OpenStars @ OpenStars @discuss.online

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2 yr. ago

Pasting from another comment here:

it is an issue that everyone commenting on every post across every community on that whole entire instance must essentially conform to all of their ideals - or else be banned from all of those communities, not merely the one with the “offensive” statement. You cannot say anything truthful about Russia, China, Ukraine, Uyghurs, Taiwan, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, etc. (if the admins disagree with what you said)

Imagine if we were on Reddit and could not say “fuck spez”, or we were on Linux but for some reason were still forbidden to say “I prefer not to use Windows today, so thank you but no thanks”. Those communities on Lemmy.ml are held hostage to people if not agreeing then at least going along with whatever party line BS that the admins want to uphold. Moreover, at any time they could add whatever their wanted to that list.

So it's not about politics, per se, but their decision to become the arbiters of "truth(iness)" about everything across any community on their entire instance.

Do whatever you want, but I hope it helped for me to explain that.

They have said things like they ban "agitators" and "misinformation". They do not provide a listing of what those things are. I recall one story from someone who has actual Uyghur family members living with them and they were describing the genocidal practices that they escaped from - BAM, banned.

Facts are political these days, I suppose. Most people don't get to choose which set of facts they have to live out, day by day.

But obviously the admins are not insane - from their POV, they are doing the rational thing, of protecting their userbase from "misinformation". Well, keep your ears open I suppose, and you'll learn more. Hopefully you don't get banned yourself as a result, but you may want to have a backup plan just in case.

100% of the people I've recommended Lemmy to irl have not only been turned away by exactly that but then actually give me dirty looks for having recommended it to them.

We who block such tend to forget: a new user faces a very different experience, full of e.g. calls to murder landlords and sometimes even people with like just bank accounts.

Imagine if this was NSFW content that wasn't labelled as such! Which is highly ironic bc I find that NSFW content is extremely well-behaved on Lemmy?! :-P

Sadly, politically extremist rhetoric refuses to label itself in like manner:-(.

Okay but while everything has its downsides... not equally so.

What if one day you were no longer allowed to discuss Linux? Or Teslas? Or whatever else the admins decided were now forbidden topics? Btw without telling you what those topics are. Also, if you even so much as accidentally mention the names of such, you lose access to the entire Fediverse from your account (on that instance).

It doesn't even matter what topic material the admins of lemmy.ml have decided to block - Russia, China, Ukraine, Uyghurs, Taiwan, North Korea, North Carolina, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, it doesn't matter. What matters is that they have set themselves up as the arbiters of "truth(iness)" and ban anyone from every community across the entire instance, even those they have never even heard of.

And then they dictate those rules - which again, are nowhere written down, plus not all that easy to guess at (let's see... the USA does genocide, but Russia does too? no wait, Russia can do no wrong - that's it! Oh shit, too late, already banned!:-P) - and hold all of the content on every community across the entire instance hostage to those rules.

I came here from Reddit to get away from such. Oopsie, it's here too.

Do whatever you want, ofc :-) I just hope that I explained this position well enough to convey that nuanced take that some actions are worth holding apart from others. This isn't merely a minor inconvenience imho - it's a major breach of the principles that many of us came here to support in the Fediverse, cited as being free and open source, except apparently the set of rules are not open to be read anywhere at all.

They definitely dance to their own tune. And also require that you do as well. Oh and they do not tell you what that is.

I have seen complaints about them, but they seem relatively minor and resulting from an overzealous attempt to protect their users, which I find understandable. I have never had anything but pleasant conversations with Ada the instance admin of lemmy.blahaj.zone and have thoroughly enjoyed everything I've ever read from them.

What!? How is that even possible...? Are you sure this was dubvee.org and not the Santabot, or are you saying this is the guy that did that? Bc I remember the Santabot and railed hard against it, but I think the Admiral Patrick guy just preemptively defederated from lemmy.ml, which wouldn't send out a notification (I would hope) to literally everyone on that instance? That would be... shit, no bueno.

Another place that spams people with modlog entries is lemmy.ml itself - the admins there ban someone from every single community across the entire instance, even ones that they have never heard of.

Hey, can you send me a message to read more about the dubvee.org situation? I was just starting to seriously consider joining it, and over the last hour have recommended it to several people since it is one of only two total instances that has dared to defederate entirely from lemmy.ml. If the situation is insane then I should not do that, but what you are describing sounds awfully familiar, twice over even, yet with different causes, so I wonder if one of those is the explanation. At least, I am quite interested to learn more!?:-)

It depends what you are looking for. dbzer0.com I see a lot so remaining there is an option too. lemm.ee is similar in not wanting to defederate from anything, and damn if they don't mean it so like they don't even block lemmygrad.ml like virtually every other instance across the Fediverse.

Or go with a theme - StarTrek.website, programming.dev, etc. Or location.

If you want to block all 3 of the most toxic instances including lemmy.ml, there are only 2 that I have heard of that do so: dubvee.org and Lemmy.cafe. I may switch to one of those myself even.:-) The latter is pure Lemmy while the former runs an alternative UI (Tesseract) geared for streamlined multimedia, and may one day also run the Sublinks backend rather than Lemmy, though that doesn't seem ready.

