view the rest of the comments
MeanwhileOnGrad
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate-speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse
What is a Tankie?
Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.
(caution of bias)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism or any variation of Tankie Ideology. There is no justifying Genocide.
Revisionism — Downplaying or denying atrocities past and present will result in an immediate ban.
If you're violating instance rules, you'll typically be warned. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last seven days, but repeat infractions will have longer sentences. You may ask to be unbanned.
I completely get the stance you have. I just can't agree with the view that the instances are as bad as fascist instances. I mean some of the communities there definitely express heinous views don't get me wrong, but they're a leftist instance with many different types of leftism. There's the extremist "tankie" communities (one might call them) with all the Russian and North Korean apologia (yes, internet MLs think North Korea is free and democratic), then there's most of the rest of the instance with well-adjusted but very leftist views. This goes for .ml and hexbear but, I haven't seen much of anything other than authoritarian communism on lemmygrad so I can't say anything positive about that.
I think most instances have their extremely problematic areas that those admins don't see as problems, and we have to weigh whether those problems are serious enough to cause major problems for lemm.ee. Seemingly in our admins' opinions, and my opinion, hexbear and .ml are easily dealt with by just blocking them. I have seen a ton of cryptofascists and actual pedophiles from some other specific large instances (cough .world), and while I certainly put some blame on the instance admins for catering towards people with those views somewhat, I don't want to defederate from them. There's tons of good reason to federate with .world, and tons of good reason to federate with .ml, and with hexbear. They all contribute a lot of non-political stuff to my feed. Hexbear has probably the best trans communities along with blahaj.zone, probably like 1/3 of the posts in my feed are from .ml plus .world.
IMO, since there are a lot of instances that defederate those instances already, the classic use of the Fediverse is to have your account on one of those instances. Or to block the instance if you don't want to go that far. I go on lemm.ee specifically so I can see all the fediverse has to offer without having to change between a bunch of different accounts because of defederation. I don't want the LGBT and leftist communities I participate in to be blocked because a bunch of guys in the instance have really bad opinions. Unless they're spreading abuse content or something, I'd probably rather be able to see the instance.
Sorry for the wall of text, but defederation is an important topic that affects everyone on the site, I think it should have a lot of elaboration.
The administration and leadership alone is bad. Fascists have less/non controversial views too. Is that an actual argument for them?
They aren't leftist in any meaningful sense. They're authoritarian first. Anything else is an afterthought. An anarchist or anarco-communist like myself calling out the ML state and the vanguard party for their failures. Would be deemed an enemy of the state. Imprisoned, killed, or if I was lucky. Just have my life ruined.
There's plenty of Anarchist and non-ML communities on .ml and hexbear. The hardcore Maoist stuff doesn't apply to most of the communities on .ml. Either way though, the communities they do have isn't as relevant to federation for lemm.ee since the admins stated they only consider defederation for activities on lemm.ee. Which again, I would say lemmy.world and other instances have had just as much of a problem. That's relevant because in that case, if we're defederating .ml/hexbear, logically we should defederate .world.
Every day on this site I see people who are into transphobia ("I don't believe in trans people" I shit you not is something I've seen), Palestinians ethnic cleansing, want to get rid of healthcare, all that Project 2025 and "ancap" stuff. And they're mostly from lemmy.world and sometimes instances like sh.itjust.works. Their propoganda seems to prove far more consequential on the site, as most people will think you're a lunatic if you say China is a free and democratic nation, but a lot of people will buy what is now mainstream far-right propoganda and culture war nonsense. Although both of those will tell Americans to not vote for Kamala.
'Anarchists' who are plenty okay with authoritarianism.