@Kasrean From my experience it's more like a soft censoring. But yea, censoring does exist. I've interacted with Lemmy (specially lemmy.ml initially, since it was the largest instance containing all the communities I needed) even before the Reddit exodus. Back then there were only a handful of people creating content and the narrative they were spinning was something along the line of Look how bad the West is! Now look at how great China is!. Not to mention, the same people are against supporting Ukraine.

The problem was that it was really easy to make anti-russian or anti-china (edit: or to be, somehow racist against these, only by criticizing their governments, although not the same was applied to the anti-US posts - it was totally okay to be anti-America) posts or comments (in mods' views) and you were usually banned for it. Nowadays, tho, the situation is changing, and they get a small dose of their own medicine, lol (but you can still see the comments of these guys, many of them downvoted tho).

The ideological leaning of the developers means nothing on a federated network. What you care about is knowing the ideology of who runs your instance.

You can just as easily fall into a right wing echo chamber by joining the wrong instance. And one that censors any kind of pro Russia or pro China sentiment, which is equally bad, in my opinion.

Propaganda can come from both sides. Just keep your eyes open.

Please excuse my ignorance: what’s a “tanky/tankies”?

I joined via lemmy.world because at the time the stats just looked favorable, with the limited knowledge I had (uptime mostly).

As someone with experience in software engineering you learn to differentiate between the product and the dev.

It's especially easy with Lemmy, because every instance has its own vibe it seems. Would I join lemmygrad or how that instance is called? Probably not, but because it's the users who in the end define the direction of an instance I see no problem.

Freedom of speech is important and if all those tanky instances are about is their agenda, they will end up in an echo chamber sooner or later, as more regular people migrate and simply drown them out.

My thoughts are that you should use an instance that is in sync with your ethics. That is the freedom you have with opensource.

Well today I had someone support the Tienanmen Square massacre, another say the war of aggression in Ukraine is a denazification campaign, argue that nothing is happening untoward to Uighur's in China and assert that Pussy Riot "is a CIA op" lol. Yeah. It's over run with brain dead tankies. They suck. That instance will get defederated eventually if Lemmy actually takes off, and good riddance

Where did you hear this from? That's pretty dumb, honestly, if it's true.

Thought I’m on NCD for a moment here lol

To me, this is like Richard Stallman and certain reprehensible actions and opinions](https://rms-open-letter.github.io/).

Just like with Stallman and his contributions to software, I can justify using Lemmy to myself due to it being open source and the devs not directly financially profiting from the spread of Lemmy (although it certainly raises their public profile).

It's definitely unfortunate that they're Tankies.

Don’t like it, don’t read it. The price of freedom is that it is freedom for everybody even for those you (or I) don’t think should be free.

This is going to be why Lemmy doesn't take off long term.

Well, lemmygrad for sure is run by tankies, that's kinda the point. Most of it doesn't matter. It's not like they can control anything that happens on other instances.

I know the lemmygrad.ml instance claims to be Marxist but I don't think they're generally taken that seriously (and not to be confused with lemmy.ml) - is that what you're confusing? Apart from that, the federal nature of Lemmy means it doesn't really matter what the creator's political beliefs are.

Who cares? We're not on lemmy.ml, are we?

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" - John Gilmore

I read this on mastodon talking about it

Better a tanky than a pig

Here’s a discussion about this: https://lemmy.world/post/24798