Other thoughts include PieFed and Mbin, which you should at least check out before deciding. The latter combines the ability to look at Lemmy and also Mastodon with the same account / on the same instance. PieFed is more a Lemmy replacement, with a variety of other goodies like Pixelfed (a "Decentralized photo sharing social media" platform) that tie in to it, and they are about to release a short video hosting service as well.

Sorry if this is too much - at least it's so fucking cool to have it many awesome options to choose from! As excessive capitalism enshittifies everything for the sake of pure profiteering, the plethora of free and open source alternatives is a great sign for the future!:-)

Not all instances should defederate from lemmy.ml. However, it is an issue that everyone commenting on every post across every community on that whole entire instance must essentially conform to all of their ideals - or else be banned from all of those communities, not merely the one with the "offensive" statement. You cannot say anything truthful about Russia, China, Ukraine, Uyghurs, Taiwan, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, etc.

Imagine if we were on Reddit and could not say "fuck spez", or we were on Linux but for some reason were still forbidden to say "I prefer not to use Windows today, so thank you but no thanks". Those communities on Lemmy.ml are held hostage to people if not agreeing then at least going along with whatever party line BS that the admins want to uphold. Moreover, at any time they could add whatever their wanted to that list.

Perhaps there will come out a fantastic Linux distro that would revolutionize Linux accessibility - but if they say no, then nobody can access any of the communities there unless they (at the very least tacitly) agree to not so much as mention its name, or that it exists, or anything else about it. This is a hypothetical but I hope you also see the connection to irl: it doesn't matter what those admins are banning people for, it matters that they have set themselves up as the arbiters of "truth(iness)", and decide what can or cannot be discussed in their platform. Regardless of which community it is in.

Most of us came here to get away from such, only to find that it is here as well.

Do as you please, but I hope this helps explain just some (and this probably isn't even fully half of it yet!?!?) of why people are judging the instance. Over time, more and more communities will move off of the instance - the main reason it hasn't happened yet I think is that version 0.19.3 (iirc?) promised to allow user blocking, which people see now how weak it is plus with 0.19.4-5 it actively got even weaker. Only defederation is left to even consider. Which won't happen quickly, but e.g. dubvee.org and lemmy.cafe both have already done so, and I imagine others will follow suit before too awfully long, with the amount of vehemence people feel about the situation.

Pasting from another comment in this thread:

The only way I know how to ditch the users, besides blocking each one individually, would be to make a new account on either dubvee.org or Lemmy.cafe where all 3 of the big 3 are completely defederated. Think of those instances as troll-blockers, working hard to keep the Fediverse pleasant to converse in:-).

Pasting from another comment in this thread:

The only way I know how to ditch the users, besides blocking each one individually, would be to make a new account on either dubvee.org or Lemmy.cafe where all 3 of the big 3 are completely defederated. Think of those instances as troll-blockers, working hard to keep the Fediverse pleasant to converse in:-).

You can't really. I mean you can block an instance, but that only hides the communities that are on it - you'll still see the users. The only way I know how to ditch the users, besides blocking each one individually, would be to make a new account on either dubvee.org or Lemmy.cafe where all 3 of the big 3 are completely defederated. Think of those instances as troll-blockers, working hard to keep the Fediverse pleasant to converse in:-).

But a lot of users on a lot of instances do not want to defederate, and thereby lose their communities that they want to receive content from, e.g. Firefox@lemmy.ml. First such communities need to be migrated, or at least new alternatives made, and then the barrier to walking away will be lower. Progress is being made though, even if only slowly:-).

Hehe, way to be a part of the chang–

Lolz so true!!:-)

Omg you defederated from them - that's amazing! I've been going around saying that lemmy.cafe is the only instance I've ever even heard of that has done so, but now I can add dubvee.org to that list as well.

Damn, you keep impressing the hell out of me!:-P Every time I dig deeper, there's always another thing to like below that!:-)

Take their news community for example.

No thank you, I would pay to avoid that actually! 😆

Although if other people either get banned as a result of saying something about China or Russia etc., or they choose for themselves to defederate somehow, then over time that is an increasing number of people across the Fediverse who cannot enjoy that artwork.

It's like... what if the Library of Alexandria had made some copies and sent it out to remote places, before being (accidentally?) burned down by Julius Caesar during his civil war?

If that artwork is important to be seen by people everywhere, then why allow it to be held hostage by an admin team that could at any moment add still more things to the unnamed list of topics that are forbidden to be discussed on that instance? China, Russia, Uyghurs, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Taiwan, and... what else will it be tomorrow?

You might even say something that gets taken out of context and be banned from the entire instance yourself. "Killing Uyghurs is not the best work I have seen" - no no, I meant that killing them isn't happening at all, I was referring to the title of the painting!?

Well, it's something to consider. I hope I am not coming across here as being too extreme, just trying to offer some thoughts along the lines that you mentioned that you have already started, in case it would be appreciated.:-)

In your Settings is an option to ban all content labelled as NSFW regardless of its origin.

Neither of those mention that lemmy.cafe has defederated from lemmy.ml. Hence I tend to agree that they are not reliable, at least in the sense of being comprehensive. Perhaps at one point in the past they were.