The lemmy.ml Problem

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨support@lemmy.world⁩

Dear Admins and Users of lemmy.world,

I am writing to express my concerns about the impact of lemmy.ml on our community. It has come to my attention that lemmy.ml frequently disseminates propaganda and engages in historical revisionism. Moreover, there have been instances where their admin privileges were used to suppress dissenting views, reminiscent of the already defederated lemmygrad instance.

While personal blocking of lemmy.ml is an option, it does not address the broader issue of new users potentially being influenced by misleading content. It is crucial that we protect our users from a continuous stream of biased information.

To illustrate these concerns, I have provided a link to a detailed post on the Fediverse that documents these issues comprehensively [Here].

Given these points, I urge the admins to consider a defederation from lemmy.ml. If their users wish to remain part of Lemmy.ml, that is entirely acceptable, but we should take steps to prevent the propagation of harmful misinformation, especially in their comment sections.

Thank you for your consideration.

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Comments

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Anticorp@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not only are they heavily censoring content and comments, they do it at the database level so there’s no mod log of the events, and users are unaware that their content has been removed.

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- SpaceCadet@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You can still see that your comment had been removed, but you can’t see the biased mass removals of content, like mass purging all China critical comments from a post, unless you’re quick enough to screenshot the modlog.
  
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  - Anticorp@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They’re purging the modlog somehow. I received a message from an admin of another instance who let me know that he happened to see my comment disappear, but he couldn’t figure out how it was removed because there was no record of it. When I went back to the comment to check, it looked like it was still there to me. So, I’m not sure exactly what they’re doing, but they’re doing something funky.
    
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muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Do it defederate the living bastards. Admins are now banning people from all .ml communities for disagreeing on a different community. I believe some guy got banned from all .ml communities for posting things .ml didnt like about tianamin square.

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- SpaceCadet@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  I believe some guy got banned from all .ml communities for posting things .ml didnt like about tianamin square.
  
  That was me, yes.
  
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  - muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Damn lemmy small af lol
    
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Ibaudia@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I also got banned from all communities on .ml that I had participated in after making a joke about how Tienanmen Square was like a glue trap for tankies. Really bad image for Lemmy. Considering we’re growing as a community, I don’t see why we should allow authoritarians to participate. Allowing that will just ingratiate their standards into the culture of the platform.

Image

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mysticpickle@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Please defederate from lemmy.ml it’s pretty much the new hexbear.

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kabe@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There are some good points here, but I think defederation should always be a last resort and especially so in this case, given that we are talking about lemmy.ml here.

Since it was the former flagship server (in activity, at least) before LW came along, there are still many thriving, non-political communities hosted there. To cut them all off would be a net-negative to the average Lemmy user, I would argue.

That’s not to say that I agree with the actions of the .ml admins, or don’t think that opening a dialogue with them about moderation policies isn’t a great idea, of course. Let the individual user figure out for themselves which communities they want to engage with and which ones they want to avoid, I say.

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- Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  there are still many thriving, non-political communities hosted there
  
  And that, in fact, is my main concern with ml. They have lots of communties which are non-political for sure but, these communities come along with an assortment of lies and Propaganda. At which point the negative outweigh the positive?
  
  And even in the non-political Communities your comments gets censored when they are not on line with their views.
  
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  - kabe@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    but, these communities come along with an assortment of lies and Propaganda.
    
    So block those individual communities that post what you consider propaganda.
    
    At which point the negative outweigh the positive?
    
    With a server like, say, Hexbear, this would be an easy calculation. Defederate and what does the average user miss out on? Not a whole lot. On the other hand, .ml has a wide variety of technology, open source, gaming, hobby, etc. communities that don’t even touch on politics.
    
    I regularly visit many of them, so for me at least, it would take a lot more on the negative scale to even break even.
    
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- Blaze@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  there are still many thriving, non-political communities hosted there. To cut them all off would be a net-negative to the average Lemmy user, I would argue.
  
