Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
Good thing that Lemmy is an open source federation, then. It’s not like Spaz on Reddit, where one dude can ruin the whole damn thing for everyone with a few bad choices.
Regarding lemmy.ml: yes, you should avoid it. It does not make sense to create politically-neutral communities on a politically-oriented instance.
Regarding Dessalines: The great thing about Lemmy is that I don’t need to give a shit about the lead developer’s politics, because he’s not in control of how Lemmy is used, and if he ever tried some kind of heinous cross-instance power grab, it would get shut down before it got started.
Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦
He’s not praising an ethnic cleansing. He elsewhere has claimed that the ethnic cleansing/concentration camp narrative is entirely western propaganda and isn’t happening at all. Instead, it’s some sort of… Incarceration, deradicalization, and rehabilitation program? Hell, I don’t know.
Either way, he already does and says enough things to criticize, let’s not make up more. It just makes us look just as dumb.
And you linking to a direct malware .zip package.
Lemmy.zip name is really unfortunate
The whole .zip TLD is really unfortunate.
Yeah, people pushed Google on that one specifically and they still went and did it. It should be removed.
As a worker in the Cybersecurity space, it’s absolutely fantastic for job security.
Imagine making a claim like this and being so lazy that you couldn’t even throw it into virus total to confirm your hypothesis
Stop making wild ass assumptions and trying to peddle it as truth. It makes you look bad
Yeah. Please note that phtn.app dev refused to change the default instance. I have moved back to Voyager since.
Edit: this has been resolved now. Photon has changed default instance to lemmy.ee
I never refused. In fact, it’s already been changed to lemm.ee
They’re going to change it soon.
Source: I asked them on matrix
That’s good news. I will move back to Photon when that happens. Thanks for letting me know.
Done
Thank you
Thank you very much! Now I feel much more comfortable using Photon.
Thanks again for developing it and making it open source.
I haven’t announced it, yet, but I’ve been testing ph.lemmy.cafe for some time now if that’s your cup of tea.
Thanks. Photon is decent but I would use Voyager instead out of principle. Would you add v.lemmy.cafe?
I’ll consider it. Need to manage the available resources a bit first.
Anyone else seeing the irony of objecting to ml politics being discussed on a platform built by a ml for discussing and organizing around ml politics?
Who cares. This is pointless drama.
Then don’t sign up for an account there? I don’t see your problem
Your apparent antagonism towards the lead Lemmy developer is sensationalist and non-constructive. If you dislike their moderation then the solution is simple: leave their instances and communities. If your user does not reside on their instances then its admins cannot silence you. If you do not participate in their communities, then their moderators cannot silence you. If you do not wish to see their users then block their instances (though, I would still advise against this). Your argument is founded upon the premise that you don’t like their opinions, so just don’t listen. Don’t taint the Lemmyverse’s image with your false alarmism. Be the change that you wish to see. Start an instance with administrative rules that you think are better. Start a community with moderation rules that you think are better. If one finds that they are needing to resort to ad-homenim to gather support, then I would advise one to critically analyze their position and arguments.
EDIT (2024-06-07T19:25Z): From your other comments in this thread I see that you are advocating for the creation of new communities and for people to individually distance themselves from lemmy.ml, rather than defederation. I agree with this. I still disagree, however, with the approach and tone that you used in your post. I think the same end can and should be achieved without ad-homenim attacks.
Edit: missed that your already mentioned it, I guess the lemmy.ml link might still be useful
A list of alternative communities to the lemmy.ml ones: https://lemmy.ml/post/16531126
I mean… What is your point here? This is the internet no?
deleted by creator
I had my first ever comment, in decades of forums/reddit usage, get mod deleted because I was critical of China and the USSR. It was a fairly mild criticism. That action turned me off the whole instance.
Sad that you chose an .ml community to come back to. You can’t talk about Russia or China at all without getting deleted there, unless it’s saying that Tienamen Square never happened or something like that.
They learn from who they are worshipping. Exactly how the CCP control the narratives.
They learn from who
they are worshippingpays them and might disappear them if they say the wrong thing.
Same here, but they tried to claim I called a Steam Deck a “Rice Burner” as a racist insult when I randomly chose “rice” as the title for this meme to fill the mandatory title block.
Like, bro? Even if that was my intent, which it wasn’t even a term I had ever seen applied to a computer, it doesn’t make sense.
I looked at your downvotes because I see you at -2… Wear this like a badge of honor!
Most of the downvotes I see are lemmy.ml users. Which I find funny. Rice exists in so many countries outside of china, but because it reminds them of China it’s instantly bad since you’re using is negatively. It’s absurd.
wow, you can see who up/downvoted a post? how do I do that?
Host your own lemmy instance. Or use Kbin(shows up as likes).
For some reason they decided that even though other activitypub services can see it just fine, lemmy will not show these things to normal users.
I thought it only showed Reduces from Kbin users? But then Kbin.social stopped showing any Reduces at all, and now Kbin.social is defunct for several days.
I tried Kbin.earth and Fedia.io but both show the Reduces as greyed out, at least for https://lemmy.world/comment/10490177 that I used as a test. I will try creating a login and see if that unlocks it.
LMAO!! Thank you! I’ve got them blocked but the fact they’re even voting me down is silly. It wasn’t even an insult because if I was even mentioning “ricing” it was the better of two options.
