OpenStars

But after I blocked hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml, I started to forget that all of that was even there, though I internally made a kind of automatic mental block for Lemmy.ml too (like WHAT!? oh nvm it's from them...). I shouldn't forget though, that that is what a new user would see... thus it would be quite unfriendly for me to bring fresh meat to the fascist audience for their amusement.

Listening to instance admins, I just don't know why they refuse to see those campaigns of brigading as you described happened to you (can you prove it btw, like if the account still exists, and you find a way to view downvotes - does Mbin let you? I tried but maybe it needs a login to do that and it appears greyed out to me without one...), and they say things like "they don't affect our users" (bullshit, you just perfectly described a situation that I suspect happens all the time where it does), and basically act like bullying and intimidation is not a thing that exists in the world. Like, if you ever say anything to anger someone on lemmy.ml, then that's your fault and you deserve whatever comes your way after that!?

Tbf, there are instances - e.g. reddthat.com - that disable downvotes entirely. But I don't want to simply become insensitive to everyone else's disapproval around me - rather I want the system to work properly so that I am only getting disapproval from people who I either respect or at least are neutral, i.e. not fascists who abuse the system bc they are allowed to by inattentive admins.

If there was an instance somewhere that had defederated from the Big 3 Axis powers - hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml - I would likely join it, and promote it, and recommend Lemmy to people irl again. Otherwise, I will either leave the Fediverse if it gets too bad, or far more likely simply block lemmy.ml but then only enjoy the Fediverse privately rather than as something I am allowed to share bc of how poor and off-putting the initial user experience is.:-(

It is extremely sad how heavily this aspect hinders our continued growth - even if Reddit does something annoying like finally kills off old-reddit for good this time, are people really going to want to come here, so that instead of being exposed to the right-wing propaganda over there, they can be exposed to the fascism-disguised-as-leftism over here? Fascists are controlling everything, everywhere!?!? But we were supposed to be different, here. At least that's what we told ourselves.

Fascism is quite capable at achieving its goals - seeing as how it is not limited by any of that pesky "morality" that slows others down.

Possibly a good comparison could be memes@lemmy.ml vs. the two alternatives mentioned in the OP - I really wanted to keep the former, but politics kept creeping in and just made the experience un-fun so eventually I blocked it all. I thought perhaps the mods were simply lazy, I had little idea of the systemic issues across lemmy.ml altogether.

If you hear of an instance that has defederated from them, I would be interested to know. Otherwise, this OP at least seems to be helping prepare people for that eventuality even if not yet happening now.

Thank you very much for sharing that history - that really helps me understand why people are not taking this seriously. If they "feel like" they have heard it all before, then they give their rote responses from the past, not realizing how things have changed.

And too there's GIGO, where people that should have been banned were banned, but it's still not a terribly persuasive happenstance to convince people who cannot handle the subtleties involved between the outcome vs. the method by which it was arrived at.

Google at one point was not evil, and people warning us not to put trust in them to make Android were solidly ignored. Apple, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of it was the same. And look at us now. FAAFO. Well, now we're seeing firsthand some very few glimpses of how bad it could ultimately get, for those companies.

But for lemmy.ml we are still in the early stages, where people are saying "but they write the code" (irrelevant), and "they aren't evil" (we have proof, NOW), and "the Fediverse is still too small, let it grow first" (a horrible idea - for one thing it won't grow as much this way and for another if it did then having so many communities held hostage on that instance would be even more difficult to fix than now). Oh, and another one I hear quite often is "lemmy.world has problems too", which I'm not even going to dignify with a comment about. But the big ones are "only the admins are bad - not the users" (partly true but not entirely and quite frankly... if YOU want to ignore all the warning signs then that doesn't mean that *I* should be forced to stay behind with you as well - particularly when user-level blocks are NOT the same as instance-level ones); and "but some of the biggest communities are there" (I mean, so what, go back to Reddit if you want that but... okay it is a more fair objection tbf).

I doubt many places will defederate lemmy.ml right now... but on the other hand, I see preparations paving the way for that to happen by removing the existing roadblocks, most notably https://reddthat.com/post/20197120. Though that too will require more than a little effort reaching out to each and every single community group of mods to begin the discussion about moving their communities, one by one. This fight against authoritarianism will be long, costly, and may never truly be won - e.g. even if Lemmy.ml gets defederated, the users of hexbear, lemmygrad, and it may simply hide out as alts elsewhere? - but it seems to me to be worth fighting? Though I may need to find at least one instance that actually does defederate from those Big Three Axis powers to use in the meantime.

Thank you 🙏 for your own efforts in combating these (mal)practices.

Worse, you will be surrounded by them on all sides, as others don't bother... :-(

I did. I stumbled upon a post to chapotraphouse while browsing the All feed from startrek.website that had not defederated it at the instance level. And similarly I found a politics (or maybe it was a memes) community on lemmygrad.ml that same way too! It seems neither of those are defederated from that server still. And on discuss.online while lemmygrad.ml is defederated, hexbear.net is not.

Probably you meant people don't sign up with a login on those instances randomly, but I thought I would add the above perspective at least - that anyone across the Fediverse can get there randomly, if the defederation is not at the instance level.

I don’t feel like I’m being secluded

You probably aren't... yet, but you will become thus, increasingly over time.

For the past half a year I have defended lemmy.ml, saying that its users are nowhere near as bad as hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml (just... visit them, you'll see fairly quickly what they are all about). And that much is still true - the users are quite often innocent.

