Soon after I joined Lemmy a few years ago, I searched for communities based on my interests and subscribed to the ones with the highest numbers of users to ensure they are active. Sometimes I joined multiple, but then saw that some people post the same thing to more than one, cluttering my feed, so I left the smaller ones.
It’s only after my community ban from !games@hexbear.net for disagreeing about Ukraine that I was told about MeanwhileOnGrad, learning exactly what “the tankie triad” means and why big Lemmy instances have defederated from those. Lemmy.ml, where the ML probably stands for Marxist-Leninist, seems to have been defederated by fewer, possibly because it’s run by the creator of Lemmy, Dessalines. Nevertheless, there is evidence of Dessalines holding the same authoritarian communist views as the rest.
Recently, there were two posts on !privacy@lemmy.ml about Signal, but then in both cases, admin davel (who is known on MoG for seeing CIA’s hand in running Ukraine, among other things) and Dessalines linked (1, 2, 3) the same article by Dessalines, which not only argues Signal could be a CIA honeypot (as if it matters when proper e2ee is used), but also manages to shoehorn China even into that, claiming its government “prefers autonomy”. This sort of portrayal of totalitarianism as sovereignty is the reason I unsubscribed from the community. As it has been said by others, ML is not a neutral instance but a means of pushing authoritarian views onto unsuspecting users.
Edit: Made the post title clearer.
I don’t give their opinions on China, Russia, NK, Iran, Ukraine, any sort of credibility. I’ve been banned from some of their comms but they’re on point for pointing out the crimes and hypocrisy of the west, and there’s a lot of deliberate effort to minimize their reach.
Fuck em’ for defending authoritarianism but without them it’s all propaganda from mass mainstream media and whitewashing of the west.
tldr: Fuck tankies and wankies trying to whitewash their atrocities with concern trolling.
I really am not sure what you mean - at least on Lemmy. I don’t see pro-western propaganda. In fact everyone is highly critical and self aware of the vast majority of the West’s moves and motives. Even articles of the rare positive moves are met with skepticism and pessimism.
The problem is that the tankies automatically attack any post by someone being critical of any other non-western nations as being hypocritical. An argument by hypocrisy. Annoying as hell, a yapping ankle-biting tiny dog constantly interrupting the conversation with “But the West did/does (insert awful thing) too!” when 99.99% of the time we’re well aware of the West’s failings, and those failings don’t mean other’s can’t be pointed out.
What’s a wanky? I’ve been here for a while and that one’s new to me.
Noooo “calling it “authoritarian” is meaningless”!!!
Stop “phrasemongering”, it’s “not fascism” when China pulls its shit! China also not guilty of Uyghur genocide, that’s western propaganda you racist!
Smh. Tankie propaganda was making me mad, I’m actually glad I got banned off their subs for adamantly refusing to accept their lines of reasoning for their blatant, apologetic, wholly uncritical acceptance of china.
What portion of the tankie userbase do we think are Chinese intelligence assets? Or at best, shills?
The down vote shaping on this thread I think supports this notion. It’s something that I have seen and personally experienced on Reddit. And, it seems that liberal left wingers are invariably the target.
My experience has always been that tankies, regardless of community, are exceedingly rare in the wild of a western nation. With leftist views usually comes compassion, and that prevents the development of authoritarian views.
There is something wrong with the proportions on Lemmy. There’s more going on than fringe local western tankies. Perhaps Dessalines insistence that Signal was a honeypot, is a projection about Lemmy.ml?
Once had a ml slag try to reason to me that political censorship is good lol
It was high in “but but the those people over there are bad why can’t I be?” energy.
Censoring and repressing your political enemies is good actually. If Biden repressed Trump by throwing his ass in prison there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be at war with Iran and Cuba might not be facing famine while fewer people would be harmed by ICE back home.
This axiom here isn’t “all political repression is good”, it’s “repression of political projects that are bad for the working class is good”
Go learn the definition of repression please. Also you are high in that “but but the those people over there are bad why can’t I be?” energy. Which I don’t see you saying is good.
Censoring and repressing your political enemies is good actually.
You imbecile, you fucking moron.
