The mods of all the major communities there remove comments criticism Hexbear and usually follow it up with a ban. It’s absolutely clear what is happening and it shouldn’t be allowed to continue.
Welcome to federation, where basically every instance is a proxy to all others.
Btw you are also free to block any instance yourself.
Unfortunately blocking an instance only blocks posts on that instance, not users from it, which is the main issue people have with those instances.
I use Connect for Android, and when I block an instance it blocks the users too. Their comments are still here, but sort of spoiler tagged.
Yes but surely you can understand that even votes from these poorly moderated instances are distorting the discourse elsewhere in the lemmyverse.
Just because you can’t see it does not mean the problem is solved.
So we wanna defederate to steer votes in a certain way? Worrying so much about votes is such redditor behavior.
I would challenge you to think about how votes can influence the culture of a community.
You’re correct in that worrying about how many upvotes you can accumulate is very reddit.
I’m not really talking about karma accumulation, but rather the way votes can influence visibility of comments. When done methodically, this promotes some ideas over others, and presents an illusion that “everyone else thinks so”. This is a very, very powerful way to influence a community.
We are hard wired to absorb the opinions of those around us. Sure you can disagree with other group members, but even that is an acknowledgement that the alternative perspective you’re disagreeing with is a popular one.
You could absolutely influence people’s opinions on lemmy just with a hacked instance that manipulated votes on comments by just a few dozen points.
You make valid points. Apologies for the Reddit accusation.
But the one thing that comes to mind is that this kind of Communist, like in lemmy.ml, is not big enough to cause this sway.
Sure, the instance is massive, but most users don’t hold those same beliefs. Most people go to it as the “default” instance. So I really don’t think they have the numbers to cause this issue.
Sure. This thread is talking about lemmy.ml, but I’m talking about the current state of the lemmyverse.
I’ve posted this elsewhere in this thread but my unpopular opinion is that federation by default is not sustainable.
Presently admins federate with everyone and blacklist those which are problematic.
It’s inevitable that in the near future someone with a rudimentary understanding of hosting will be able to spin up a dozen instances, each with a few thousand bot accounts, intent on upvoting every “genocide Joe biden” comment.
The fediverse will shatter. Admins will realise they need policies to guide their own moderation, and acknowledge that they can only federate with specific instances with compatible moderation.
So instead of blacklisting bad instances, you need to change to whitelisting good ones.
Yeah it’s a very common misconception, I find it weird that people are still having it though when 0.19 is widely available.
Maybe they’re just saying it as a way to be dismissive of the issue, this kind of stuff happens often when people report or call to attention malicious instances or malicious users.
Honestly I think it’s just people that haven’t thought very deeply about the nature of communities they’re supporting.
nor how letting a large, poorly moderated instance run wild can negatively affect discourse on the entire platform. Before Hexbear was defed’d on lemmy.ca, Lemmy was damn near unusable on many threads because of the spam and trolling. Blocking them doesn’t stop them from bothering those who haven’t and it affects the platform as a whole.
Blocking is not a real solution, it is putting a blanket over the problem and pretending it went away. People who suggest you do that are suggesting you enable bad faith actors by ignoring their behavior, as opposed to reporting it and/or making others aware so they can report it. We all need to work better to make the platform and spaces on it better, if no one works at it, nothing gets better.
Exactly! Letting problematic instances poison the well leads to a net negative to the platform.
My unpopular opinion: Federating with everyone by default is not sustainable.
It’s inevitable that the lemmyverse will shatter, and everyone will be better for it.
Instances will develop their own policies around moderation and behaviour, and federate with other instances with compatible policies.
Basically, federation only works if everyone is acting in good faith. It wouldn’t take much for a single entity acting in bad faith to fuck the entire fediverse presently.
Presently admits are blacklisting the bad faith instances. That’s going to change so admins whitelist compatible instances.
Btw you are also free to block any instance yourself.
Not how the instance blocking feature works. it’s a common misconception because people don’t read the docs and just assume it does what they think it does. From the News Section on Join-Lemmy:
Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.
It’s not an alternative or replacement to defederation, not even close. I’m really surprised this misconception still persists even after widespread adoption of 0.19.x across the Lemmy network.
