Asking as there has been a few comments mentioning this with the new !stardewvalley@lemm.ee taking over !stardewvalley@lemmy.ml
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com for additional context on those recent events if you are interested
Also, an older post for more context on how lemmy.ml is managed: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
Curious to hear other thoughts about this, as I’m trying to keep !simracing@lemmy.ml active, but might suggest to move it elsewhere if a lot of people prefer not to interact with lemmy.ml communities
No. People complaining about ml are exaggerating.
Pasting from another comment here:
it is an issue that everyone commenting on every post across every community on that whole entire instance must essentially conform to all of their ideals - or else be banned from all of those communities, not merely the one with the “offensive” statement. You cannot say anything truthful about Russia, China, Ukraine, Uyghurs, Taiwan, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, etc. (if the admins disagree with what you said)
Imagine if we were on Reddit and could not say “fuck spez”, or we were on Linux but for some reason were still forbidden to say “I prefer not to use Windows today, so thank you but no thanks”. Those communities on Lemmy.ml are held hostage to people if not agreeing then at least going along with whatever party line BS that the admins want to uphold. Moreover, at any time they could add whatever their wanted to that list.
So it’s not about politics, per se, but their decision to become the arbiters of “truth(iness)” about everything across any community on their entire instance.
Do whatever you want, but I hope it helped for me to explain that.
I wish that political ideology wasn’t such a thing to worry about on Lemmy. It’s sadly easy to find extremist content, even on the homepage, when you’re not logged in.
100% of the people I’ve recommended Lemmy to irl have not only been turned away by exactly that but then actually give me dirty looks for having recommended it to them.
We who block such tend to forget: a new user faces a very different experience, full of e.g. calls to murder landlords and sometimes even people with like just bank accounts.
Imagine if this was NSFW content that wasn’t labelled as such! Which is highly ironic bc I find that NSFW content is extremely well-behaved on Lemmy?! :-P
Sadly, politically extremist rhetoric refuses to label itself in like manner:-(.
Wait, I’ve certainly read this comment before…
!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca! I wish a lot more posts would go there, but sadly it is still the most recent one after all this time.
Yes. I find their gaming-chair leftism and obnoxious preachiness annoying enough to just avoid. My blocklist is filled with .ml users, and none of those were because of any political positions. It’s because they were annoying, whinging twats.
It’s because they were annoying, whinging twats.
Not even whinging, screaming.
no, I’m subbed to many communities on .ml
This is something that that bothers me… I joined lemmy.ml around 3 years ago as one of the pirate subs on reddit made a backup community there in case they were banned.
Fast forward to the api debacle, I started to use lemmy as a permanent alternative, and made 3 of my favourite art communities- abstract photography, collage and printmaking
It’s always been in the back (and sometimes the front of my mind) whether to move them elsewhere, partly because people commenting on their ‘blanket ban’ of lemmy.ml, and the fact that I sometimes feel that I’m on one of the ‘pariah’ instances.
It’s interesting reading the comments here, especially considering the art communities are laid back, without politics, and haven’t had any issues (so far)…
Moving communities is always an option.
We moved !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee a while ago, it worked fine, it’s even more active now that it used to be as there is no delay due to LW size
Yep, it’s something that has occurred to me, I’ve got an idea of which instance and all that, but I’d probably need to speak with the admins. I don’t know whether communities can migrate over posts/comments etc and part of me is reluctant to leave all that behind… BUT, I’ve done it once from scratch, so it’s not impossible
For me it was a blanket ban that finally caused me to unsubscribe from every ml community. If it wasn’t for that then it might be OK to keep hosting a non-political sub but the censorship over there is so aggressive and widespread that it’s very difficult to avoid.
I would say think about migration because if anything the problem is getting worse over time.
