Comment on The lemmy.ml Problem
taipan@lemmy.world 6 months agoWhile you certainly are free to not care about lemmy.ml mods blocking users from unrelated communities for criticizing China or Russia anywhere on the fediverse, which effectively silences lemmy.world users, there are currently 1,019 upvotes vs. 92 downvotes on the “Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem” post, which suggests that most lemmy.world users who are aware of the issue do care.
Nobody is claiming to want to change the minds of lemmy.ml mods. We just don’t want to have to worry about whether posting something mildly negative about China or Russia on a post anywhere on the fediverse that somehow catches the attention of lemmy.ml mods will cause us to lose the ability to participate in a community such as !linux@lemmy.ml.
Condoning this censorship from lemmy.ml corrupts the “marketplace of ideas” because it distorts the discourse visible on lemmy.world to favor the political preferences of lemmy.ml’s mods. This affects every lemmy.world user, whether they block lemmy.ml or not, because there is not way to opt out of the chilling effects besides defederation.
s38b35M5@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You’ve got me thinking about it, but I still just come back to, “this doesn’t affect me.” But it would affect me if LW was to defederate, which has already been discussed dozens of times in the past. If I look at the ML modlog, I just don’t see evidence of what is being claimed beyond this incident. Rule 1 is being misused and a mod or mod team are being assholes. That sucks. I don’t think it means that the posts and/or visibility of content of thousands are at risk in the way being presented.
I equate that more to the crowd yelling, “yeah!” more so than carefully considered agreement.
Thank you for having this discussion. I’ll continue to ruminate on it. If it means anything, when I read the OP by SpaceCadet, I subbed to LW or other large-ish communities for the ones I follow at ML in hopes that they grow.