Hey everyone, I’m new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says “Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.”).
The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the “lemmy.ml” server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”.
So I thought I try that one when it’s from Lemmy’s own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?
lemmy was made by communists. if you don’t like it go back to reddit.
How about freaking No!
Lemmy might be written by communists, but nothing stops you using it on an instance that is not.
Also, there’s other threadiverse apps out there that work fine with the federated network if you really don’t want to use one created by “communists”
I don’t think making this place a total echo chamber, by telling people to “go back to reddit” is in any way a good thing.
Freakin epic bacon sauce.
I suspect the devs wouldn’t even agree with this take.
Edit: really? They’d rather everyone align with their views 100% or fuck off to reddit? Why even make something like lemmy then?
C’mon dude, they just asked you to copy a quote from the Capital, not to recite a whole brochure with the latest analysis on imperialism. And/or swear by it,
It is the most basic common ground for every left wing person and a monumental text in modern Western literacy.
Most people I would care to discuss with should have a basic understanding of what is written in there, and I believe it is the same for people running their own instance.
If you take such a vehement stance against “quoting” Das Kapital, then you probably you lie so much off center that I would personally could have no productive discussion with you.
I mean, even the notion that this is some kind of pledge of allegiance is suspicious enough in its own sake, like letting us on you believe leftists are somehow indoctrinated[^1]. I you weren’t a little removed about Das Kapital you could even subvert the text by quoting something out of context so that it says something unintended by the authors.
But indeed, if you are turned off by this playful screening question, then it only shows that such screening serves its purpose most effectively.
[1]: To be frank lemmy.ml does not even defederate neoliberal instances, so perhaps there is a paradigm shift for you right there.
No where have I said I personally have a problem with it.
LMAO that’s a “new” (to me) requirement, I guess they’re full mask off now. They, along with their sister instance lemmygrad, and their cousin spawned from chapo trap house called hexbear, are rabid authoritarian communists (aka tankies) who want to kill people to enforce their ideals “for their own good.” They honestly believe that once they take over and kill all political dissidents the state they install to accomplish this violent goal will “wither” on it’s own. Clearly, they’re insane and can mostly be ignored, unless the topic is entirely apolitical. Also heads up, .ml (and grad, not hexbear) are the instances run by the devs that originally made lemmy, and jerboa (the app) is made by one of them as well.
Most other instances are cool.
So I’ve certainly read some leftwing stuff on lemmy but I have yet to encounter, ant current recollection, any posts / comments which advocate violence. Not saying they don’t exist but would be curious to see some examples (if you have some on hand).
You will in time, there’s plenty on !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works. the latest I can remember is “the French deserve a thousand Charlie Hebdos” (Charlie Hebdo being a magazine, ironically left-leaning no less, that was shot up with 12 people murdered and 11 injured for publishing a cartoon depicting Muhammed in 2015).
A few corrections regarding your misconceptions of Communist theory, for anyone scrolling by but unfamiliar with Marxism:
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Marxists advocate for revolution, because Capitalism cannot simply be voted out. Given that following Marxist analysis to its correct conclusions necessitates transitioning to Socialism, this can be seen as a “call to violence.” Yes, it is, but out of necessity. Marxists don’t advocate simply massacring everyone of slightly different beliefs, rather, Marxists are not Blanquists and thus believe revolution is only possible with mass, popular support.
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The Marxist conception of a State is a tool of class oppression, not all instances of government. Rather, Marxists advocate for working towards full Public Ownership of Capital and Central Planning by the government. When Marxists say they believe the State will wither away, they mean eventually all property will be folded into the public sector and thus the concept of “classes” will cease to exist as well, gradually as property is folded into the public sector to the degree to which markets have formed Big Industry and Monopolist Syndicates. From Engels:
“When ultimately it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself superfluous. As soon as there is no social class to be held in subjection any longer, as soon as class domination and the struggle for individual existence based on the anarchy of production existing up to now are eliminated together with the collisions and excesses arising from them, there is nothing more to repress, nothing necessitating a special repressive force, a state. The first act in which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – is at the same time its last independent act as a state. The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then dies away of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not “abolished”, it withers away.”
Communism or not the people you associate yourself with and defend (.ml, grad, and hexbear) advocate violence, the mod team supports it, and you know it. Stop trying to pretend you don’t.
Sure is great to cherry pick and remove any and all context! All I did was add context to the nonsense you spouted.
Mmhmm
Edit: Oh look, the mods removed the photo evidence of their users calling for violence. Wonder why, anyway it’s over on meanwhileongrad where they can’t do shit about it. Tough break.
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Do you actually believe this or are you intentionally lying about what their political goals are?
Enough of them have told me by now that I believe them, yes. If you’re unaware you haven’t been paying enough attention or don’t ask hard questions like “what will you do if someone doesn’t want to give their property to your collective willingly?”
what will you do if someone doesn’t want to give their property to your collective willingly
I got bad news for you about every government ever. Are you sitting down?
