people of Donbas to self-determine their position. They have strongly opposed any such measure.
As I said before, NATO is an extension of US foreign policy with only minor complications from the "independent will" of its other members, such as that will exists. The foreign policy of the US is one of the most savage violence and precisely-leveraged deprivation. It is beyond the violence of organizations like ISIS, let alone Russia, let alone China (the answer to my earlier question was 30 years of war for the US and zero for China).
You want to talk about fucking censorship? And let's assume here that you mean censorship of people in general and not you in particular. Unless you are really interested in the proliferation of fascism or of for-profit cults and prosperity gospel asshats, there is substantially less censorship instigated by China than by the US. Even if your image of China -- in which neoliberals are put in prison -- was true, that would be substantially more lenient in its approach than efforts the US has lead around the world. Here's an easy example of them organizing and sponsoring the slaughter of dissidents, in case things like the Vietnam War ("domino theory!") don't count to you for some inscrutable reason.
Source: dude, just trust me
I'll explain this by analogy. Sometimes here you see galaxy-brained liberals (no, I haven't seen you say this) saying in the context of China's domestic situation "Well, you say that the media gives me a false perception of China, but what about the Chinese media giving Chinese people a false perception of their country?"
This is all well and good when one doesn't think about it for even a second, but if one does that it becomes apparent that one group lives in China and the other does not. It is much easier to lie to Americans about a place that they will never, ever go to, probably will never really talk to a person from there, and which communicates only in languages that are completely inscrutable to them, compared to lying to people who live there and amongst each other and only speak those languages. Americans are the most propagandized fucking people on the planet, and they still in huge proportion have contempt for their government and much of the country, because no amount of propaganda can simply "overwrite" your own experiences (brainwashing is fictional).
This is a board that is overwhelmingly in a US -- and more generally a "western" -- context. Spreading misinformation about the country they live in, or whose language they speak, is much less effective than for a distant country they have no connection to except in these media representations so even if an article is slanted, it frankly just doesn't matter (though spreading clear misinformation is bad in any case and should always be treated harshly).
So in brief, your line of interrogation here is based on a crass equivocation rather than a justified analysis.
Can't really say much more than I disagree with you on the fundamentals. I don't think I'm going to convince you otherwise and I don't think you'll convince me. I don't think the US or NATO are some perfect entities, but I also think your blaming of NATO for the situation in Ukraine is disingenuous at best. If you really think Russia is operating in good faith and that Putin's motivation for his invasion of Ukraine out of nowhere is because he felt threatened by NATO then I have a bridge to sell you. I agree that the US has benefitted greatly from NATO and has worked hard politically to bring NATO to where it is, but to act as though NATO members are just puppets being pulled by the US's strings is to severely misunderstand their positions in the world. This is especially the case for the people of Ukraine. You seem quite ready to dismiss what their people want for their country and to act as though the US is behind it all. You can tow the Russian line about Azov or whatever "Nazi" propaganda they've served to justify Russia's actions, but it's all a twisting of reality to justify Putin invading another nation, just as you would so readily dump on the US for.
And you can criticize the west's coverage of China all you want. I'm glad to hear it. I disagree with you, but I happily welcome opposing viewpoints. The same goes for Russia. I disagree with you and I'll say it, but disagreement and censorship are two different things. And at the end of the day this entire conversation was triggered because I disagree with mods banning people for unclear rules they've arbitrarily decided on the spot. If you think "Orientalism" is a good reason to ban every western article about China without establishing a clear community rule about that, then that's the only real line between your views and mine that matters to me. If you think censoring viewpoints that aren't in line with yours in general is okay, then we're not going to get past that impasse.
I never claimed the US was good on censorship. That's the difference between your arguments and mine. I am perfectly willing to shit on how terrible the US has been. I only think China and Russia have been worse. I've had coworkers from both the USSR and China. I've heard their horror stories about being forced to live in Siberia or being unable to get information freely or speak out freely. But even so, I don't think the US should be the world's solo superpower. I agree that the US has been the epitome of greed in the past century and has positioned themselves financially and militarily in a way that benefits them first and foremost. I think a world where nations cooperate on an even playing field is a much better world. But I'm not so foolish as to delude myself into thinking that Russia or China aren't similarly motivated by power. At the end of the day, global politics is a poker game where everybody is cheating. I don't support any one country, but rather I support ideals. Countries will always fail you, but knowing where you stand on issues like censorship or democracy won't.
Avoid any instance that bans/blocks other instances. As for communities, just find whatever you like.
I had the same exact thoughts. Liked the concept but was kinda sketched out by lemmy.ml. Hope kbin forms a nice little community
Same, I found a place that I know I'l prioritize a lot so I joinded that instance instead of the official one because ran into a post pointing out just what you said.
Also I've seen admins and users in the most popular/main instances acting like if not allowing adult content will keep their instances safe from NSFL or troll content or as if that will save them from the problems to moderate that kind of content, which honestly is disingenuous and/or naive (at least until the instances actually have to deal with big constant activity).