Tankies are modding many communities here as well. The solution is to fight them tooth and nail.

.ml = Marxism-Leninism

This wasn't obvious to me because ML could also mean the country of Mali or machine learning, but based on their content and moderation patterns, it's unmistakable that the ".ml" in Lemmy instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml stands for Marxism-Leninism.

Hope that clears things up.

As you say OP, the solution here is to use the fediverse model as intended and use different instances/communities. It sucks because it fragments the community, but that’s the way it is. I’ve long held the opinion that I’m grateful to the lemmy developers for building this whole thing that we all get to enjoy, but their approach to administering an instance is reprehensible and actively damaging to the relatively free and open exchange of ideas that should happen on the fediverse.

They will ban you for comments that are so inert it's impossible to even know what offended them, it's ridiculous.

I am surprised that my comments on that post weren't removed.

It is pretty horrifying that there are people in positions of moderating what thoughts are allowed to propagate who deny or cover up the events that took place in Tienanmen Square.

Tankies gonna tank. Just block their shit instance and move on with your life.

This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ...

So what you're essentially saying is that these moderators are effectively propagandists/state actors for China, Russia, and so on. I left Reddit to get away from psychic attacks like that, so I'm perfectly happy to defed from the instance. Glad I have the option, too.

I’ve been making fun of Lemmy.Ml for months, I’m glad to see I’m not the only one

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is.

I think this is a core problem of lemmy as it is right now. This place is meant to be federated and decentralized. Instead it is heavily centralized as communities lie on one instance. What one needs should be federated communities as well. Like say c/linux@lemmy.world is the same as c/linux@someotherinstance.com. this way one could subscribe to communities on your home instance and if the home instance defederates from one other instance the community can defederate from the community on that instance without completely breaking apart

They're also hyper sensitive and generally toxic with their reflex delete/ban/block. They'll see what they want to see in the most mundane comments and nuke an entire thread. Best to just block them and ignore.

I don't mind being banned from the ml instance. The issue is their users come to all the other instances and use the same old strategies to stifle any speech by engaging extremely hyperbolic language and name-calling. The goal is to have a chilling effect on any discourse where their opinions are scrutinized in the slightest.

They can't engage with any topics or offer counter arguments. Every response is:

"I don't know how to respond to your argument. You must be a _____________[insert 'racist' or 'genocide defending' or 'fascist' or my new favorite 'zionist']"

The confusion about how the protocol works for new users is real, and suggestions that 'any instance is fine', although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading, firstly when you're not used to how fediverse stuff works, but also when bizarre rules about no swearing or NSFW content are applied at an admin level. I first started on .ml, but moved here after some deliberation because people can tailor their feed and content through joining communities, not having their instance hyper-politicised by ban-happy tankies. (I'm very progressive myself, before it's claimed otherwise)

I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption. Of course admins are entitled to their own opinions, but the entire purpose of communities like this is to try and decentralise the problematic censorship which has ruined reddit (among other issues). Having faith in the users and mods to consider content and conduct with as impartial as possible development and administration is vital to the site having any chance of being transparent and worth-contributing to.

I don't want to see the whole concept of Lemmy written off by outsiders because their first experiences of the site are of the rabid circlejerk messageboards instead of a new and exciting format for online content with greater interoperability and user control. To this effect, I'm still on the fence about defederating with those communities at a user level, but I think that I'm going to make a more concerted effort to make content and foster the communities I want here, so that .ml fades into insignificance - I don't want to feed into their narratives of persecution.

I wanna call on @dessalines, and @Nutomic, among others, with the greatest respect for their views and contributions to the project, to put the future of the platform ahead of turning it into an echo chamber - either by relinquishing themselves from one or the other (admin/dev), or by the admins collectively creating a clear policy about politicised banning to acknowledge people's concerns about this behaviour.

Yeah, I've been banned because I said something about Uighur genocide, on the other hand I'm wondering about dessalines' nationality and his knowledge about communism, it's easy to be communist of you only touched it online, I for example live in post communist country and remember some of it, old people are talking about it, it wasn't that good

I'd "understand" if everything would be transparent and they admitted it's tankie instance and you're banned because you don't like China but no, everything is against their own COC

Do we want someone like that not only administrating the oldest Lemmy instance but developing the whole platform?

I've been censored/shadowbanned in a couple .ml instances for calling out their overzealous comment-nuking mods. Not even political in nature, just seeing threads where 80-90% of the comments are 'removed by moderator' and commenting how suspicious it was.

Then they removed that comment, and after taking a screenshot of the new comment calling out that, I got shadowbanned and can't even vote there anymore.

Chinese honey pot

I was imagining something like this in hexbear or lemmygrad, as people there seemed quite dogmatic at times, but even on Lemmy.ml? Sad to see this, as I had mostly positive interactions there till now

For people who want to avoid all content from lemmy.ml, including posts and comments:

I use lemmy.cafe now because it has defederated with lemmy.ml.

As a lemmy.cafe user, I don't see any post/comment from lemmy.ml users at all.

Communities on lemmy.cafe are invisible to lemmy.ml users, so I would recommend creating more communities there.

I agree completely. Blocked the instance only now despite them becoming more and more annoying each month.

LW needs to defederate from LML so that they aren't being spoonfed users from the biggest instance.

Hello,

A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml.

Are they? Most of the communities are rather on LW: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active

!collapse@lemmy.ml is moving to !collapse@lemm.ee

Is there any community you need that doesn't have a LW or another equivalent on another instance?