Look at here and the people who complain about it being too hard to figure out are the ones complaining about “I can’t use muh slurs, this is awful.”
“The left of today is very much in favour of censorship to avoid “harm.” This makes those of us in the middle very wary of signing up to any partisan media.” /u/decidedlysticky23
/u/misshapensteed claims he isn’t far right, but explictly only posts on PoliticalCompassMemes and TheLeftCantMeme and KotakuInAction.
If they are too stupid to figure out we know they’re lying, they’re too stupid to figure out lemmy.
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they’re too stupid to figure out lemmy
Please let’s not introduce elitism into Lemmy. I just got here and stumbled upon this post. The social network you use does not make you superior. As much as I agree with anti-racist censorship, there is no need to speak as if Lemmy users are superior beings. It was annoying when Redditors did it back in the day and it will continue to be now.
Exactly this.
As an analogy, I personally think the Linux desktop is better than Windows but I don’t think desktop Linux users are inherently better than Windows users.
Sure, desktop Linux users are probably more tech savvy on average but they are probably also more likely to be less socially capable imo. (like me)
“I use Arch by the way”
(I kid, I kid… I use garuda)
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I actually use gentoo and I love y’all
Pleb. I use NixOS.
(Arch
btwactually)+1 for NixOS
Praise the Arch wiki though
Oh for sure. And pacman / the AUR. It’s the reason I stated with an arch-based os even though I got a little tired of managing all the minutiae myself (I did used to use arch)
I do actually run arch btw :)
Quite. Remember narwhaling bacon? Never again.
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I mean more as “if you can’t look past skin tone and gender, you can’t probably read a sign up sheet.”
Racists are idiots. The ones who learned better aren’t idiots because they applied new knowledge.
Racists just regurgitate what they were told since birth, without questioning anything and doubling down.
Is Lemmy better? Remains to be seen. But if they refuse to join because we won’t tolerate slurs, that’s a bonus.
s/stupid/lazy
Big agree.
I’m glad that Beehaw doesn’t do it, but the other instances shouldn’t be federating the Tankies.
Authoritarian, genocide-denial, Stalin-praising politics have no place on the left.
That is the one thing that still makes me unsure of whether I should fully support Lemmy or not. I know how the federation works and that those communities can be easily excluded, but what is off to me is that the two main devs of Lemmy itself (and the Android app) are themselves tankies.
Even if that is true, it shouldn’t bother you I think. You have to let people have their convictions. The alternative is The Ministry of Truth. :)
I would generally agree, but tolerance should not extend to the point of accepting genocide denial and defense of clear-cut authoritarianism. See here for the general concept.
Tankies make the (imo) correct assumption that the US (or the west in general) engages in imperialism and is responsible for a huge amount of problems in the world, in addition to general atrocities, but then somehow decide the everything and everyone that opposes the US is perfectly fine and does no wrong. It’s baffeling.
Regardless, the whole point of a platform like Lemmy is that it’s creators have no control over it, by design.
Sure but look at some of the discussions in the US…they are also completely convinced that the US is the best country in the world.
It’s something with certain human beings it seems, that makes them want to join a team and defend it, no matter if it has flaws and is obviously incorrect at times. They connect their self confidence to their country I guess.
Fascists and red-Fascists have no place in discourse. In part because their engagement is never good-faith.
We are talking about developping open source software. To be clear, you’re saying you disagree with using copyleft software written by people whose politics you disagree with.
Not so much, more that I am concerned about ways they will use their influence for evil.
As authoritarians seem to all but inevitably do. I can’t say I’ve known any single tankie to every be involved in a community project for long without trying to purge or poison it.
There was some chatter somewhere about beehaw.org assessing kbin as an alternative. I don’t think kbin is ready for primetime in that way yet, but I would be supportive of Lemmy instances converting when the time is right given that the two main developers of Lemmy are the two main admins of the tankiest instance
I heard of kbin too and on paper, it looks like a viable alternative. But as you’ve said, Lemmy is (as of now) more robust, and getting Reddit users to switch to something even less mature seems like a hard sell. With the Reddit blackout coming soon, Lemmy is just in the prime position to grab all the refugees, most of which will probably never find out about the main devs.
I think there needs to be a diversification of who develops Lemmy to include more people who aren’t authoritarian apologists. You’re never going to agree with everyone you interact with, but sometimes you’ll agree with someone you generally disagree with. Architecturally, I think the concept of Lemmy is very sound, but there’s a very strong argument that programming is a form of communication, and the messaging that Lemmy is designed for is ungood
beehaw.org assessing kbin as an alternative
What does this mean exactly, what is kbin and how does it fix the problem vrojak is talking about? You’re still using code developed and maintained by lemmy admins, no?
No. Kbin is a completely different fediverse software entirely
Ohh, I see. I thought lemmy was the only one with the following-communities-over-people design.