Though not 100% so, and now this with the admins, I will block lemmy.ml soon. I have already started blocking some of its communities, like all the politically-themed memes were simply not fun to keep appearing in my feed, unlike the many other meme communities scattered throughout the fediverse. I am missing out on basically nothing but contention, which has noticeably improved my experience of the Fediverse.

Yes, I am throwing out some babies along with the bathwater, but I am okay with that. The point is to foster a sense of enjoyment and peace, rather than constantly argue with people who are not engaging in good faith to begin with. I left Reddit for good reason, and believe it or not I would have left it regardless of all of spez's bullshit.

Imagine my dismay when coming to the Fediverse, I make the mistake of ONE comment in chapotraphouse, and I got like a hundred replies of the most batshit insane, derogatory, bad-mannered and bad-faithed "arguments", which lasted for WEEKS long after I stopped responding. I was being "dunked on", which they LOVE, and which - apparently, much to my dismay upon finding out - is the literal purpose of that community. I almost left the entire Fediverse after that.

Well, it did not help that I made the same mistake upon replying to a comment in some political community on lemmygrad.ml. It was those two events together that almost made me leave. However, fortunately for me Lemmy v0.19.3 came out just as I was mulling that issue over, so I blocked those two instances, and now I am as happy as a clam. Honestly this issue with Lemmy.ml is nowhere near as bad as those two instances. But it's still not great, it still impacts people - e.g. it will impact you far more than me - and it will hurt all of us if we cannot recommend to irl people to come to the Fediverse, b/c they are likely to see that stuff and be put off by it. And therefore all the content that they may have offered for our consumption is gone along with it.

An analogy might be: how much fecal matter is okay to appear in your food? We can spend a large amount of time curating our own experiences here to avoid that, but how likely is a non-Linux-using average person who might want to leave Reddit and come here to be even willing to do that, before they can start enjoying their interactions here? That "shit" demeans us all.

That’s like saying all US citizens are awful because they live there.

I suggest a different analogy instead. Crime in the USA in general has gone down substantially in recent decades, but let's say that you wanted to walk the streets of NYC in the 80s-early 90s. It's not "just b/c they are there", but rather "crime is MUCH more likely to occur there, than other places". If you choose to go there, you are making a probabilistic bet that you will survive the encounter. Maybe you will... or maybe your child will become Batman after you get brutally murdered in front of him, but either way, past some threshold it becomes a foolish bet to have chanced it, in return for what gain even?

You and I do not get to decide upon the preferences of others. Many will leave Lemmy altogether, rather than put up with this stuff. I at least will block Lemmy.ml, but that leaves the newest and least aware and therefore most vulnerable people to still have to deal with it. In the meantime, we are conversing about it, letting people know about the problems that we all face, together.

Every word used by disingenuous people on the right becomes "useless" - freedom, patriot, Christian, help, law, order, justice, democracy, Constitution, agreement, good, bad - you name it, they twist it into a 100% polar opposite of what it used to mean before they got their hands on it.

So at some point, I think perhaps they should not be in charge... of what words "mean"? :-P

That said, 'tankie' is pejorative so perhaps we can find a better one for that different reason. I don't know what, or for sure that a pejorative is bad, but maybe "authoritarian", totalitarian, or fascist seems accurate - as in not beholden to "principles" so much as whoever holds the power gets to do whatever they want.

I mentioned elsewhere but here’s a copy and paste:

It is far more than just that. Removing comments is one thing, mass-banning from many communities at once despite never even having commented in them at all is another, but the real issue is using database manipulation to delete the log entries as to why the comments were removed after the fact.

Even if unintentional, which strains credulity, this is some spez-level stuff going on, where we have the option to either take what a single person (who does not seem inclined to follow their own stated rules) offers, or else we can leave. Many are choosing the latter, and like the Rexodus, making the situation known to others as well in the process.

“Criticizing China” was merely the spark that lit the match, with the situation offering proof of what apparently people have been suspecting for some time now.

Well, more to the point, it's too late for us to test this all now. We'd have to spin up our own instances, watch all of the signals coming out, and compare those signals to what they used to be vs. then become. As someone did - with screenshots demonstrating the before vs. after. But we cannot now go back in time to confirm that particular instance, we'd have to catch a future occurrence.

Unless you meant the mass removals - but people have been complaining about that for quite awhile now iirc? This is not an isolated incident, by any means. For months now I have been defending Lemmy.ml to various random commenters across the Fediverse, citing how different it is from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net (and truthfully, the situation is quite different, here being isolated more if not exclusively to the admins), but lately I have given up b/c the collective weight of all of these actions seems indefensible to me now, as a pattern of behavior.

I actually have compassion for them - as you say they are programmers not social workers, and if they truly want their goals of FOSS acceptance and socialist world-views to be exported around the world, then they are working against their own goals but do not see that. Put another way, they may truly believe the local Chinese propaganda, but in order to export their ideals to a global audience, it needs to be tempered with a greater mix of acceptance that people exposed to more Western-style media are accustomed to (where we are allowed to watch things like videos rather than be forced to read state-sponsored bulletins telling us what to believe).

But anyway, the removal reason is far from the point - it is the manner of the removal that concerns us so greatly. But sure, start up a dialog with them if you wish - you sound like a good person to initiate such, since you go to lengths to understand their POV:-).

Btw do you have any suggestions as an alternative to "tankie"? I am not 100% convinced that it is fully "dehumanizing", but I do see where it is somewhere along the spectrum towards that goal. Would "fascist" or "authoritarian" work better?