If you guys had repressed the pedophile in chief we wouldn’t be in this mess idiot
You guys? Fuck up you don’t know where I am from. If trump was oppressed the way navalny was, we would have a whole other bunch of problems, such as political oppression like what happened to navalny.
And if communists hate trump so much why did their governments get him elected? Fucking think ya basic dogcunt.
Communist russia got trump elected? 😂😂😂😂
Seriously your dad bred his own sister didn’t he?
lol Navalny, the extreme-right racist fuck.
why did their governments get him elected
that’s Blue MAGA tinfoil hat BS
If trump was oppressed the way navalny was, we would have a whole other bunch of problems, such as political oppression like what happened to navalny
People who do illegal things should be punished according to the law regardless of whether they’re a billionaire or not, and since the law doesn’t allow us to throw people like Trump in prison for harming millions of americans so he and his pedophile buddies can feel more powerful, then it needs to be amended.
if communists hate trump so much why did their governments get him elected
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You think Russia is communist? God damn I thought America had shitty education, but we at least learned about the fall of the USSR (though the 90s was framed as a warm time of reopening, not the greatest drop in life expectancy outside of war and famine in the 20th century)
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Russia has infinitely less influence on American elections than our own billionaires.
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Yeah but what if Trump had repressed Biden and now you were in tye 10th year instead of the 6th year of the kid fucker running the US.
That particular sword cuts both ways. Something the tankies never seem to understand.
There is free speech in plenty countries, in none of them it’s absolute.
From Shitipedia: Common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, hate speech, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, blasphemy and perjury.
But when China does it it’s “repression”
MeanwhileOnGrad is the place for you to cry your little heart out and join your fellow Mc Carthyists.
Complain about “cluttering my feed” and then think it’s a good idea to make a whole post about this?
Want to talk to the manager Karen?Nobody cares ffs. One post out of 5 is whining about tankies.
Lmao, bro Dessalines is legitimately the most cringe person on the entire internet. He literally will not comment outside his own instance, because he cannot handle any form of internet where he doesn’t have his magic “win argument” ban button.
too bad he sustains lemmy indirectly though
“indirectly”? He fucking wrote it
Thers always piefed :)
go back to Reddit then
Your life on the fediverse improves significantly if you just block the entire lemmy.ml and hexbear.net instances.
Yes, miss all the vastly more interesting and excellent comments and context provided by them.
Sure you can block them if you want a slightly less vulgar Reddit.My experience improved immensely when we defederated Hexbear. It’s like a Lemmy cheat code to delete 80% of the trolls.
So funny story, I initially joined Lemmy on the voyager app. By default they had hexbear.net blocked. I removed it because I didn’t know what that was or why it was there. Well I now know the preemptive favor they were doing for me and added them back to the block list. Thinking about adding ML to it too.
hexbear sounded like its “a cute” instance name which would make look like a pleasant place, its a bait and switch.
I believe that’s from .zip rather than Voyager. When I joined, there were no blocks, but one or more of the triad were later added as a soft block via default user settings, as opposed to defederation.
I think you might be right. I think .zip was the initial instance when I joined via that app. Either way, I now know why they did it.
Getting closer and closer to that! The reason I made this post to begin with is to do a PSA, because it took me months of being subscribed to games on Hexbear to notice it’s not a leftist community as it presents itself, but authoritarian communist. So I can’t be certain all of their users are in the know, but is it worth keeping the instances unblocked if the bad outweighs the possibility of good?
no you’re not missing out on anything
these servers were some of the first which is why they appear to have a lot of communities
all the communities have moved on or been replaced on other servers so these servers are now a tiny fraction (faction? hoho) of the fediverse, exactly for the reason you experienced
Much of the “left” communities here veer towards the auth right with a light “left rebranding”
you can kick rocks with your horseshoe theory
it’s not a leftist community
Someone should tell their anarchists. If you only want to interact with pro-imperialism leftists, that’s ok.
Are you aware Russia and China are imperialist too
Russia maybe, but imperialism doesn’t just mean “big country does stuff” or what you’re referring to with China; big country refuses to balkanize against the wishes of it’s own population. We know what imperialism looks like in the neocolonial era, it’s comprador governments kept in place with military aid, selling the people’s labor and resources for pennies to their benefactors.