It’s certainly the most mature, but there’s also KBin and Prismo. Prismo looks to be abandoned and kbin is super early in its development. It looks like there’s a few other link aggregator software programs for the fediverse, but none of them have that much documentation or servers
Can you reference who the main devs are?
Thanks. Dessalines is the one confirmed to be ‘problematic’.
Yeah I’ve been going back and forth between this one and lemmy.ml and a recent thread on Ukraine made really really appreciate that beehaw has that instance blocked
Personally I’m not sure I consider tankies leftists. Although communism is a leftists ideal, it’s based on the premise of people being equal and deserving of basic needs. Tankies often embrace misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and authoritarianism and deny or even support injustices against other humans. Not very leftist of them imo
Yeah, I agree, I don’t really see a lot of “left” in the position that Imperialist ethnostates are okay for some, but not for others.
ML-tendencies have also historically been opposed to the goals of even the Marxist movements. Considering the way that the Bolsheviks removed power from the People, Soldier, and Worker’s Soviet to instead centralize into their own centralized “Soviet” organ of power. Or the reactionary, authoritarian and socially conservative policies pushed by the contemporary and often the historical CCP (though the history of Maoism is obviously complex).
It’s refreshing to be around folks like you. Thank you.
That’s surprisingly sweet, thank you.
Yeah as someone who vacillates between demsoc and anarchism, I can’t see anything of value done by the MLs ever, and the only thing I really respect the Maoists for is taking care of their landlord infestation.
When you look at their contributions to historical revolutions, their efforts often amount to counter-revolution. Russia, Ukraine & Spain among prime examples (when looking at the post-WW1 revolutions)
I get where you’re coming from, but this feels like a no-true-scotsman kind of thing that both the left and right do to renounce and endorse their extremes as and when necessary to ensure they can always claim they were right from the beginning.
Things are what they are (including the results they produce), not what they ought to be. Whether that divergence happens because of orchestrated dog-whistles or poorly set up incentives is irrelevant.
Don’t get me wrong, I have the same tendency and the above is more like a mantra rather than an ingrained belief for me. A good litmus test has always been “Can I extend this argument such that I’m never wrong?” If so, I’m probably wrong already.
The term “Left” is nothing more than a team sport since the inception of the term in the 1800s. It’s not a useful term, nor a consistent term, and we only really use it for convenience. It’s not a meaningful model of classifying politics. That’s why we should consider just saying what we mean: progressive? socialist? egalitarian?
Same with “right”, of course.
But what are the ideals of the left? Isn’t there a focus on social equality and human rights? There are circles and movements on the left that i don’t fully agree with because you’re right, it’s not a monolith, but the core value of equality amongst humans feels like a requirement. I just think excusing genocide and supporting authoritarianism or totalitarianism are incompatible with the core leftist value of equality.
“Generally, the left wing is characterized by an emphasis on “ideas such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism” while the right wing is characterized by an emphasis on “notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism”.”
Where would tankies fall on that scale?
“Tankies” is basically a meaningless slur at this point, but I’ll try to answer your question.
There are two overarching branches of philosophical thought, Idealism and Materialism. Idealists believe the world is shaped by ideas. Materialists believe ideas are shaped by the world.
Liberalism is an example of an idealist philosophy. If enough people believe in civil rights and democracy, then they are sure to manifest. Liberals approach politics from the standpoint of evangelizing their beliefs. They believe with the correct rhetoric and the correct positions, they can win the day and bring about their version of a just society.
Marxism is an example of a materialist philosophy. Social currents, ideology, and history are driven by the material conditions. Marxists aim to apply an empirical analysis to historical events, to identify the underlying systems and processes which are at play. To figure out where the meager resources of the oppressed and downtrodden might be applied most effectively. From this style of historical analysis, many theses have been formed, creating a very deep theoretical canon.
We can all agree that democracy is good. We can all agree that civil liberties are good. At the same time, when the United States declares it is going to bring democracy to your country, you know are going to have a bad time. Or when the Untited States, jailhouse of the world, brings up complaints about civil liberties, you know there are ulterior motives at play. This is because the United States is a world-hegemonic imperialist empire, always seeking to expand its markets, its influence, and its profits. There are other countries which exhibit imperialist tendencies. Imperialism is the inevitable endgame of capitalism, but none compare to the US Empire.
The idealistic paradigm of categorizing states as democratic or authoritarian crumbles under the past century of cold war. A state like Cuba, living under siege, facing very real threats of espionage, sabotage and infiltration, is forced to take a warlike posture. It can never let its guard down. It will take measures which seem repressive in order to defend its sovereignty. This is unfortunate, but there is an underlying material reality which drives this state of affairs. The artificially imposed scarcity. The constant threat of a coup and the imposition of western finance and privatization. And still, you can make a very strong argument that the conditions in Cuba are far more Democratic than they are in the US. You can make the same argument for China. These places are far from perfect, but when you examine them in the context of the geopolitical reality we live in, there are reasons why they are the way they are (and a giant steaming pile of sensationalism and vile slander dumped on top).