So you don’t care about the instance you want to ban all the users from there. That’s quite open minded and tolerant!
Honestly, I’m so weary of being open minded and tolerant. I just want to look at linux memes in peace.
Paradox of tolerance, if you tolerate the intolerant then tolerance quickly goes extinct.
Can we stop this please?
It was never that revolutionary in the first place - “if you allow assholes to be assholes everything will go to shit” - I’m shocked.
… but now, after seeing it as a reply to every second comment on lemmy, it’s just spam and doesn’t inform discussion in any way.
You can block instances for yourself instead of blocking them for everyone.
Good lord. It’s as though you haven’t bothered to read any other comments in this thread.
Blocking instances yourself doesn’t solve anything. At all.
Of course they didn’t, they’re just reactively replying to comments that trigger them hoping that the people they reply to also get triggered. They are a troll.
I’m all for defederating Hexbear, but lemmy.ml is absolutely huge compared to Hexbear. To motivate the community to do that you’d need quite a bit of proof. Or at least something rather compelling. Do you have any proof of what you’re referring to?
Asking for proof of what is an open secret on lemmy seems disingenuous.
I think that instances like hexbear, lemmygrad, and lemmy.ml are very bad advocates for Lemmy and will most likely end up damaging it more than anything else, keeping the “normies” out.
They argue in Bad faith, say the most radical stuff they can think of, and purge anything bad said about totalitarian regimes they idolize. China, Russia, Iran, all considered victims of the evil west…
- Uyghur camps > not happening
- Tiannamen square > Just some peaceful protests
- invasion of Ukraine > NATO forced Russia to do it
I would like to see proof of how a community doing its own thing of sharing their radical views on their instance is damaging.
I haven’t seen any rampant behavior of lemmy.ml users going to other instances and dogpiling certain posts or comment section. That may be defederation worthy.
The denial of having seen it yourself, is something I don’t believe. Therefore I don’t believe you made your reply in good faith.
Not all of lemmy.ml is a cesspool filled with poisonous cretins, but they (tankies) control the instance at conversational, moderation and administration level. So it will not change, only get worse.
Just like we see with the MAGAts… Once you start drinking your own coolaid… the sky is the limit.
The denial of having seen it yourself, is something I don’t believe.
If it’s so rampant that you find it unbelievable I haven’t seen it, then it must be very easy to prove. Can you please provide a proof?
but they (tankies) control the instance…
It’s their instance. That’s not proper grounds for defederation in my opinion, when the damage is contained within their instance.
As I stated in my preface, no thank you.
And if it is contained in their instance… it does not matter that the borders are guarded by deFederation.
No worries. I never expected you to have the proof anyways, but I wanted readers to be aware that you don’t.
That’s fair. I think most people can make up their own minds looking at the thread, posts contents and then their own experience in the .ml scape compared to the rest of Lemmy.
Hexbear loves to dogpile as well. I’ve seen a couple of raiding threads linking to other threads in Lemmy.ml making fun of whoever. But in reality they’re just directing people over there to shit on someone. At least, that’s what I saw last year, so I’m very distrusting of them.
That and the Lemmy.ml AMA thread where one admin was all buddy buddy with Hexabear users during their federation.
I abandoned an old account because Hexbear bullies followed me around and downvoted everything. Come to think of it, I haven’t posted a single thing since then, and I had a bunch of posts with hundreds of votes.
This literally cannot be true, because hexbear accounts cannot downvote.
If so maybe it was lemmy.ml, I get them confused sometimes
IF lemmy.ml is admin’d by the Lemmy devs, themselves,
AND their ideology/prejudice is being obstructed by the Lemmy-verse,
THEN wouldn’t it be rational for them to engineer-in to Lemmy, itself, protections for their ideology?
Breaking the Fediverse’s ability to “manage” them?
or breaking the Fediverse’s ability to have any alternative-ideology be its core??
I’m thinking they could either adulterate privacy, deliberately, or they could force blocking to be porous, or something…
IOW, I’m thinking that it is strategically-incompetent to allow tankies to own our core tech, exactly as it is strategically-incompetent to allow right-wing highjackers-of-our-countries to do so.
?