Apparently its to do with a sport car scene where the Chinese couldn’t afford such luxuries but still want to participate and westerners or Americans would call these vehicle mods ricing
Now with linux theming we call ricing and that carries a racist connotation. How racist it actually is I am unsure but either way thats the reason people get upset.
Dang if you like free speech so much, why not federate with hexbear about it?
What are you implying here? People don’t use Lemmy because of this guy’s politics? Do we know the politics of other developers?
To be honest the issue is more about the power tripping than politics. Banning someone from the Arch Linux community because they disagree with you seems strange
And people believed they’d escape the days of power-tripping mods by exiting Reddit.
At least with the festive there are no alternatives.
festive
Like that new neame
I appreciate the mod log here because at least you can see the receipts
Even more interesting with admin powers of your own instance. You can reverse shitty mod decisions locally and make your own decisions on evaluating if what they said if it’s actually a problem or just overzealous moderation. Also means you get to see what mod took the action. Also looking at votes (which you could see as a kbin user).
That’s the beauty of lemmy though - there is probably another community for the same thing on a different instance.
Yup. There were power tripping mods on Reddit, too. Except there, you’d be out of luck. On here, you can go to other instances, like communities on programming.dev or something.
To be fair you could’ve made a different subreddit but somehow this feels different
Because there the name was immutable. Here, you can take the name with you. You don’t have to make up some secondary related name that has significantly lower SEO value (for lack of another way to describe).
Encourage users to create content on Lemmy communities hosted on non-tankie instances.
My problem with this ideology is while there are plenty of tankies on Lemmy, the term gets overapplied.
Some people think anyone to the left of Bill Kristol is a tankie.
Thanks for pointing this out. To some people, advocates for things like socialized healthcare are ‘tankies’. Its hard to tell what people mean anymore by it, and one persons tankie might be another’s centrist at this point.
Yeah… The label of “tankie” seems to be used to describe “anyone to the left of me”.
It’s so widely applied to the point of reaching meaninglessness.
Mods and admins have enormous power to shape what can be discussed using comment moderation tools, bans, and promoted content. At the very least you should be aware of what potential biases an admin has that may inform how they moderate.
Oh nice, thank you. I didn’t realize they were an admin and mod too. I thought just a developer.
Only of their own instance, they cant do this shit on other instances
Only of their own instance, they cant do this shit on other instance
They can when they bake it directly into the lemmy code.
The ended up allowing instance admins to enable / disable that filter as well as customize it but the discussion shows how much power they wield across all instances and their mindset about using that power. The comment about something not being in line with their view of the the project (lemmy) is particularly telling.
To be clear I’m not disagreeing with the filter nor am I necessarily bagging on the developers, what I’m trying to demonstrate is the breadth and depth of their reach. They are most definitely not confined to a single a instance nor is everything they do, or can do, visible to most users.
i dont think you can take an instance of the devs considering maybe possibly baking in a poorly thought out slur filter and then being told what a stupid idea it is by the commuity as evidence that they can’t be trusted not to bake in features allowing them to take admin actions on other instances
Such a change would likely trivially easy to remove by jusr forking lemmy, as they suggested people do a few times in that thread
Lemmy has a lot more contributors and eyes digging into its codebase now compared to 2021 so I think this is very unlikely to happen.
And the creators of lemmy (same dudes lemmy.ml) have done things like this. Specifically the insertion of automatic word filters IIRC:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
Here you can see all the glory of these devs.
Don’t forget, there’s lots of other federated media options besides lemmy.
Frankly my time around lemmy.ml has been pretty off putting to the service as a whole. I don’t see how endless user growth is sustainable for any volunteer moderation team either.
Don’t forget, you all can go look through the lemmy.ml mod log at any time and view the bullshit that goes on over there.
Here’s a link: https://lemmy.ml/modlog
Oh, my, god, they added an optional, configurable regular expression filter. The monsters!
Talk about over simplification of a problem lmao
Right, but Lemmy is open source. It can be forked.
Their political ideologies that are anti-capitalism are actually Lemmys greatest strength.
I don’t know that I’d agree that the political beliefs of the lemmy.ml admins are lemmys greatest strengths. Certainly federation amd open source contributions are core to lemmy but support of a specific nation’s policies and actions certainly is not.
We already have a capitalist, Lemmy. It’s called Reddit.
Lemmy exists explicitly because of anti-capitalist sentiment, not despite it. Remember that politics is two separate spectrums, possibly more. Economic theory and governmetal theory are completely different things. My point is that it is their economic communism that birthed lemmy, and thier governmental theory is really not releveant to the software in the same way.
What’s that got to do with censoring some discussions about some countries?
I literally just described the difference between their governmental philisophies and their economic ones.
Ok but they are administering and moderating their instance according to their political beliefs about a specific nation. They’re not defending China’s economic policies at Tiananmen Square or their notions on tariffs with Uyghurs. I don’t think you answered the question in the way you think you did.
YSK: you will never see more pathetic whining than people on Lemmy constantly complaining about “tankies”. Full disclosure: I have been called a tankie one time in two years on Lemmy. I commented on a post that was basically jerking off to the idea that Japan would repeat its atrocities against China in the event that there was a war over Taiwan. I expressed doubt that it would go very smoothly, for which I was banned and labeled a tankie.
Read fkn anything on lemmy.ml and this is obvious.