Democracy is good, but you can’t just let the NED (a known CIA front) pour millions of dollars into reactionary media organs across your country and hold a direct election so every little victory the revolution has achieved can be sold off to gangsters. We got to see exactly what this looks like in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. We got to see exactly what this looks like when the US-backed coup in Chile overthrew Allende and installed the military dictator Pinochet. Shock doctrine, privatization, mass killings, neoliberalism. It looks like the parliament getting shelled by tanks, the former citizens of a socialist country getting sold into sex trafficking, and the dreams of millions turning into ashes while the capitalist gangsters take everything for themselves. It looks like the greatest decline in life expectancy and living standards in modern history.
Antiimperialism can seem perplexing at times, and nothing makes this clearer than the war in Ukraine. The invasion and the war are clearly abhorrent, but if that is where your analysis begins and ends, that Ukraine is a wholesome smol bean democracy and Putin is punishing them because he hates democracy on principle, you are missing a whole lot of what’s going on. The Reddit response to the war was that everyone became Ukrainian nationalists overnight. Even as Ukraine descended into martial law, banned opposition parties, media and labor unions, and devoted itself to full mobilization. The actions of the Ukrainian state are somewhat understandable under the circumstances, but I’m not sure how you get back to egality, fraternity, and liberty coming out of these conditions. You might just get the fraternity, but a very dark, nationalistic one.
Instead of taking sides, what most of these “tankie” / “russia apologist” leftist communities are trying to do is figure out what the hell is actually going on. They certainly aren’t on NATO’s side, which is enough for most to call them Russian stooges. There is an intense fog of war, and the only thing you will find from either side is war propaganda. Ask the Ukranians and they have killed a million Russians. Ask the Russians and they have killed a million Ukranians. The enemy is constantly on the verge of running out of munitions. Tons of “great man theory” attempting to do psychoanalysis of Zelensky or Putin, instead of examining the political and economic factors driving this war. At the end of the day, it is the working class killing each other in another war for bourgeois states, and the apologia for national chauvinism only makes excuses for it. No war but class war.
The beauty of it is that we don’t necessarily have to use lemmy.ml at all. Beehaw and Sopuli.xyz, two of the largest instances outside of lemmy.ml and the tankies, don’t federate with the tankies. It some ways it’s a good thing, as it encourages people to branch out instead of clustering around a “main” instance.
As far as I’m aware, yes.
So considering that those individuals are supportive of genocide- not even denying, but supportive- That is a fairly big problem for the ecosystem.
Presumably, with their extremist and toxic views, they will be acting to keep criticism of their favorite Imperial states (say, China) from being too prominent.
They’ve actually been quite tolerant of all of us, to be honest. I don’t think they have any desire to be exclusive to tankies.
Supporting and justifying genocides is my line in the sand, personally. And that is a near-universal Tankie policy.
I don’t know where you’re making these assumptions from. They’ve actively promoted Beehaw, which defederated with Lemmygrad.
If they were acting in bad faith and just trying to shove ideology down your throat, they wouldn’t have done that. They would have at least declared their own instance to be an authoritarian flagship instance.
Yeah it’s not like theyre uncomfortable with socialism in general, this is like full on self identifying STALINISM. That’s something that comes with it’s own mess of human rights totalitarian crap, and pointing out that the US has also done terrible things(and oh boy has it) doesnt make that any better.
Like they arent the power to the people kind of socialists their logo is literally a tank.
I consider myself a socialist.
But Stalinists and other authoritarians have essentially reactionary politics.
I’m anarchocommunist (though I often say anarchosocialist because of loaded term stuff), and I view all authoritarian stances as truly horrific. The big great huge tragedy with capitalism is that the people with capital control the state, and therefor have authority to harm the populace. Bolshevism does not do anything to fix the tragic part. Vanguard party politics consistently devolves into authoritarian regimes, and those authoritarian regimes then harm the people.
The standard by which we should be judging any political or ethical framework is the degree of agency the most disenfranchised person in the system has.
China is also an Imperialist state, with borders and a realpolitik firmly grounded in ethnic supremacy.
Worth repeating that line I think. That China is an Imperialist ethnostate, because it is very true.
There is no doubt china is an imperialist state that views itself has having a manifest destiny like right to rule the world
I’m not actually sure I agree about Chinese culture, or even the Chinese state, pursuing world domination. It seems to me as if their goal is Imperialist domination of their bordering and nearby regions, and economic Imperialist influence globally. But not outright domination.
Though of course, China’s current borders are defined by Imperialism, as is its internal policy.
The ~90% of non-Han residents of the Chinese state are faced with policies exterminating local language and culture, and forcibly Han-ification - Which is Genocide by modern definitions. Xinjiang and Tibet are well-known regions with distinctive culture that were forcibly subjugated to the modern Chinese State.