Check my history, I called them out for the NATO one today and they threw all sorts of random shit at me that was off the central point, just looking for a mistake in my wording.
Yep. They were claiming that Putin invaded Ukraine to stop fascists. And that they were liberators. I was like, why would one fascist care what other fascists do? In the US, our fascist, wealthy Republicans largely supported Hitler till pearl harbor. But I did agree with them that the Soviet Union absolutely liberated many countries against their will post WWII. And that those countries still hold it against them to this day.
The gulags were mentioned and they were like, but but but America jails more! To which I told them that was bad. But the West doesn’t kill millions of prisoners the way they did. And all for political dissent, reminding them of just two weeks ago when Putin had Navalny killed for political dissent.
The absurd thing is, I’m one hundred percent down for Marxism. And largely agree politically with his theory plus some modernization. So technically we would agree on a lot of things there. It’s just the Engles and Lenin bullshit I disagree with, and has shown to have failed. Or caused their downfall historically. But they are primarily leninists, dedicated ideologically to authoritarians and strongmen above all reality.
But they are primarily leninists, dedicated ideologically to authoritarians and strongmen above all reality.
Why does that mean they should be banned? Is speech that we agree with the only permitted speech?
Just because you think they’re wrong doesn’t mean they should be banned. Banning them makes it look like we’re afraid of people reading their points, which gives them power and credibility
I have not commented on whether or not I think they should. Frankly I’m ambivalent. Considering many of the others that have been defederated. I think it’s kind of hypocritical that Lemmy.ml hasn’t. Personally though I don’t have need or desire to defederate them. It’s pretty easy, if annoying to poke holes in their arguments where important.
However it’s important to remember that each server is answerable to it’s community and ownership. If world defederated from lemmy.ml you’d be unaffected. And seeing the disdain lemmy.ml has for many types of speech. I’m not overly motivated to make any case to keep them around either. Offering them what they deny others.
Considering many of the others that have been defederated. I think it’s kind of hypocritical that Lemmy.ml hasn’t.
So what? If it was wrong to defederate from those other instances then this can be wrong as well
However it’s important to remember that each server is answerable to it’s community and ownership
Or, more accurately, answerable to the appearance of a community and ownership. All of the major instances are heavily astroturfed by various state and corporate entities. Which includes both the United States/West and China/Russia. World is western aligned and ML is not. It’s a proxy war in cyberspace, same as occurs on reddit and Twitter and elsewhere. The solution to such a proxy war is not to cede all ground to the West - such action would not promote truth or critical thought
It could be. It’s not. But it could have been.
And do you have any proof of that? I’ve not seen anything of the like. I’m Marxist myself. Just not Leninist. I have no major issues on world. I tend to get downvoted about equally from capitalist to leninist. Up voted too. I’ve not noticed any anti-left trend. Anti ml? Sure. But they are not left in any meaningful sense beyond nominally. Authoritarians always ape populist political trends. In order to take advantage of society. Hitler did it, Lenin and Stalin did too. Though, unlike Hitler, I believe Lenin actually genuinely wanted a good outcome. Despite his bad ideology.
I was banned from lemmy.ml for posting a meme about the fact that gay characters are removed from movies in China. Not even by a mod. By an admin. I’m not remotely surprised they’re pro-shitheap in general
There is an admin on lemmy.ml that seems to be banning anyone who says anything negative about China. If I’m thinking of the right person, they are also a large contributor to the Lemmy codebase. That person is why I stopped donating to the Lemmy devs.
This kind of stuff is making me consider stopping my donations to the Lemmy project, and instead donating to the Sublinks drop-in replacement developed by the programming.dev instance admins
Hey, I’m the founder of Sublinks. It’s a huge collaboration of several major Lemmy instances like lemmy world, beehaw, discuss.online, programming.dev, and quite a few others that wish not to be named until the release.
Some admins are directly working on the project while others are providing other types of support. @Ategon@programming.dev is certainly a major contributor and has helped develop the new front end in many major ways. You can follow some progress updates here: !sublinks@discuss.online
We have several different teams of developers:
- API / Java
- Front-end / JS/CSS/HTML
- Federation / GoLang
- Libraries / JS
- Requirements gathering and organization
- Design & Graphics - UI/UX
- Lemmy to Sublinks migration tools
There is an active community on Matrix where all of us chat: https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks:discuss.online if anyone is interested in joining. We also have weekly touch bases to discuss progress and next steps. There are tons of people contributing.
