I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. 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, ...
As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.
I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.
This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:
Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say?
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance."
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. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there's nobody to discuss anything with.
I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
Tankies make liberals uncomfortable because liberals believe they are the furthest left you can go before you become wrong and bad (forgetting that there are folks to their right on the political spectrum who think they are.
The worst thing for a tankie like me was running here to get away from the insane msn-pilled discourse, finding some actual leftists, only to have have leredditors chase me down sayin' i am following them.
I mean shit I'm just trying to talk leftist ideals that haven't been twisted into neoliberal business-school-bullshit talking points. I care bout the same shit yall do, i just don't think the DNC is going to help us get there. That prospect does not make me happy, believe me.
Libs? If you are burning with desire to debate politics? I am begging... begging you to understand that the education in school and the news yesterday on the tv Aren't. Acumen.(why would they be more credible than the commercials in between them?), and do not fear but embrace the idea/possibility that there's an iota of a chance you might not actually be right.
Does this notion mean i am? No. But if you don't think you might be wrong then you'll likely never find out you are.
I'm not sure you understand exactly what a tankie is. I mean, do you really think it's all right to sacrifice (I.E. straight up murder) people to the ideals of communism and socialism?
Being ultra liberal is fine IMO, even having the attitude that we might have to have use violence to overthrow of our government in order to get liberal ideals to be a part of our system is somewhat okay. But to think that our government, should it become communist, should be allowed to kill people in order to maintain a socialist or communist society is just straight up wrong and as far as I know that's what a tankie is, someone who thinks that Tiananmen Square and Stalin's reign of terror was just a necessary evil in order to strengthen the communist societal norm.
Seems to me the real objection should not be the ideology but the existence of any system that must murder the people it governs in order to continue to govern.