  Agreed. To address this, I started this thread to see which lemmy.ml don’t have alternatives on other instances: lemmy.world/post/16235541
  
  Hopefully that can help people who want to avoid lemmy.ml.
  
  I guess at the end of the day, people should be able to choose whether they go to the lemmy.ml communities or the alternatives
  
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  - kabe@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    See, now that’s a much more positive approach. Users making informed decisions and organically migrating is much more in keeping with the Fediverse spirit than admins wielding the defederation hammer, IMO.
    
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- Ibaudia@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The non-political communities on .ml are poisoned by mods who ban users based on their political opinions they voice in other communities. If you’re critical of China, you will likely be banned from all communities on .ml, regardless of if they’re political.
  
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  - tron@midwest.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They banned the Plex mod, who was doing good work, for basically nothing as far as I can tell. Effectively killed the community. Rest in peace BrooklynMan
    
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- awwwyissss@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  let the individual user figure out for themselves
  
  What a ton of people will figure out is that the fediverse has a serious problem with propaganda and moderation. They’ll come check out the Fediverse, see it’s full of extremist political content, and go back to Reddit.
  
  I’m thrilled about the potential of the Fediverse to be something great, but I won’t even tell anyone I use it in it’s current state.
  
  Defederating malicious propaganda instances like Lemmy.ml should be a no-brainer. It’s not “people I disagree with,” it’s a murderous authoritarian government’s tool for spreading lies.
  
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  - kabe@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    First impressions to new users is an important factor, I agree, but is it really"full of extremist political content"?
    
    Scrolling through the first 4 pages of Lemmy World today, I see no extremist content at all. All of the political posts are standard liberal/left-of-centre talking points and the only things related to .ml content are three posts complaining about tankies, off the back of the original post that made a splash yesterday.
    
    I can’t see anything that would be putting potential newcomers off in droves.
    
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steventhedev@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Calling to defederate merely on the basis of political opinion might be premature. However, I suspect defederation will happen for legal reasons: they host users who openly support terrorist organizations designated as such by the EU. LW is subject to Dutch law - hosting such content is more of a gray area than CSAM, but still very much illegal in most countries.

The reason I’m not pushing here with examples is because I have not yet contacted the mods/admins to remove said content. They may have simply not been aware and I’ll give them that chance. But even seeing that content has a chilling effect on users who would contribute - even in unrelated communities.

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- Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Like in the other comment, it’s not their view on politics what is the problem. Its that they straight up lie. They try to rewrite history and deny well established facts. And if you try to call them out, they lie even more and ban you.
  
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  - deweydecibel@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Who is “they”? The entire instance? Every single user in every single community on that instance You don’t think people around here spread lies, too?
    
    Hexbear and lemmygrad were instance-wide operations. They existed for the purpose of disruption. Lemmy.ml is not that and has never been. It holds a large body of individuals who share the same beliefs, but that’s not the whole instance.
    
    And are we establishing a dedicated, impartial, fact checking body to evaluate everything? If not, then defederating the entire instance based on “lies”, determined by people with their own biases, is about as slippery a slope as you can possibly get.
    
    Besides, you keep talking about “lies” but what I see in the evidence you linked is mostly about admin actions. So let’s not punish the users of either instance for their admin, let’s open some dialogue about it.
    
    But the greater issue here is that the whole concept of this federated platform is basically moot the more fractured the federation becomes, and this would create the most evidence of that. I agree the admin actions over there are eyebrow raising, but the biggest instance defederating from one of the other biggest and oldest instances is cutting off our arm, their arm, and making this whole thing even more confusing for new users.
    
    I don’t know if there’s a good answer, here. Rogue admins in charge of massive instances is not something that can be dealt with easily. But defederating is going to cause more issues than it solves.
    
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- SpaceCadet@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s not defederating on the basis of political opinion. It’s defederating on the basis of extreme intolerance towards and censorship of people who have different, non-fringe opinions that aren’t even controversial in most parts of the world.
  