Other historical Chinese states that have held influence in this region - Han or not - did not pursue extermination policies in this way. From that point of view, the CCP and its policies are betraying even the Chinese legacy of (semi-kinda-sorta) cultural pluralism.
Fellow AnCom here. Say it loud and say it proud.
I have to say that I had a really rough whiplash when I saw what kind of communities the admins of lemmy have created and are maintaining (I guess that is what you mean by tankies). Absolutely shocked that this is the credo of people making this “open/free/not controlled by company” software. A company might be preferable at this point >.>
These 2 people are the ones we’re supposed to put the faith into to maintain and develop the framework and architecture for all these potential sites? If we fund lemmy we fund them, if they give up then nobody else is probably going to take over, it sounds like a disaster just waiting to happen.
And okay, nice to hear that beehaw is blocking those communities but we’re still federated with everything else there, if I’m understanding it correctly, and it’s the same users that can easily cross between the instances? That’s not very reassuring either.
Considering that Reddit’s capitalist shenanigans is what brought redditors here, having socialist devs is not necessarily a bad thing.
You’d probably also be shocked at how many communists are strongly involved in FOSS development, and just how nice and great people they are on average.
In any case, don’t worry too much about it, their software is open source so if they suddenly turn evil, a fork is enough to fix it.
Socialism is not the same as what’s going on here. Socialism means you believe in good for the common citizen, not denying reality and wishing death and destruction on peaceful people.
Minor correction, socialism has one definition and one definition only: worker ownership of the means of production
I support that definition, but it’s false, unconstructive and arrogant to declare it’s the only one. It never has been. It’s not even Marx’s definition, which is undoubtedly an extremely influential one throughout history. This is the kind of dogmatism I’d expect from a tankie.
Socialism is a widespread global phenomenon with hundreds of variants and competing theories from a range of historical underpinnings. There never has been one definition, not even back in the 1800s.
Eh, agree to disagree
While I have to admit that I’ve been frustrated by the tankies during my short stay on lemmy.ml, I don’t think that’s a fair representation of their views.
Most I believe seem frustrated by a western world that seem entirely too content in accepting a narrative heavily biased in favor of laissez-faire capitalism and right wing narratives, to the extent that it has blinded them to the cruelty of regimes in China and Russia.
I think that in order to foster a fruitful discussion here and avoid the trenches that often form between differing political views on the web, trying first to understand and empathise with an opposing view is crucial. It’s been a good heuristic for me at least, except in those cases where there is zero intention of even trying to understand each other (where just ignoring works well).
I think it is a huge culture shock for redditors who are used to the idea of extremists being the alt right, and the ones that they are used to mainly associating with hate speech and being in agreement they are an unsavory group.
Particularly with a lot of redditors who joined lemmy just looking for a reddit alternative for their hobbies. Usually in reddit when you hear someone say they don’t want politics the image that comes to mind is some alt right fascist who get hung up on how other people live their personal life and complain about not being able to use hate speech.
So encountering supposed liberals who are very reminiscent of the alt right is incredibly jarring. It’s leading to some going wait…what?..
quick plug for /c/leftistinfighting
I am not worried about socialism, I am personally anti-capitalist too, at least in theory. I am worried about their extreme anti-NATO and seemingly pro-putin propaganda. If they kept these private I also wouldn’t mind it but they literally named the tech after their ideals. Ignoring these enormous red flags seems naive.
Or maybe you’re right - I’m misreading the situation and people like me who are bothered by that just shouldn’t be here in the first place, wrong place for us.
In any case, don’t worry too much about it, their software is open source so if they suddenly turn evil, a fork is enough to fix it.
I am not going to get into this discussion since we can’t know what will or wont happen but I am sure that maintaining a project like this requires much more than committing a bugfix to a fork.
Yep, it’s kind of like finding out something you use is made by antivaxers, flat earthers, holocaust deniers. Broad political ideology such as supporting communism isn’t an issue at all, but finding out some of them hold what feels very reminiscent of alt right extremists is eyebrow raising.
You’re very right, it makes me a bit wary, especially with uh, familial experience with authoriarian rulers.
Practically all modern technology stems from some pretty brutal history and a hell of a lot of colonialism. I think being informed is important but in most cases there’s exceedingly little you can do with this information.
Not using it is an option for something like social media. If this place turned out to be for instance a stormfront run one then it’d definitely be an easy pass without hesitation. At this point I’m new to this type of service so seeing how disconnected and independent from the problem players each instance is.
Apologies if it was unclear, I was directing the comment at the technology itself. You always can choose to use or not use an implementation of said technology for moral reasons.