Compare the development of countries that work with China to mutually develop, resulting in production of higher-value products, verses say French Africa exporting raw gold and coco to factories owned by France for over a century, with as much poverty today as a century ago, or South America’s century of “developing” without ever approaching the living standards the first world enjoys off their labor.
Russia definitely.
Your comment history seems to be full of trolling anarchist communities, so it seems you misrepresented yourself as the reasonable voice of leftism. And isn’t that what the whole post here is about.
Chinese imperialism is the expansion of political, economic, cultural, media, and military power
Yeah no if you’re using such a silly definition, Cuba is Imperialist.
trolling anarchist communities
Mocking liberals and “anarchists” whose foreign policy aligns perfectly with their government isn’t trolling.
I like how I linked to a specific part of that article that bypasses the typical rebuttals from trolls, so you had to pretend I hadn’t.
And yes you are gatekeeping a community you clearly don’t belong to. Quite poorly at that.
Tibetans were invaded in an act of colonialism and live under colonial occupation. If you don’t think so you haven’t talked to many Tibetans about it.
invaded in an act of colonialism
They were a slave-based theocracy who was liberated. While I don’t know much about current policy and recent history in the region, its hard to take any criticism seriously from someone who doesn’t acknowledge freeing slaves as unambiguously good.
Nope, never been to Tibet. Have you? What Tibetans have you spoken to?
They were a slave-based theocracy who was liberated.
It was none of China’s business and they didn’t leave after. Cool motive, still colonizing.
Lived with a family in Ladakh for a month. They have an interesting perspective… and a society that presents a way forward from the medieval semi-feudalism you call slavery. They are also living under colonialism but with very different outcomes than Tibet.
I lived in Dharamsala for six weeks. I have talked to a lot of other Tibetans from the refugee diaspora. Their proposed modernization would look a lot like Bhutan. Are the Bhutanese slaves?
I hear a lot of negative talk about those instances, but rarely any specifics. What’s the deal with them?
Supposedly a lot of the first people on lemmy were leftists and or tankies. My thing is though is that advocating for defederation weakens Lemmy, less communities to interact with, less content or posts to engage with, less people to interact with which cause echo chambers and hugboxes. Nor would I agree with defederating people just because they have views that I don’t like or vehemently disagree with. As bad as some tankies are, they sometimes do make a few good points here and there.
They are fake leftists working for fascists, and they will troll you if you argue with them, following you around on alt accounts with non tankie instances.
In my own experience, it’s less that they spew out politics and more that they are just so defensive and argumentative. A lot of good lemmy communities are based on discussion and sharing cool stuff, while the denizens of those instances and the like are more online to debate, nitpick, and criticize. Like there could be a post of a dog picture and their comment would be critisizing the owner or introducing some political argument that is distantly related. Like bro, just enjoy the dog picture
I think the behavior surrounding my games@hexbear ban is also indicative not just of their politics but also of their behavior in general. Its moderator reacting to my report of Holodomor denial by publicly saying the comment has been reported by me is highly unethical. Then following my post about the situation (linked in the OP), one of their users reposted that to Hexbear and there were people tagging me as they threw insults at me, which amounts to harassment, considering I’ve never left a comment in that thread. There were admins in the thread as well, but they only piled on despite their rules prohibiting harassment and insults.
Edit: Here’s a link to some specific examples.
Edit 2: They’re now brigading this thread and tagging me again from here.
Hey I’m in there! hexbear was my first block. Just do it if you enjoy not having your language policed or just general arguing. I don’t think I’m missing anything.
You’re in there!
Huh, okay. I guess I’ll avoid going over that way. I’m hesitant to outright mute anything that I don’t immediately have a huge issue with in case it becomes a source I learn of something through.
Go visit it yourself.
These folks are specifically trying to stir shit. [It’s like walking into an Indian reservation and yelling that we speak English here, that this is a white country and if you don’t like it you should go home. Then they try to get the reservation closed due to the roughing up and expulsion they received] The usual form this takes is repeating long debunked anti-communist propaganda, that a majority of people in the western media orbit have swallowed whole, so the resulting mod action seems disproportionate.
