Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ?
selokichtli@lemmy.ml 2 days agoAh, I see. Well, I had a discussion in that thread too and it felt off at some point. I replied about a similar crime backed by the CIA and some people accused me of whataboutism, while the other guy assumed I was denying the Tiananmen Square massacre. That was not the case.
I used to participate in a subreddit where a permanent set of people, including moderators, would downvote you to oblivion as soon as they read a divergent opinion, though, the subreddit wasn’t about a specific ideology. It wasn’t about arguments, it was systemic. They would eventually ban you if you insisted on your points of view. Both things are shitty, in my opinion, and while one is more permanent than the other, the banning felt at least more straightforward to me.
What I find excessive is the instance ban.
OpenStars@discuss.online 16 hours ago
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.
selokichtli@lemmy.ml 16 hours ago
This was pretty informative, thank you. As I said, this instance-bans are just too much, so I mostly agree with your point of view. Would like to read what these admins have to say about the situation.
OpenStars@discuss.online 15 hours ago
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.