I have to say that I had a really rough whiplash when I saw what kind of communities the admins of lemmy have created and are maintaining
Unfortunately that’s kind of a reality regarding FOSS in general. Platforms focused on smaller-scale moderation and a lack of overarching control first attract people who’re rightfully kicked off of everything else, or are really paranoid that they will be.
I don’t understand the reddit users who are claiming they don’t want to join Lemmy over political reasons. They could create their own instance with whatever rules they want and push whatever political agenda they want. The fact that the platform is decentralized means everyone can get with they want.
True. Let’s be honest though, in a world where people are used to huge centralized platforms like Twitter and Reddit, the Fediverse is unfamiliar and confusing. Not sure what can be done about it other than educating people. But there may always be a slight barrier to entry.
They’re just not smart enough to understand how it works.
Hey!
…Why do you have an 88 in your username?
Some people are born in 1988, lol. I appreciate the concern over dogwhistles but I would encourage you to report content you see that is not nice. If you plan to have a conversation with someone, please give them the benefit of the doubt.
:) Deal.
Yep! That’s the thing about federated platforms that seems really hard to drill into people’s heads. Go make your own thing. It’s genuinely not that hard.
Weak people need a strongman. They want to have someone tell them where to go instead of forging their own path. They absolutely love the idea of being told what to do.
How can someone honestly claim to be “in the middle” when one side openly embraces Nazis, sexism, and other forms of bigotry? What’s the middle ground there?
There’s a difference between needing a safe space and not wanting to hang out with the KKK.
It’s an Overton Window thing. They’ve watched so much “fair and balanced” far-right media that it has made them believe that they’re centrists.
I think the answer is the words we use, which are incredibly myopic, literally two-dimensional with LEFT and RIGHT.
This reduction to the binary is exhausting, and probably forces people to think in bad faith. It is all bad faith. The middle ground is meaningless. Bigots don’t like to be called out as bigots, and many people are too afraid to call bigots out.
I think the step forward is to be significantly more precise with our language, avoid the temptation to simplify, and to stop using tired labels that are easily hijacked by bad actors.
Actually, left and right can even be one dimensional. Heh.
They only want to murder half of all trans people, not all?
I guess the other option is only half-murder all the trans people, but yeah; these compromise-always people need to take a second and actually THINK about what they’re asking us to compromise on. They sound incredibly foolish and disconnected.
They know what they’re asking for. They’re aiming for plausible deniability.
Yes. This is a different platform, I’d rather we don’t just transplant all the reddit problems here.
Lemmy is inherently political. It was and is a revolt against reddit’s staff, their business model and the influence of US politics, media and corporations on their platform due to their advertising model. This place wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t political differences.
We’re not here to impress people who were banned for spreading Nazism. Go to all the reddit-clones that started in the early 2010s when reddit got called out for hosting toxic racist-or-fascist hate communities and communities sexualizing minors (e.g. /r/jailbait).
Everything is inherently political. If anyone thinks it isn’t, it’s just because the politics favour them.
This is true, politics is not something distinct which can be considered separate from or optionally added to society, culture or economics, although Lemmy is also explicitly political. That might be more what I intended to say.
(The real kicker is realizing that abstaining is not politically neutral.)
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Very true. A good phrase is “the personal is political”. Politics refers to organization, power, and decision-making, and so much of our lives is determined by decisions outside our control.
Exactly. I’m not exactly hiding my politics.
If anything, I’m glad being open about it means that a lot of bigots aren’t going to use lemmy in the first place. A natural filter to keep the transphobes and McCarthyites elsewhere.
Yes, exactly. If we can have the equivalent of Reddit without the bigots, it’s a big plus. Tired as a trans woman to go on r/Gaming and see transphobic comments
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Voat was a school project that blew up in popularity and became infamous after the Nazis decided to use it as an easy platform to fester. It was not created as a response to anything reddit may have been doing at the time. It was just another link aggregator with comments that had user overlap with reddit.
If that is all true, the logic behind advertising it on Reddit at that time, and sticking to the position of “free speech absolutism” is kinda questionable. Maybe don’t plug your social media site when all the reprobates from r/C***town are looking for a new home. For your own good.
Another site was founded by a former Reddit admin over at tildes.net, but he was very explicit about what he was trying to do (2019 announcement - tldr: ban assholes, shun low-effort posts). It never had the problems Voat did.
There is a big problem with all these tech bros where they think an algorithm or a piece of software are what makes a community. They have no concept of society. No thoughts about what diasporas or social milieus they are trying to assemble. No thoughts at all about what the purpose of the thing is in the first place. They are very bad at this shit. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen someone be like “What if we did something like Reddit, but on the blockchain?” without even asking, who is this for? What problem does it solve?
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Agreed!