I do agree that art subs in general are among the most politics-free areas of lemmy, (speaking as a moderator of traditional art)
I have mostly refrained from posting political art, even though I do really like a good caricature (I grew up on Spitting Image, and other British satire progs), and also political art is, well… art
But, people come to see the nice pictures and chill out for a bit, which is fair, and it’s good to have that as a community
Although if other people either get banned as a result of saying something about China or Russia etc., or they choose for themselves to defederate somehow, then over time that is an increasing number of people across the Fediverse who cannot enjoy that artwork.
It’s like… what if the Library of Alexandria had made some copies and sent it out to remote places, before being (accidentally?) burned down by Julius Caesar during his civil war?
If that artwork is important to be seen by people everywhere, then why allow it to be held hostage by an admin team that could at any moment add still more things to the unnamed list of topics that are forbidden to be discussed on that instance? China, Russia, Uyghurs, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Taiwan, and… what else will it be tomorrow?
You might even say something that gets taken out of context and be banned from the entire instance yourself. “Killing Uyghurs is not the best work I have seen” - no no, I meant that killing them isn’t happening at all, I was referring to the title of the painting!?
Well, it’s something to consider. I hope I am not coming across here as being too extreme, just trying to offer some thoughts along the lines that you mentioned that you have already started, in case it would be appreciated.:-)
…I hope I am not coming across here as being too extreme…
Not at all, you’ve basically summed up how I feel, plus added something I hadn’t considered which is what would happen if I was banned from .ml for a post or comment. I’ve got a few days holiday to have a think about it all and also ask the community… I don’t want to make top down ‘executive decisions’ without consultation
Cheers 👍
Indeed it is good to think ahead, rather than make rash decisions:-).
I mentioned elsewhere, to the developers of PieFed that I will switch to, that Dessalines is still an ally in the flight against for-profit corporate control over everything, e.g. Reddit, Facebook, Threads, X, etc. But while I have ENORMOUS respect for having offered the Lemmy codebase, the way he runs his personal instance… it’s not all good, nor all bad, but definitely does have more worrisome elements than most Lemmy or Mastodon instances.
The lack of transparency in governance in particular, as well as how heavy-handed it is, and again the fact that the unwritten rules are so hard to guess at, and could change at any time. It leaves people feeling insecure in the situation, which seems to make it unreliable, unless you constantly dance to his tune, which he never states quite what that is. And even if you never so much as mention e.g. Ukraine or Uyghurs or Gaza, the fact that someone else in your community could, and therefore mandatorily become booted from the community (along with the entire instance), is not ideal. The rules merely state that Lemmy.ml is “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but there’s far more (politics) going on besides that.
At least Reddit was more honest about Huffman’s opinion - “you are landed gentry and I will harvest your data and no longer allow third-party apps unless they pay my exorbitant fee”. Okay… good to know I guess.
Anyway, if I helped any then I am glad ☺️.
Curious to hear other thoughts about this, as I’m trying to keep !simracing@lemmy.ml active, but might suggest to move it elsewhere if a lot of people prefer not to interact with lemmy.ml communities
I would vote for moving it elsewhere. Maybe lemmy.zip would be a good instance that’s focused around tech and gaming. Or discuss.tchncs.de because !trucksim@discuss.tchncs.de and !diysimulators@discuss.tchncs.de are already hosted there.
You are a very active poster here, so moving it to that instance would also be convenient in case you need to mod
Also, that instance is very well managed, always impressed with the other services they offer.
Based on the comments, it seems like we should definitely suggest this. Would you like to make a meta post or do I do it?
I’m busy this weekend. Feel free to go ahead with the post.
Done!
I’m more of an anarchist and I’ve not had issues with hexbear or .ml, though I don’t block lemmygrad I’m not subbed to most of their communities mostly because sectarianism bothers me.
I feel like I always have to check if I’m posting on something that’s on .world because even relatively mild off-color humor can get removed as “incivility” if it rubs a mod the wrong way.