We are currently taking donations only through Github: https://github.com/sponsors/sublinks if you’re truly interested. We’re all working on this part-time in our free time and making fantastic progress.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Thank you for the extra info and clarification!
I blacked out irrelevant information.
While I agree that hexbear generally sucks, they and I do at least have an enemy in common. That ban is not so undeserved as I was led to expect.
Is your common enemy the People? Because Hexbear promotes authoritarianism and genocide denial.
Yeah… at this point I find insufferable liberals that don’t understand the difference between tankies and fascists nauseating enough to ban you on sight, too.
Yeah that coat of red paint is definitely more stylish
I don’t know what you all are whining about - tankies are really just liberals who have given up on any pretense of being pro-democratic. After all… isn’t Lenin’s “state capitalism” just another way of preserving your precious status quo?
Lemmy.ml is a massive instance. I don’t really know where are you posting there, probably in political communities and thus this reaction. But I follow lots of communities that are hosted on Lemmy.ml and they are just normal communities about their topics, normally technology. I certainly do not want to lose those communities of having to move my accounts around just because you had some problems with some particular people. Block them yourself and move on.
I don’t get why there’s always people in small places that are always doing their best to make them even smaller. Lots of goods things are lost this way. We must be clever in trying to preserve and make this good things thrive. And, believe me I’ve been in lots and lots and lots of small community driven projects, this kind of attitude is no good for them. You cannot take every small issue you have with some part of the project and say: “we do not work together anymore”.
If there’s an issue let’s be constructive about it. But defederation of such a big instance with so many people and communities that just does not care about this drama… I don’t see how that helps lemmy as a whole.
I suppose there’s a lot of political ideology behind what’s being ask for, and what’s being said. So I do not expect convince OP of anything, as those hard as steel political beliefs are inmutable. But I hope sanity and a wish for making Lemmy a big project of the kind of social networks we want in the future will prevail. Even if that means sharing space with people you don’t politically agree 100% about everything, because that’s how a community works, different people working together.
The fact I got an instance ban means the admins were involved and were endorsing the tankies. The problem exists at the highest level of Lemmy.ml, not just in a handful of communities.
Moreover, it seems pretty clear to me that .ml intends to keep their finger on the scale as much as possible. Just saying “oh federation solves all the problems just block them” doesn’t really fix the issue when there are a bunch of ways they can potentially run malicious versions of the code base to mess with how federation functions and hold onto their influence. For example, they are already refusing to federate their mod logs in some cases, and they’ve shown themselves to be completely shameless and hypocritical when it comes to banning any and all dissent. They simply cannot be trusted.
I personally believe that the broader fediverse should seriously consider taking serious steps to cut out .ml before they do something drastic to fuck it all up
They also manipulated the modlog on their site to not differentiate between removed by mod and removed by admin. So even When something is removed by Dessalines or Nutomic it’ll still show as moderator and not admin in the mod log.
That your lies get any upvotes is quite sad, i thought people on lemmy were tech savvy. I’m not and even i can see that you’re making this stuff up.
Maybe go back to .ml where people don’t need proof to support their arguments and just make wild sweeping accusations, but it’s been proven already that OP is correct.
You’re just wrong.
Where is the proof please? As far as i can see, the lemmy.world modlog is the outlier, not the lemmy.ml one.
Plenty of people have provided proof. You’re free to check all the threads here and find them yourself. At this point I’d just be repeating the same sources.
Do your own work. Don’t expect everyone to do it for you.
Sorry but i cannot find anything. If the proof for Draconic’s claims is so obvious and plenty, please be so kind and link at least one bit to me. The only thing i could find that seems like some kind of “proof” is the screenshot @Draconic_NEO posted. How they got to take it i have no idea, not saying they drew it in paint, but here is what it looks like on my side (same mod actions):
Again, it’s not my job to provide evidence already provided.