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Yeah when I joined IIRC I just had to write a sentence about why I wanted to join. The communism thing made me laugh though!
most people have answered your questions so i want to chime in with the information that i wish someone had told me when i first joined:
a lot of people came to lemmy from reddit like you and i both did and also mostly for the same reasons. most of them went to lemmy.world because it was the first search result on the big search engines like google & bing. those people have turned lemmy.world into a mini reddit and ended up recreating the same problems that reddit has plus more; hence the bot check that you ran into when you signed up.
the original instances of lemmy all have a strong leftist bent; i think of it like if r/politics; r/anarchy/; r/communism; r/socialism; etc. went off and created another social media platform and then started discussing everything like reddit does, but from this perspective. instances is the name given to individual servers and all those servers combined is nicknamed the lemmyverse, or lemmy, for short.
the fediverse is the nickname given to the pubg protocol that’s shared between all the platforms that use it like lemmy, mastadon, kbin, threads, bluesky, etc and that means that the conversations from all of those platforms are shared amongst each other so it’s possible to be on lemmy and have a conversation with someone on kbin, for example. i stick with lemmy because it’s doesn’t have any venture capital investors pushing the admins to enshitify it to maximize profits like has been happening to reddit and bluesky; i’ve been moving from one social media platform to another because of enshitification like reddit’s since the 1990s (before it was called social media) so this last part matters to me a lot.
i started off on lemmy.world like most ex-redditors did and discovered that they’ve duplicated the censorship thing that reddit likes to do with defederations so i switched to lemmy.ml since it doesn’t defederate with anybody due to fact they’re the primary instance where lemmy development takes place. the federation is what makes lemmy decentralized and when you defederate; you cut yourself off from the rest of the lemmyverse, but lemmy.world and some of the other instances that got most of the ex-redditors like the star trek instance use it to try cut off content and people from the instances that they don’t like and that’s their right since it’s their instance. lemmy is decentralized so trying to cut out people & content only serves to cut yourself off and that’s intention behind the fediverse; to make it so that no power tripping mod or ban happy admin can stop the conversation like they do on reddit.
everything is done by volunteers and donations and, if you don’t like one instance; you can move onto any other one and still get a similar experience. i don’t like letting other people decide what i can & can’t see and who i can & can’t talk to so i mostly stick to the instances that don’t defederate with anybody like lemmy.ml and i use the block-people and block-communities features when i feel like i need them for myself.
they’ve duplicated the censorship thing that reddit likes to do with defederations
I disagree that defederation is censorship, but no worries, we don’t have to agree! However:
i switched to lemmy.ml since it doesn’t defederate with anybody
If you switch to the “blocked” tab you’ll see that this is absolutely not true.
One of my primary criteria when I needed to make a new lemmy account (due to problems with my original instance) was to be sure I picked an instance that had pre-emptively defederated from Threads. (as .ml does, but there are a lot more in that list)
If you switch to the “blocked” tab you’ll see that this is absolutely not true.
oh yes, i keep forgetting about the fascist and corporate shill instances; they were also the reason why i went with lemmy.ml and why i think it’ll take longer for it to enshitify. thanks for correction.
the fediverse is the nickname given to [instances using] the pubg protocol
Haha I’m guessing that was meant to say ActivityPub
the original instances of lemmy all have a strong leftist bent
[Bonus info]
Reddit has a history of big events when a clump of subreddits get banned all at once when a newspaper reports on them. A lot of right-wing ones went to Voat and later *.win, and some socialist ones (notably /r/GenZedong) went to Lemmygrad, which became the largest federated instance at the time. /r/chapotraphouse also made their own fork, Hexbear, although while it was the largest, it wasn’t federated with the rest for years. Most instances were either hard-left (e.g. Lemmygrad, Lemmy.ml, SLRPNK) or a slight left, but tge third most populous for a while was Wolfballs, a ‘free speech’ instance, de facto alt-right (US right-Libertarian style instance), which ended up defederated from almost all the others due to constant bigotry and rule breaking when posting on other instances. Wolfballs admin eventually shut it down before the Reddit API exodus because, among other reasons, they realized the neo-Nazis among their users were serious and not just trolling.
Overall, the few right-leaning instances are alienated from the bulk of federation and become islands or vaporize, but most just dismiss Lemmy or even the Fediverse at large as a left wing commie thing.
Haha I’m guessing that was meant to say ActivityPub
yes, that’s what i get for going fast; thanks for the correction and the history lesson.
Open source is inherently political and you depend on software being developed by communists. We are here to evade corporate censorship, censor reactionaries, spread agitprop, and discuss raising the quality of life of all working people.
Not just tech workers. Everyone.
Because dessalines is legit in competition for the most cringe person on the internet.
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.ml is actually Mali’s TLD. That it happens to also be an initialism for Marxism-Leninism is a coincidence.