The fact that guys like that dont feel welcome on Lemmy is a testament to Lemmy getting it right. I think it differentiates itself from the awful social media clones of the past like Voat or Vidme. I’ll leave it at that because we should probably shy away from outrage bait. As much as I’d like to i cant do anything about him and he is driving his buddies away from us
I’ll leave it at that because we should probably shy away from outrage bait. As much as I’d like to i cant do anything about him and he is driving his buddies away from us
yeah, i’m not donning my mod hat here or anything but i think it’s nice and generally a good idea to not linger too much on weirdos and cranks you hate online. i think it’s an easy way to ruin a community’s vibe if you’re not careful or let it go on too much, and even if everyone in the conversation is otherwise acting cordial. there’s just… not much value in doing that, you know? we’re not talking a major politician here. these people do not “matter” in any meaningful sense.
Agreed. I’m hesitant to even join this conversation but in my opinion, we can refuse to tolerate intolerance/hate and still bee nice about it.
As this is a post on Beehaw, I’m going to abide by the rule and omit any unsavory words I was originally going to include 🙂
Whether intentional or not, the slur filter was one of the most genius things the Lemmy developers have ever done. No one was under any false pretenses that it was the absolute best way of moderating a space. In fact, everyone knew from the get-go that it had its fair share of problems! But it did one thing splendidly: it acted as a barrier against people obsessed with free speech who claim a slur filter is a tool used by some nebulous participants in the current culture war. I’ll refer to this comment made by user
uabstractionon Hacker News 2 years ago.Even to this day you see those people using the slur filter as a talking point against the devs, the software, the wider community, etc. even though it hasn’t been hard-coded or required for over a year at this point!
Meanwhile, as they continue to avoid Lemmy and prophesize its downfall, the people actually participating on Lemmy are growing a community and just generally vibing! No one is fainting at the thought that they can’t say a slur.
Not just the slur filter, the whole strong leftist flavor, hard moderation, and no stupid ideals of free speech lemmy had basically sent all the right wing extremists running.
I’m conflicted about the slur filter episode. Sure, a clever way to moderate a brand of toxic community participants. If I’m not mistaken, moderation tools were far from mature at that stage and lemmy.ml was an active community dealing with community issues. I wasn’t involved in the community outside of keeping an eye on the project development and perhaps the community needed a heavy handed solution - not for me to say. But the implementation left some questions and from my memory, dev response to pushback was not positive. I think it took over a year, maybe two, to remove.
That was the first exposure many, many people had to the Lemmy project - it probably resulted in a lasting erosion of trust in the software among people who had/have no interest in using the blocked slurs, and formed an impression that will continue to echo for many years despite the filter being removed. The impact goes far beyond people who would use or defend the use of the excluded language.
I don’t see an issue with slur filter either but from what I’ve read it was hardcoded and couldn’t be customized by other instances. Can you explain the reasoning behind that, why not let instances decide how far they want to go with their censoring policies? In my experience the only good moderation is manual context-aware moderation done by a person, text filters accomplish nothing except making people come up with slang terms or other workarounds. Seems weird to have this policy enforced in this way.
It’s open source software. You could even then remove the slur filter manually trivially, and with a small amount of technical skill, make that persist across updates.
It took them quite some time to move it to a user friendly place. It can be set in the server settings in the UI presented to administrators. Previously it was hard coded requiring a fork or maintaining code every update.
However, I’d like to highlight that many people interested in federated software are not as technically proficient as you are. Your thoughts on what is challenging probably doesn’t match what less technically proficient users think of as challenging. If federated software is to succeed, it needs to be approachable to many different kinds of people, not just the most tech literate of us.
What does political even mean here? I guess the usual “Don’t be racist, don’t be homophobic, don’t be transphobic etc.” I really don’t see much real political topics in my frontpage (local and all).
Historically, Lemmy has been very political (Marxist, pro-Russia/war, etc). But as of a few days ago the userbase is now mostly reddit users, so it feels quite different now. This is especially true if your instance admins choose who to federate with.
Oh no… Well I really really hope that this is in the past with the new users. Nothing but unpleasant experiences with Tankies.
I suspect most of them sit on lemmygrad. This is the beauty of instances and federation - nuance! Some users might be assholes on some instance communities, but if they’re not maintained in a way people are happy with, they can splinter off and make a better place. For instance, Beehaw can maintain a gaming community which is set up to be safe and avoid bullshit gamergate stuff, and they can call it “Gaming” because it’s not the only instance that can host one of those.
The issue with default subs and subs with obvious names on Reddit is that they build a certain personality and approach, foster certain views or don’t moderate well, and then new people come in and amplify that because that’s how they’ve seen the interaction working before. In that case, the best you can do is make a secondary one that has more strict rules - /r/truegaming, /r/games etc etc - which are difficult to grow because they’re unlinked. Being on beehaw means it’s part of the beehaw umbrella, so has to abide by the rules of the instance. Kind of a neat system.
I didn’t commit to Lemmy in the past for this reason. Lots of tankies and cranks. Figured the space wasn’t for me. But there are now other instances that are popular and other posts being made by people who don’t share the views of the original userbase, which I think is great. Those guys can still hang out in their own space and I can hang out in mine.