If you join there yourself you will find, like most instances, respectful conversations and a healthy community. And like anywhere else you will find a spectrum of personalities and a handful of kooks.
Let’s stick to the real world, not weird analogies. By default, Lemmy users are presented with an All feed, which includes communities from all instances (except those defederated). When you see one called “games” (at hexbear, whatever that means) and then maybe see its trans flag banner, what’s the reasonable expectation? Discussions about games with people who seem to recognize the value of minority groups and viewpoints, right? And then it turns out those people hijack discussions about gaming to praise or defend totalitarian states who oppress minorities; then they ban, insult and harass you if you disagree. Likewise, what does the notion of China preferring autonomy have to do with Signal in the context of privacy? No reasonable person comes to a privacy community expecting to see praise for China.
This. I’ve seen a lot of obnoxious and/or argumentative comments from them, but one that stuck with me was when my first Lemmy instance had to close when Trump was inaugurated due to safety fears.
The first comment to the announcement post was a hexbear user saying something like “Yeah this is why capitalism doesn’t work, America sucks and it needs to go down” – which I do not disagree with, but the post was the admin sharing genuine fears and talking about the logistics of having to move to another state. The user didn’t even say a “I’m sorry you have to close your instance because of this…”, just straight up getting into politics when it wasn’t the main point of the post.
(I will always miss you, possumpat.io; I hope the admin is safe and thriving!)
You touch on the problem with talking with them. You can agree on the problem, get into what can we do about it, they are no, you can’t do anything except violently overthrow your government. Also fuck you and I hope you die, their attitude towards us. Some of them.
Yet if they talked that same talk in those worker paradises of China and Russia they would be committed to re-education camps and gulags.
Just a dog!? Despite making up only 13% of the dog population, pitbulls–
Hypocrisy largely. Heavy micro management and over moderation by admins broadly. Thankfully most are self aware enough outside hexbear to not leave their echo chamber. There are a few sub’s documenting it.
Should discussion touch on certain trigger topics, and should your view deviate from dogma. You will often find yourself banned, either temporarily or permanently, without much discussion. Do you think imperialism and invasion of another country is wrong? Such as the United States current invasion of Iran or past invasions of Afghanistan? Well, if you happen to feel the same way about the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan or modern day Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. You would be classified as a mush-brained, imperialist turbo-lib.
Do you think genocide and cultural erasure such as what the United States and Canada did to First Nations people is wrong? Don’t make a mistake of applying that unbiased to the plight of cultural minorities in China. Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Uhygers, all of course are glad to sacrifice their cultural and ethnic heritage. Under the penalty of imprisonment or death for glorious left unity with the party and President Xi. Any discussion of these groups dissatisfaction with it is CIA propaganda. And not well tolerated.
If you skirt around in only the most niche of communities with hyper-focused specific topics. Who have almost no capability ever touching or involving current events. You might avoid it. Otherwise you will run afoul of it at some point as many have.
Let’s not forget about the native siberians, the russians sabered everything on their way east.
Or the polish. When it comes to giant unwieldy nations, preserving power becomes more important than preserving large segments of population. Regardless of which economic system they larping as.
When I was reading about Amanita muscaria, a mushroom I use occasionally, it talked about how the Russians to destroy the Siberian culture would take the shamans of the Native Siberians into helicopters and throw them out.
Aaaah one of those handy not so fun facts. I 100% believe that had the immigrant settlers in the 19the century had helicopters and not covered wagons. They would have done similar to my ancestors.
They are tankie instances, where they think and then push narratives such as China is the greatest country in the world and does no wrong and that Ukraine is full of Nazis and Russia is the good guy They love their authoritarianism, but only as long as it’s “communist” or generally antagonistic towards anything “western.”
Anything that contradicts their narrow worldview is met with hostility, comment removals, bans, etc.
Do you know how joke movements turn into real ones? Like Flat-Earther used to be a joke, but þen a bunch of people who didn’t realize it was a joke got sucked into it and took it seriously, and eventually some poor fuck killed himself trying to prove it? I believe Hexbear is þat. I have little evidence, but it feels like Hexbear started as a bunch of trolls wiþ a common þeme, but it attracted oþer people who took it all seriously, and now it’s just a collection of brigaders who jump on any chance to push a pro-Russia, pro-China agenda.
