I was super into the idea of lemmy.ml and actually had some extensive conversations with them and with lemmygrad when I first joined Lemmy. I didn’t agree with them on practically anything, but whatever, it is fine. Then, lemmy.ml mods started deleting my comments when they decided that I was expressing the incorrect viewpoint and that viewpoint needed to be deleted to clear the way for the correct viewpoint. That’s kind of a red line for me in terms of whether or not I feel like fuckin with a particular instance, and I pretty much turned my back on it.

Hello! I’m a guy who decided to join lemmy a few months ago, specifically because I was absolutely enraged by how moderation on Reddit worked. I am also taking part rather vigorously in the conversation about how much I dislike .ml moderation practices! I think I might be a little bit of an agitator in all this, because In joined lemmy after about a medium bit of research, and then jumped into it full tilt with the idea of “why not, I spent so much time as a revolutionary, myself!” And then I hit whatever the internet/globalization has done to what I recognize as leftist political spaces.

AMA, I guess!

For some background about myself, I’m an older millennial, who grew up with disparate web forums which were generally hidden behind a random website. My favorite haunt was punkbands.com, and loved LAN parties and early MMORPGs. Anyways, I had to get off the internet for a while to make a living, but eventually got to a spot where I could again visit the world wide web during working hours. One of my coworkers introduced me, through my first “smart phone” (an android, like, whatever was around in 2011 and cheap as fuck but still let me get online) to reddit. I really loved that old(ish) school internet, where people could spam and insult eachother within limits, and the community policed itself through a somewhat democratic process. I was legit excited to join lemmy, given how far I think reddit had fallen and how much disinformation had infected it, and how similar it appeared to the older, more democratic internet of my youth.

However, I found that a large part of lemmy is dominated by people who profess to be leftists, but ambush you with ideological purity tests and subsequent abuse if you don’t pass. I questioned a post on the .ml world news sub that came from a source that is literally a Syrian and Bolivian governmental news outlet, which alleged that the US military was stealing crude oil and raw wheat from Syrian oil derricks/Syrian farmers. I used mediabiasfactcheck.com to support my questioning of this source. I also appealed to logic, questioning why the US would steal things that it exports. A mod there (I believe the username is davos) engaged me in a conversation spanning hours, where we exchanged information about whether mediabiasfactcheck.com was a reasonable source to help assess the validity of media. While the conversation was uncomfortable, we each exchanged information and links supporting our arguments. Because I did not accept his outright rejection of medibiasfactcheck.com as a way to assist with the judement of media, I was banned and all of my comments were deleted.

Since then, I have met another .ml mod (username yogthos), and engaged in a long conversation about this same topic (.ml censorship). It was in a meta sub, hosted on the .ml instance. The conversation I am referring to has since been deleted, and I am not sure if it is possible to find it again, since my own history has disappeared; I will be happy to answer questions of anybody with the tech savvy to retrieve these exchanges. Anyway. In this meta thread, I engaged several users about the issue of unfair .ml moderation, alongside several other lemmy users. During the course of this exchange, a .ml user made an assertion that the OP (who was complaining about the “tankie problem”) was banned from the .ml instance because they had, somewhere undefined, insisted that the Tienanmen Massacre had actually happened. As a note, please understand that this was about a week before the start of June, and nobody so far in this thread had mentioned Tienanmen Square. Anywhere. Anyways, I questioned this particular statement, and yogthos suddenly butted in with a ton of weird sources that supported his claim that Tiennenma Square never happened. They insisted that the whole thing was a Color Revolution that was sponsored by the CIA, and that actually the students of the Tienanmen Square had attacked the Chinese Soldiers. I insisted that this was inconsistent with prevailing evidence, but was told that I simply needed to watch the various videos and read the blogs to understand that it was all untrue. I also engaged with some uders about my own ideology, where I was insulted as a “lib” for stating my intense distaste for authoritarianism. yogthos, the .ml moderator who I spoke with, told me that “libs don’t understand” that authoritarianism is ok if it is in defense of fascism… but did not expound as to how fascism was defined.