This whole post has been like a gish gallop DDoS attack.
doesn’t really fix the issue when there are a bunch of ways they can potentially run malicious versions of the code base to mess with how federation functions and hold onto their influence.
This is hysteria of Chinese spy balloon proportions 😂
At some time we have to deal with this.
Keep in mind that we like Lemmy for being a federated platform.
I don’t think there is enough awareness at this point. And the way we do it here, it has to come from the community. The people and mods have to become aware and make a decision to move their participation and the communities to another instance. I don’t see a way around that. This will take some time, patience and effort.
I’ve started to do my part and unsubscribed from !Fediverse@lemmy.ml I’m now going through my list of subscriptions and find alternatives to other communities, so I don’t contribute to the lemmy.ml communities being the larges ones any more.
[Edit: Wow. I’ve replaced 32 communities, some with substantially better alternatives, and I’ve found a few nice additional ones in the process. I still need recommendations for alternatives to: “Peertube”, “Libre Culture”, “Crawling the IndieWeb”, “datahoarder”, “Linux Phones”, “postmarketOS”, “osu!”. I’m glad I did this. I think this is the way to make a change as a simple user. And now I’m not part of the problem anymore. It took me the better part of an hour, though.]
I’m just blocking the entire lemmy.ml instance. I’ve seen consistent problems from them, and nothing worth staying connected with.
Wish I could help you find alternative communities but I’m not sure about the ones you mentioned. They’ll grow over time if Lemmy survives.
Thx. I found the most important communities to me. I’m glad most of them have an alternative and those are going strong. I can live with losing a few minor ones.
Concerning “blocking them”: I’m not sure. I was a strong opponent to the whole defederation and “safe-space” thing last year. Where especially beehaw.org decided to do their own thing and rigorously defederate, often preemptively and without talking to people. I think such behaviour splits the community and disconnects people. I really don’t like all the drama, falling out with each other and particularism. And I think all the feud is a sure way to kill the platform before it even took off with the general public… Honestly, I’m slowly changing my mind. Give me some more time.
I agree with your general point but
splits the community and disconnects people
They aren’t people like you and I. They’re paid shills at best and KremlinGPT at worst. I think to survive and flourish as a platform Lemmy will have to aggressively fight back against authoritarian disinformation. As it stands, I won’t even admit to anyone that I use it because it so full of propaganda.
It is a bit more nuanced than that. There are normal people there, too. It’s been one of the largest instances when the Reddit exodus happened. Some of the users chose the largest and the ‘official’ instance. And some of them are still there.
But lemmy.ml is operated by the same people who also run lemmygrad, some moderators seem to be the same. And unfortunately the whole Lemmy software platform is developed by “those” people.
I don’t mind leaning a good amount to the left. I think a few socialist values would advance society and economy. Especially in places like the USA. And I’ve been called a communist for that. But being a tankie is beyond my comprehension. Why would anyone like Putin, defend the CCP and what they do to people. And I’m not overly bothered with the left vs right. It’s the constant yelling, being super argumentative, doing brigading and spreading misinformation.
I think things are changing. I’m paying attention now to the usernames in the comments. And lemmy.ml isn’t the dominating place anymore. Most of the usernames I see come from a broad range of instances. And that’s a good thing. It’s still a home to some big communities which needs to change, too. And I’m also waiting for a new software to come along, written by different people with a different motivation and agenda. In my opinion that’s one of the next steps to emancipate ourselves. I mean if you don’t like lemmy.ml you probably don’t like the people making the decisions there. Which unfortunately are the same people who also write all of the Lemmy software. And their software development decisions reflect the same attitude. But also that’s going to change. A few people are working on good alternatives which strive to listen to the community, invite people to participate and also finally implement proper moderation tools and a few other tweaks to foster good behaviour.
I like Lemmy. But this platform had a hard time from the start. And it’s still struggling. Mixing technological difficulties and innate problems of growing a community with drama, bad decisions, waywardness and friction within the community on many different levels is just stupid and unnecessary. But I’m still waiting for progress and a bright future. I think Federation is one of the best approaches with some potential to make that happen.