I may be giving Hexbear too much of a benefit of doubt; maybe it was always confirmed tankies. And for sure þere are people on Hexbear who have well-intentioned convictions and try to argue in good faiþ. But þe signal-to-noise ratio coming out of Hexbear is very low; it’s mostly angry, agressive, anti-Western rhetoric and an alarming amount of defense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s genocide of Uyghurs, or denial of Tiananmen Square.
As examples, you can easily generate þem yourself. Usually it’s in þe form of a defending statement about X (“Russia had to invade Ukraine to secure it’s border from Western encroachment”) plus some what-aboutisms about þe US (“what about Alligator Alcratraz”). And it’s frequently acerbic, aggressive, and almost always not in good faith. It’s just a fight, trying to stir up drama. And unless you toe a very straight political line – if you agree wiþ þe position þat Ukrainians must be ethnically cleansed but express any doubt about þe party line about the treatment of Uyghurs, you’ll get jumped on as being a western stooge. Dissent is not allowed.
Hexbear is at best a troll pool, and at worst a digital recreation of The Cultural Revolution; even if you agree wiþ þe politics, you’re still probably better off not getting any on you. It’s not a healþy place.
Not entire instances are bad. A few comunities there are relatevely free from propaganda and admin influence. So what I did, is that I blocked only the worst comunities from there. All others are intact to not create a complete echo chamber.
Western propaganda bubble is warm and cozy, just close the window so you stop feeling cold nasty drafts.
You’re right.
Russian fed propaganda is sooo good.
/s just in case
I did that years ago
Don’t subscribe to anything Lemmyml if you want to keep your sanity
The issue with the rest is that it’s full of people whining about tankies
You can always just block seeing the instance. Sure you still see them mulling about the rest of Lemmy but generally they’re better behaved when interacting with everyone else.
Yes hello, I would like to learn more about privacy.
But don’t tell me about threats to my privacy unless I already know about them.
I don’t want to change my mental model of the world, I already know everything important.
Because praise for China is to improve privacy? Is that a religious thing?
I’ve had hexbear blocked for so long, I actually forgot about it. Wow, that place is nuts!
they have infilitrated political memes com, since thier instance is likely wasnt getting any traction.
I got banned from their privacy instance for 3 days because of something that, imo, barely is justified by the rules they cited, while other people were being insufferably hostile. It may be one of the same posts you’re alluding to. Granted I let a troll bait me into getting frustrated (that’s on me). Mistermodal I believe the user name was. After that happened, I was seeing a lot of these same criticisms about ML on other communities. I paid more attention to how the people there conduct themselves, which coincides with your point. I’m still fairly new to the fediverse/lemmy entirely so I don’t quite know the lay of the land if they aren’t obvious in the name of the instance. I haven’t bothered going back because .world and other communities I frequent seem a little more normal, less unhinged, and less hypocritical.
i stop interacting with thier instance the moment they called certain shows/movies(the ones that ascribes thier authotarianism too) as shit lib or woke, yea thats conservative speak , instant block.
I can see that thread in the mod log (which is public here on Lemmy). Your comment they removed was
Aw the mewling wittle baby is in love. I actually don’t use signal, but nice try. I do know a fair deal about the obscene income inequality and disparity in non-profits though.
Indeed, you were responding to a condescending comment in a manner that’s also snarky, but as a long-time moderator of big communities, I don’t think that warranted a ban, or at least an action that affected only you but not the instigator. However, it’s worth noting that their rule 2, which was among the cited rules, is incredibly permissive (and widely abused, as seen on MoG), basically allowing to ban for anything at a mod’s discretion and making the rest of the rules redundant.
I hope you stay on the Fediverse one way or another. Its power is that even if you clash with any of the staff or even the Lemmy maintainers themselves, there are always other instances or even PieFed to replace Lemmy itself.
Yep. I own the mis-step in how I acted. It was juvenile of me and I let my temper get the better of me when I should have went about my business. This was when I also discovered the modlog. I came over from Reddit, which doesn’t have that feature at least from what I noticed when there. Now I just take a trip over to the modlog and search the user to see what their deal is and block them if need be. It takes me out of the initial reaction I get from bait like that.