Yeah, I just hide lemmygrad communities and it’s all right
Be racist, homophobic, transphobic. For some people is part of their political identity.
claims he isn’t far right
Right-wing extremists do this to make it seem like their position is widely held and “normal.” The worst extreme right-wing party we have here in Finland (Valta kuuluu kansalle or “Power Belongs to the People”, aka Valta kuuluu Kremlille or “Power Belongs to the Kremlin”) claims to be center right. The head of the party is a pro-Russia flat earther who doesn’t believe in climate change, and the party is staunchly anti-immigration
Performative Overton acrobatics.
I don’t like politics precisely because of polarization and extremists. My first experience in the fediverse wasn’t good either. Russian invasion to Ukraine happened two months before, Elon Musk stated his intentions to buy Twitter, and I joined a random Mastodon instance. Guess what? Tankies supporting and defending Russia and anything related to communism.
Luckily, I discovered that there are a lot of more Mastodon and Lemmy servers, and I’m in those that I can call “home”.
It’s obvious that I don’t want to see far-right or alt-right content while I can. But I don’t want to see tankie or far-left content either. Like someone said in this post, discussing with a commie and disagreeing, even being in the left political spectrum, makes you a “fascist” or something similar.
It is funny how the only viable Reddit alternative I’ve found so far (here) isnt led by weird libertarian tech bros but communists lol
I’m amused by the idea that what is functionally an anarchist technology has been so effectively moulded by Marxist-Leninists.
Technology running on technology originally developed by the American Military-Industrial Complex. It is an odd mixture of influences.
The “centrists” that all all in favor of letting the oppressor and the oppressed talk their differences in a neutral playground are great.
Requires a level of love for the status quo and lack of reflection that never ceases to amaze.
Dude, you are not in the center. You are three steps from the neonazis and a thousand kilometers from the tankies. Even if you are opposed to the “extremes” and “mu horseshoe” yo are not equidistant.
I’m not that kind of communist so I won’t likely interact with lemmygrad but for the rest of lemmy I’m not concerned with the devs being tankies unless they lean hard into silencing disssenting views from the rest of the left like anarchists and other flavors of socialists
The beauty of the system is that they really don’t have that power. It’s open source and federated, so at most they can ban people from instances they run
True, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth I suppose. Just another of the many many grey areas of life and trying to be as ethical as possible under a capitalist system
Yeah no disagreement there, as a non-auth leftist tankies really activate my almonds
What’s funny is there is nothing stopping them from making their own instance. I think the hesitation stems from them coming to grips with reality that few people really want to engage with their messaging when they step out of their bubble.
Because they can’t make people who don’t agree with them miserable if they’re all relegated to their own bubbles.
One of the funny events on Mastodon was that someone set up an instance that was far right and almost within a few hours, all the other instances had de-federated from it and blocked it
No-one was stopping them setting up their own instance but they all said “you don’t play well with others so go play on your own!”
I believe defederation is one of the best things about the Fediverse. People who say objectionable things have the right to free speech too (within reason), but I just don’t want to see it or interact with them. Defederation enables peaceful coexistence in a way which could never work on a centralized social media platform.
That’s how a healthy society should be. Bigotry is always a minority of society. The media has been inflating its perceived reality to attract more people away from criticizing the current economical system. Fashism 2.0.
As Buenaventura Durruti said:
“No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.”
Not speaking for anyone but me, but sometimes when people say they something is too political it really means too much “extreme” political views. Personally I don’t want to interact with extreme auth-left or auth-right content. I think politely discussing why access to housing should be guaranteed by government, or arguing for lower corporate taxes or whatever, isn’t what bothers most people.
Fortunately Fedi allows instances who are fine with it host those users, and I don’t have to see it. And Lemmy -the project- isn’t political, it’s just software for which I’m grateful to the devs.
I was almost gonna agree until the end but unfortunately, I really can’t agree with the notion that technology is not political.
The project is political. The license they chose for the software, what they’re using to develop it, how they fund the development of the project are all very political things.
I don’t completely disagree, but that’s not what I meant. People are conflating the views of Lemmy’s main developers with the project itself, and I believe they can be separated.
Yes exactly, I call myself very left but the minute I tried /kbin a thread about china from lemmy.ml showed up and there full of Tianomon Square deniers I tried to engage but just after half an hour I was almost done with the whole reddit alternative and was on my way to delete my account.
People are put off of extremist places and don’t want to join them, think they are lost already to the extremists. Both online and in real life.
This is difficult to hear but may be good feedback to share with kbin.social’s admins and kbin’s devs in the kbinMeta magazine. I don’t want to see lemmy.ml defederated at this point, but it’s a risky one to have on the front page. It’s kind of nuanced:
Lemmy’s devs have been running a successful campaign to recruit Redditors to use their app, and many Redditors have chosen lemmy.ml (the instance run by its developers) by default. A few of us have been trying to sound a warning about this, but it’s muted amid the outrage at Reddit.