As for my evidence, I have shared it in some of the other posts. However, if you’ll look at the moderation history of .ml, under my user name, you will see that I am banned from several subs, and I think from the whole .ml instance. It will be for “Rule 4,” which from what I can tell is spam, or advertising. I have never taken part in anything that resembles spam or advertising. I have, though, had comments that insist that there was some kind of violence surrounding Tienanmen Square, or debate the validity of news from Syrian government media sources, removed from .ml instances. You may also notice that I was banned from subs like palestine and usa, which I have never actually participated in, aside from upvoting or downvoting.

You will also, looking back, hopefully find the initial conversations I reference in this post. If you have specific questions, I will try to figure out how to find them, using the mod log.

This is a long post… and I’m sorry. I guess I just really don’t want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.

I’m sure I have missed a ton here, and paradoxically written far too much. I am happy to answer any questions or critique, as long as it is relatively polite and relevant.

Edit: I’m also just kind of a nerd about propaganda and discourse in international relations, especially in online spaces. I’ve studied it. Ive written papers on it. I find these things incredibly meaningful and important, so I’ve gotten involved here.

First of all, the complaints are not without substance. Some of their admin decisions are highly questionable and obviously politically motivated. However I think the idea of defederation is a huge overreaction.

What do people think about lemmy.ml?

They have always been left-aligned, despite officially being privacy/FOSS focused. This is largely due to the history of Lemmy, which was created by leftist developers and existed in relative obscurity for a couple of years prior to the reddit API exodus a year ago. They have received a good number of relatively apolitical users since the API exodus due to their branding, but many of those users eventually chose to leave to other servers.

Right now they are sitting right around 2.5k MAUs, same as us.

Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically?

I don’t believe it creates problems for Lemmy users, but I can see the argument for why it does. I think there’s a misconception that lemmy.ml is still the flagship instance or new users are being drawn to them, but I just don’t think that’s the case. People dont really recommend lemmy.ml to new users, because it’s already common knowledge about their political leanings. And they’ve never prioritized promotion of that instance on join-lemmy.org or anywhere else that I’m aware of. This is borne out by the data I just shared, which shows their share of the Lemmy userbase has steadily declined over time.

For sh.itjust.works specifically, I don’t agree that it’s creating problems for our users. Our server has literally grown in the garden planted by lemmy.ml users. We are less dependent on lemmy.ml today than ever before, and now is when people decide they want to defederate? That seems really lame and somehow duplicitous.

I think to the extent that there are problems with the lemmy.ml userbase, they have come more recently after hexbear got defederated from most of the fediverse. I think some long time users on hexbear and lemmygrad who got a taste of the wider fediverse decided to move over to lemmy.ml so they could keep pushing their ideology. That’s not ideal but I don’t think defederation of the whole server is a proper response to a handful of hexbear trolls up to their old tricks.

For me personally as an admin, I can confidently say that I don’t feel like lemmy.ml users have been disproportionately involved in bad behavior or trolling. I’ve removed my fair share of hostile comments in political arguments, but no more offensive or combative than stuff I see from our own users, lemmy.world, lemm.ee, or any big server. I haven’t seen them brigading communities or threads, aside from the ones located on their own server, which is obviously fine.

In terms of their admins, I have to acknowledge that they sometimes make mistakes with moderation. But moderation on Lemmy is also a really difficult task. One important factor is that they host a disproportionate number of communities and especially political communities. Here on SJW, our most active communities tend to be fairly non-controversial. I cannot imagine the moderation burden for active political communities such as those hosted on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, and I’m thankful they’re doing it instead of us.

TLDR Lemmy.ml is basically alright with me, aside from some minor annoyances. I think it’s kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them. But that’s just my personal opinion, I will of course abide by the wishes of my fellow sh.it.heads.