I think the solid technological basis is what I’m a bit more concerned as of now. But apart from that I agree that it is us, the community who sets the tone and we decide who we want to listen to, nice people or people with behaviour disorders and an attitude. And it’s a vicious circle. At some point a platform has an image and is bound to tip and attract more like-minded people and less normal ones. And the dynamics are there and we need to actively fight for a nice place.
Well said, I agree with all of that. I’m considerably more to the left as well, that’s part of why I hate lemmy.ml, because they’re preventing actual good growth and movement in that direction.
Hopefully Mbin or some other one of the new forks/platforms takes off soon. I’m ready to move if necessary, I love the idea of a healthy Fediverse and I hope some day I can recommend it to friends instead of being too embarrassed to admit I use it because of all the propaganda.
you can leave literally any time. there are dozens of instances, you don’t need to stay on flagship instances. you might like truth.social, which runs mastodon’s software, or gab.com which does the same.
Thank you very much, you can leave too.
No. Defederating at the drop of a hat is stupid. You don’t like it? Then you, YOU, block the instance.
I don’t like defederation, but these clowns are asking for it for a very long time.
If they weren’t such weasels and actually agrued back rather than just ban people like the spineless dimwit twats they are, I’d say the argument that they are easily filtered holds. But given they are just looking to propagate their shilling for Russia, trump (and they definitely do this) etc… fuck em!
Please find a single example of Hexbear supporting Trump. Attacking Biden does not count
Jesus fucking christ, this has comments talking about trump living rent free in muh libs heads
https://hexbear.net/post/2090983
You’re the same pack of fucking incels mixed in with the same russian shilling from 2016, that post was from an hour ago, took me seconds to find it
Are you incapable of reading into nuance at all? How could you possibly…
I really can’t be bothered going and finding all the pretty fucking obvious examples of you shitheads either apologising or glorifying putin, or coming out with pure incel stuff, or platforming trump. Which makes sense given it seems to be the same campaign as before, and its pretty fucking obvious at this point, very sloppy… I’ve clearly hit a nerve lol. It’d be great if you all could change track at this point and stop platforming that odious cunt, don’t worry I know there is unfortunately no option to stop shilling putin…
They asked for a single example. Find just one, a single one.
Assuming you’re not paid or being forced to do this, you must know you’re being used as a tool for the fascists you claim to despise. Platforming trump is support and I see there is no mention of the direct relationship to Putin in all the very loud refuting of this support…
I thought the Mueller report exonerated him. anyway it’s not as though anybody’s supporting Russia or Putin or Trump in these comments. we just know the Democrats are bad and aren’t afraid to say it.
If you can’t see how hexbear is mirroring trump rhetoric almost word for word then I don’t know what to tell you.
They’re the new The_Donald, only they’re not even self aware enough to know they’re the bad guys.
I’m not sure which is worse.
Are they mirroring trump rhetoric. Or is trump regurgitating talking points from his fascist idol. And ML are just so cultish, indoctrinated, anti West that they couldn’t not attack the west. Even if Russia is more clearly in the wrong on this issue.
It’s more likely than them actually supporting trump. Honestly I think the only possible way you could say they support trump. Is that they understand that trump would destroy Western society and they approve of that. No matter who gets hurt in the process. Well actually when it comes to leninists it’s all about hurting people in the process really.
Yes, leftists famously LOVE Donald Trump 🤣
This is the most Reddit radlib shit I’ve seen over here yet. Grow up my dude
Hexbears arent lefties. They are hiding behind acting like they are lefties while at the same time sucking up to the most fascist regimes on earth.
Lemmy.ml are tankies first and foremost. They’ll defend anything that Russia/China thinks is good.
Calling them leftists is an insult to the rest of us who aren’t authie chuds.
Pretty damn rich coming from lemmy.world where you ban people for criticizing Biden
All you dummies do when you ban and defederate is push more and more people into extremist communities.
I’ve been banned for defending Biden, kiddo…. Find a new bit, the one you’re using is old.
Wait were you banned for defending Biden, or were you banned “for merely suggesting that responding to someone with memes is childish and immature,” or both?
And which of your user accounts were these? Because it wasn’t this one.
Two different things, Detective Kiddo. Sometimes, both can be true.
Wasn’t calling someone “kiddo” how you got this account temp banned from !politics@lemmy.world last time?
