Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
What are you implying here? People don’t use Lemmy because of this guy’s politics? Do we know the politics of other developers?
Mods and admins have enormous power to shape what can be discussed using comment moderation tools, bans, and promoted content. At the very least you should be aware of what potential biases an admin has that may inform how they moderate.
Oh nice, thank you. I didn’t realize they were an admin and mod too. I thought just a developer.
Only of their own instance, they cant do this shit on other instances
They can when they bake it directly into the lemmy code.
Here’s the two primary devs arguing to do exactly that during a discussion on github regarding the slur filter.
The ended up allowing instance admins to enable / disable that filter as well as customize it but the discussion shows how much power they wield across all instances and their mindset about using that power. The comment about something not being in line with their view of the the project (lemmy) is particularly telling.
To be clear I’m not disagreeing with the filter nor am I necessarily bagging on the developers, what I’m trying to demonstrate is the breadth and depth of their reach. They are most definitely not confined to a single a instance nor is everything they do, or can do, visible to most users.
i dont think you can take an instance of the devs considering maybe possibly baking in a poorly thought out slur filter and then being told what a stupid idea it is by the commuity as evidence that they can’t be trusted not to bake in features allowing them to take admin actions on other instances
Such a change would likely trivially easy to remove by jusr forking lemmy, as they suggested people do a few times in that thread
Lemmy has a lot more contributors and eyes digging into its codebase now compared to 2021 so I think this is very unlikely to happen.
Right, but Lemmy is open source. It can be forked.
Their political ideologies that are anti-capitalism are actually Lemmys greatest strength.
I don’t know that I’d agree that the political beliefs of the lemmy.ml admins are lemmys greatest strengths. Certainly federation amd open source contributions are core to lemmy but support of a specific nation’s policies and actions certainly is not.
We already have a capitalist, Lemmy. It’s called Reddit.
Lemmy exists explicitly because of anti-capitalist sentiment, not despite it. Remember that politics is two separate spectrums, possibly more. Economic theory and governmetal theory are completely different things. My point is that it is their economic communism that birthed lemmy, and thier governmental theory is really not releveant to the software in the same way.
What’s that got to do with censoring some discussions about some countries?
I literally just described the difference between their governmental philisophies and their economic ones.
Ok but they are administering and moderating their instance according to their political beliefs about a specific nation. They’re not defending China’s economic policies at Tiananmen Square or their notions on tariffs with Uyghurs. I don’t think you answered the question in the way you think you did.
Literally, the only statement I made was that if they weren’t communists, they probably would not have made lemmy. A capitalist would have made Reddit. That doesn’t diminish their faults. It’s just pointing out that none of us would be here if they weren’t communist.
And the creators of lemmy (same dudes lemmy.ml) have done things like this. Specifically the insertion of automatic word filters IIRC:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
Here you can see all the glory of these devs.
Don’t forget, there’s lots of other federated media options besides lemmy.
Frankly my time around lemmy.ml has been pretty off putting to the service as a whole. I don’t see how endless user growth is sustainable for any volunteer moderation team either.
Don’t forget, you all can go look through the lemmy.ml mod log at any time and view the bullshit that goes on over there.
Here’s a link: https://lemmy.ml/modlog
Oh, my, god, they added an optional, configurable regular expression filter. The monsters!
Talk about over simplification of a problem lmao
To be honest the issue is more about the power tripping than politics. Banning someone from the Arch Linux community because they disagree with you seems strange
And people believed they’d escape the days of power-tripping mods by exiting Reddit.
At least with the festive there are no alternatives.
I appreciate the mod log here because at least you can see the receipts
Even more interesting with admin powers of your own instance. You can reverse shitty mod decisions locally and make your own decisions on evaluating if what they said if it’s actually a problem or just overzealous moderation. Also means you get to see what mod took the action. Also looking at votes (which you could see as a kbin user).
Like that new neame
That’s the beauty of lemmy though - there is probably another community for the same thing on a different instance.
Yup. There were power tripping mods on Reddit, too. Except there, you’d be out of luck. On here, you can go to other instances, like communities on programming.dev or something.
To be fair you could’ve made a different subreddit but somehow this feels different
Because there the name was immutable. Here, you can take the name with you. You don’t have to make up some secondary related name that has significantly lower SEO value (for lack of another way to describe).
Encourage users to create content on Lemmy communities hosted on non-tankie instances.
My problem with this ideology is while there are plenty of tankies on Lemmy, the term gets overapplied.
Some people think anyone to the left of Bill Kristol is a tankie.
Thanks for pointing this out. To some people, advocates for things like socialized healthcare are ‘tankies’. Its hard to tell what people mean anymore by it, and one persons tankie might be another’s centrist at this point.
Yeah… The label of “tankie” seems to be used to describe “anyone to the left of me”.
It’s so widely applied to the point of reaching meaninglessness.