  Right now, the instance hosts a lot of let’s say mainstream, non-political communities, purely because lemmy.ml was the first instance and so “popular” by default. The way the mods over there behave, it’s clear that they’re not suited to be a mainstream instance for these communities. Unfortunately due to network effect, people won’t just move.
  
  The only way to dislodge these communities and move them to more neutral instances is if larger instances like lemmy.world start defederating lemmy.ml.
  
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  - steventhedev@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Defederation is a tool of last resort. Before taking that step as a community we should attempt to engage the admins to align them towards more acceptable behavior. Migrating communities away from instances with petty and abusive admins is always a good idea, and this absolutely qualifies.
    
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awwwyissss@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I absolutely agree. For the sake of the Fediverse and it’s potential to be great, cut out the malicious propaganda machine Lemmy.ml.

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- elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  its* potential to be great.
  
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p5yk0t1km1r4ge@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Ooooh lemmy drama

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Delta_V@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
The lack of moderation on lemmy.ml is a problem. For example:

lemmy.world/post/20285303

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Alice@hilariouschaos.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Ok so I’m no one here and not on the .world team.

So don’t take what I’m saying personally or anything bc I’m not meaning it in any kind of angry or combative way. Not trying to argue with you or anyone.

I’m not of the same beliefs that .ml or the developers are. So I guess you can say you and I agree that yea their messed up I get it.

But that’s the issue with the whole fediverse thing. Even though I do agree with you about .ml

People are allowed to do whatever they want and believe whatever they want. That’s not up to you. Don’t Take that as an attack, I’m not meaning it as one.

Think of it this way:

It’s like .ml making this post but about your personal beliefs (they probably already do)

But that’s not up to them to get what I’m trying to say ? Yea it’s fucked up but ppl are allowed to believe whatever they want. Even if what they believe is shitty. The thing is, one person doesn’t and shouldn’t get to make that call for everyone else.

No one person knows what’s best for everyone

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- Eheran@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I could agree with you if they would not specifically suppress anyone not agreeing with them. That is the big issue, meaning that anyone there only sees that one side of everyone agreeing with their nonsense, with no chance to get out.
  
  And we absolutely know that making shit up is not good for people and where that can lead to. It does not need to be "best’, just not the absolute worst.
  
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  - Alice@hilariouschaos.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Unfortunately though… that is lemmy though dude. That’s what I’m trying to say.
    
    It’s by design. That’s how and why the fediverse is the way it is. It’s stupid yes I don’t agree with it either. But that is the truth.
    
    Echo chambers. That’s how they want it.
    
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- SpaceCadet@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  let’s pretend lemmy was heavily conservative instead of liberal making this exact post.
  
  I think you misunderstand the issue, so as you mentioned conservative, let’s illustrate it with an analogy.
  
  The situation with lemmy.ml right now, and apologies for the reddit analogy, is the equivalent if on reddit the batshit crazy mods of formerly /r/the_donald or /r/conservative could ban you from /r/linux because you said something bad about Trump on /r/memes. At that point it’s not about dissenting opinions, it’s about them wielding power they shouldn’t have over those dissenting people.
  
  An instance that operates like that shouldn’t be part of mainstream lemmy and host general purpose communities. The only way to take that power from them is to shun them, i.e. defederate.
  
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  - AchtungDrempels@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I wonder what your “call out” looked like that then actually got you temp banned from all those communities, have you laid that open anywhere too?
    
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- ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  No one person knows what’s best for everyone
  
  But we do know what isn’t best for everyone, and that’s lies and disinformation.
  
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  - Alice@hilariouschaos.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thank God you’re not in charge of anything important in real life lol
    
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- Blaze@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Well put
  
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  - Alice@hilariouschaos.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Ty
    
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Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m with roflmasterbigpimp here because I mean look, strongly-worded letter format

This guy fucks

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