Lemmy’s developers are often described as “tankies” but the word seems to be acting as a euphemism, as though it’s just an eccentric subculture. The fact is Lemmy’s devs are stooges for the CCP. They actively welcome its propaganda on their instance, and they’ve compiled apologetics for the CCP’s human rights abuses including the Uyghur genocide.
At the same time, lemmy.ml is the primary instance for Lemmy, and an important support resource for instances that run on it. On top of that it’s now home to a lot of Redditors trying to build their own communities there. For those reasons I don’t think it should be defederated, but I think kbin.social might need a way to prevent the instance – or at least some specific communities – from reaching the front page.
For myself, I’ve blocked its china and technology communities, as well as a few specific users that I’ve seen post propaganda pieces there. I’m satisfied with that solution to address my own use, but your own experience makes me realize it still reflects on kbin.social to have that stuff reach our front page.
Yep, I’m working on solving this problem. I want everything to be clear in the end. However, in the meantime, I need your help to use the reporting option in such situations.
Makes sense. I’ve unblocked some things so I can help with reporting.
It’s looking a lot better right now, so I think ex-redditor posts are overwhelming and diluting a lot of the problematic content. There were even some things I thought I’d blocked but hadn’t – they just haven’t reached the front page since I created my account a few days ago.
It’s good to know there’s another solution on your radar, though. Thanks!
noob question, but where is the block UI
- To block users: when you go to someone’s profile there’s a 🚫 button to block them. It’s next to the “Follow” button, below their name.
- To block magazines/communities: the 🚫 (block) button is next to the Subscribe button in the sidebar. On mobile the sidebar gets moved to the bottom of the page, so you have to scroll down a ways to see it.
thanks, found those. I guess blocking an entire instance is still WIP
I think you’re right. There’s a “Blocked Domains” section to manage blocked hosts in Settings but I don’t see a UI to add domains to it yet. (It’s also unclear if it’d be for blocking instances, link posts, or both.)
I wish the fediverse is able to contain all the ideas, all the political positions and that disconnecting/blocking an instance is only used for behaviors like spamming. Not giving every political stance the opportunity to be a part of the same world fuels extremists.
Beehaw and other instances can kick all the users with far-right beliefs. That’s fair. But Lemmy users shouldn’t be blocked to listen to or even interact with them, in their own instances, if they wanted. Don’t help creating political ghettos.
I’m not super over how the fediverse works mechanically; I was under the impression that users could create their own instances and interact with who they choose to?
Take my reply with a grain of salt because I’m also very new to this. From what I understood, although you can create instances and interact with everyone, other instances can choose to cut ties (blocking) with your instance. For example, beehaw blocked lemmygrad.ml which can be seen at https://beehaw.org/instances (on the bottom of this page there’s a link in “Instances”). So, if your Lemmy account is on Beehaw, you won’t be seeing lemmygrad.ml posts. I don’t even know if it’s possible to comment on them (maybe someone can elaborate on this).
I don’t even know if it’s possible to comment on them (maybe someone can elaborate on this)
That’s correct, yeah. It’s basically the equivalent of the instance being blocked by a firewall as far as I understand.
Basically, but it is not seamless. The biggest hurtle is that when you stand up a new instance, you will only see posts and comments from after the instance was created. This is the way most federated social media works. The rationale is that it would be too burdensome (for both ends, the massive established instance, and the small upstart instance running on a budget VPS), and prone to DOS abuse, to request the entire history from every instance in the network. The initial experience on a new instance can be a little barren. After a while, when it has discovered other instances in the network and had time for new posts to roll in, it starts to be natural. This doesn’t happen automatically though. Actions must be taken (following a user, subscribing to a community, etc) for these connections to be made. The first actions must be deliberate, but it eventually begins to snowball with user activity.
When I started up my Mastodon instance, I had a bunch of friends, some situated on the network already, some newbies joining in, all follow each other and recommend other accounts to follow. Within a day, 400 instances had been discovered. Months later, it has discovered over 12,000.
How would I be blocked from “listening to” (that’s never what’s going on) psedo-Nazis in my own instance?
Sorry, I didn’t understood what you meant. Especially the parenthesis part.
That’s the unimportant part.
Let me be clear. I’m asking, “How would I be blocked from listening to and interacting with anyone in my own instance?”
Oh no no no. Sorry, it was probably my fault since english is not my native language. I was referring to theirs instances! in your example, the neo-nazis instances.
In other words, I was trying to say that I agree with instances (like beehaw) being able to block what they consider to be toxic instances, but I’m against removing instances from the lemmy fediverse if that’s even possible. Like, removing them from the network.
Well, you’re in luck, that is exactly how things are.