Meh, youre making this post itself from .world, which itself just last week had a massive struggle session as its most prolific mod was under fire for claiming the genocide in Palestine is unrelated to US politics. If that’s not propaganda, I dont know what is. I dont know of any other instances that have the same censorship issues as .world.
Classic, .ml that chooses whataboutism rather than seeing two things can be wrong at the same time
For real. I can go “Hey does this piece of software/hardware have any connections to China and should I be concerned?” and someone will hop out and be like “BuT iT’S oKaY wHeN tHe uS gOvErNMeNt StAlKs YoU?!?!?!”
Like no dumbass, that’s the reason I’m trying to move away from surveillance of any kind. Both countries can suck in major ways.
Worst part is that we are all on the fediverse for a reason and have too much common ground to then squander into a net lack of action.
I don’t know of any other instances that have the same censorship issues as .world
Considering that it’s common knowledge that hexbear and ml both ban for the slightest anti-auth left comment, you’re both lying and proving the point that .ml should be blocked and not taken seriously.
Unfortunately I am considering creating lengthy black lists of trolls and irreversibly corrupted/poisoned instances. Still better than using a corporate operated political brainwashing platform.
the tankie triad, plus .worlds politics(only because they are too pro-zionist), any individual accounts with .ml or hexbear i will block only if they start ranting.
I see it as curation. My blocklists are yuuuuge.
Is there any way of sharing blocklists? That would be a killer feature!
Considering the lead developers of Lemmy are themselves the cringelord admins of the ML instance that everyone blocks, I would venture a guess that it’s not in their interest to develop this feature…
lemmygrad, hexbear, .ml you can block that those are the only problematic instances i see.
politics.world also because they will call any critcism against jewish people as anti-semetic in one for or another.
I wish so too, I’ve been wanting to make a new account on an instance with no defederations but the thought of restarting my blocklist makes me wanna delete lemmy
I’ve gotten into it with tankies time and time again over Signal. They point to all this hypothetical nonsense repeatedly and then refuse to provide evidence. Signal, on the other hand, has proven that they either don’t have this info or don’t provide it over and over again through publicly-disclosed subpoenas, but the tankies continue to push this propaganda, which one can only reasonably conclude that they’re bad-faith actors and just “haters” of all things American.
The actual reason they don’t like signal is because China bans it and they need an excuse for why that isn’t just transparently authoritarian bullshit so they have created this entire lore around it being a CIA honeypot.
I’ve asked them to prove it with sources, when I have deliverable sources that it’s misinformation. They just downvote and run. So I guess that means they won in their eyes.
Signal’s creation and running costs were largely financed by the US intelligence community. So they’re right to be cautious.
It may seem like it’s technically impossible to track usage but nothing is 100% safe as long as there are humans involved that can be bagged up and dropped off in some offshore torture site.
Signal’s running costs were primarily funded by Brian Acton.
You can bag up whoever you want, they can’t give you info they don’t have. That’s the entire point.
I am willing to bet the recent Prarieland convictions are probably the drive on this recent focus on Signal.
I’m saying they they are right to be cautious about any messaging service and there are concerning stories out there about signal. However as you point out it seems like it is currently tight. But. That can always change if the human beings involved are put under pressure. https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/signal-facing-collapse-after-cia
What “concerning stories” are you referring to?
How about the one I linked?
Your link is broken
Funnily, it’s the same blog as the one from davel about Ukraine being run by the CIA. It’s around the same points as Dessalines’s article: the OTF, Radio Free Asia, and the CIA.
Edit: I love the “examples of tools supported by OTF”. The list includes Lantern, Psiphon (both used to fight censorship in authoritarian countries), WireGuard, Mailvelope, Tor, Tails, F-Droid, and K-9 Mail. Beware of those products supported by the US government!
Edit 2: And as one would expect, the program in question was among the DOGE cuts last year. Authoritarians think alike?
Try it now
All of Lemmy is propaganda bro. The ratio of bots/shills to real people is like 1:9
If you can find an actual unlabeled bot, admins will ban them.