Yes. I’ve had personal experience, many times, of over the top censorship and bans based on opposing views expressed in a mature and rational way. Once or twice is fine, but I’ve seen it more there than my entire combined experience online, it’s crazy and happens to often to ignore.
I’ve also seen a crazy amount of trolling there and it seems the trolls are protected through crazy censorship of anyone calling them out. It’s just not worth the aggravation.
Fwiw, lemmy.cafe defederated from lemmy.ml, and is even running a 0.19.6 beta codebase so even if there’s only a single admin they seem really on the ball.
Tesseract also has implemented a way to ban all users from lemmy.ml.
And PieFed allows personal bans on any custom instance you choose. Plus it has “categories” of communities so that you don’t have to keep searching on All, though you can do that too if you want. It seems really polished these days! Not 100% - e.g. you can’t easily search for a user in the same form as a keyword - but it looks extremely usable, so I am switching to it today.
Meanwhile, on Lemmy we were promised that 0.19.3 would allow user blocking of instances, which turned out to be not quite true, and when your instance upgrades from that to 0.19.6 when it comes out (most other instances, like mine, are already running 0.19.5), the protections that it offers will be further rolled back - e.g. on 0.19.3 I did not receive notifications from those users, whereas now on 0.19.5 I do.
And maybe some apps allow blocking of an instance, I dunno about that aspect.
Lemmy.ml was one of the first instances in the Fediverse… but that doesn’t mean that we should be forced to listen to the stuff spewing forth from it unless we choose that for ourselves, especially in the next few months as the trolls go into overdrive due to the ongoing USA election (and likely subsequent “constitutional crisis” event).
Anyway, I just wanted you to know that there are options! Not many, but they do exist!:-)
deleted by creator
I block all .ml communities when I see them pop up. I’m somewhere between 200-300 blocked communities at the moment (not exclusively .ml though).
deleted by creator
Pasting from another comment in this thread:
The only way I know how to ditch the users, besides blocking each one individually, would be to make a new account on either dubvee.org or Lemmy.cafe where all 3 of the big 3 are completely defederated. Think of those instances as troll-blockers, working hard to keep the Fediverse pleasant to converse in:-).
deleted by creator
Yeah it seems like there’s barely anything here for Mexico, which I guess uses just the standard sources. There is !mexico@lemm.ee, but… you see how empty that is. There is https://lemmygrad.ml/c/latinamerica but… fuck no, not on on that instance!:-P
Yeah I see !trees@sh.itjust.works at lemmy.cafe, though I don’t see trees@lemmy.world so perhaps nobody there has subscribed to it yet, anyway ymmv. And I see !animepics@reddthat.com, but you may want to check your specific communities.
Damn, lemmy.cafe is somehow even running 0.19.6-beta.9. Is this too good to be true - is this a trap?:-) Or is the instance admin that much on the ball?
deleted by creator
Yeesh. Things are not perfect in the USA but it does sound a bit better than that - until/unless Trump wins and then the gap will close a bit:-(.
I wonder where I will end up myself! I even wonder if I should take a break from social media altogether over the next couple of months, but that seems doubtful (if only bc it would take quite some effort to replicate the various functions, e.g. research a good RSS reader). Lemmy - like everywhere else - seems likely to become a shitstorm until the election is over.:-(
Though dropping lemmy.ml and hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml should help a ton.
Instance blocked it. The mods are corrupt and actively shape conversation to align with their world view, without transparency.
It’s fine to disagree, and want respectful discourse, but it isn’t ok to use very vague sidebar rules to scour dissent
100% I do not want anything to do with .ml
I definitely try to avoid it. Whenever there’s an (active) alternative community available, I prefer that.
I generally don’t worry about communities. Either the community is well run or not.
Users, though. I’ll block trolls all day long. If I notice I’m blocking a whole bunch of users from the same instance, I’ll block the instance. So far that has only happened twice. Lemmygrad and feddit.ro.