That they picked it specifically is not a coincidence, though.
Right, but .ml doesn’t stand for Marxist-Leninist is the thrust of what I’m saying.
In general, no. In this context? It does
It does stand for Tuvalu. It is a happy coincidence for Twitch and any other media company that wants to use that TLD that such a seemingly in theme TLD exists (so long as you only use the abbreviation and never spell out what the TLD actually stands for), but .tv 100% refers to Tuvalu. There isn’t a Television-land that it’s reserved for.
I used to think it stood for machine learning.
Mali also happens to be under attack by US funded terrorists. The same pattern repeats itself over and over and over
The ccTLD was free when lemmy started. And developers like to test out things on free resources. The ccTLD just became paid last year.
Repeating the same thing for the 1000th time doesn’t make it the truth.
Yes they’re tankies, have awful censorship and are thin skin snowflakes. but making out the whole .ml ccTLD a marxists-leninist agenda just makes them see you as conspiracy nuts.
For what? a couple domains you’ve noticed to fit your narrative? Holy fucking batman. LMAO!
… when did I say everything on .ml domain is marxist-leninist? It’s not any kind of conspiracy lol.
I said they picked this one because it was an obvious reference. Apparently some other people have spoken directly to them and said it was purely because it was free. Which I didn’t realize, and also makes sense.
They used that TLD because it had the same letters as Marxist-Leninist, not because they’re from Mali. They’re not from Mali.
So you are a mind reader now?
Sometimes people write their reasons for doing things down and other people read them and they don’t need to read anyone’s mind to know why they said they did something.
LOL. It does not stand for Marxist-Leninist. That’s some grade A trolling if I saw it.
The .ml domain stands for the country of Mali, but lemmy.ml definitely chose that domain because it can stand for Marxist-Leninist.
You spelt militant anti-capitalists wrong, its spelt “tankie”
All Marxists and Anarchists are “tankies?” Lol.
You’re catching on well done
Why do people keep repeating this? Every time they do someone corrects them but they seem to just assume that’s what .ml is without so much as a google search about it.
Is it a coincidence or did they pick the Mali domain space for that reason? That’s the story I heard
Wait? What’s the reason? Like, the tld is for Mali, but lemmy and lemmygrad use it as “marxist-leninist” as a joke. Or at least that’s what I thought the story was
They were free up until 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ml
This part is funny
Employees for the United States Armed Forces regularly misspell emails—suffixed with the .mil TLD—with .ml. In 2013, Dutch internet entrepreneur Johannes Zuurbier took on the .ml TLD. He attempted to contact the United States government about classified information being sent to army.ml and navy.ml in 2014 through Dutch diplomats.[citation needed] The contents of these emails include crew and staff lists, maps and photos of installations, naval inspection reports, and passwords. Emails that were sent to the .ml TLD include the travel itinerary of chief of staff James McConville on a trip to Indonesia in 2023, information about Kurdistan Workers’ Party efforts in the United States, and Australian Department of Defence documents detailing issues with Australian F-35s. On 17 July 2023, Zuurbier’s contract expired and control was reverted back to the Malian government.
This part is funny
I am sorry but you are wrong: This bit is beyond funny.
Amazing. Wish the chinese had caught that first, like they caught the secret CIA websites that allowed them to kill hundreds of spies
It’s been speculated they paid for theirs because other sites and at least one instance had their free .ml domains revoked
??
Emphasis on speculation, but I found the instance that had its ml domain taken away
Maybe Lemmy.ml had a free domain but they got to keep it because they had it for a longer time. Who knows?
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So .ml isn’t an intentional reference to communism?
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Where do you get these insights?
The domain was initially managed by Sotelma, a Malian telecommunications company. After Sotelma was privatised in 2009, the .ml zone was redelegated by IANA to the Agence des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (AGETIC), a Malian government agency, and the process completed in 2013.[1] The agency then announced that it would give away .ml domains for free in partnership with Freenom with a view to improve the usage and the knowledge of the IT industry in Mali. It was the first African nation to start giving away domains for free.[2][3][4] The ten-year contract with Freenom expired on 17 July 2023. Since then the registry is operated by AGETIC itself and the free domain offer was discontinued. All paid Freenom .ml domains were migrated to the new system.
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So, there are a few different categories of TLDs.
com,net, andorgare among the original generic TLDs, which had the ideas of being for specific types of site, but in practice have always been available for pretty much any purpose.Then there are country-code TLDs, your
au,ca, andtvdomains. In these, the registrar of that particular country sets the rules. au domains require some specific connection to Australia, while Tuvalu has seen it as a good source of income for the country to sell.tvdomains to sites that want to have a domain that recognises their primary purpose as relating to video.In 2012, ICANN opened up the ability to buy new TLDs with almost no restrictions beyond the minimum 3 character length. Though technically
com,net,org, etc. are considered generic TLDs, when you see people say gTLD they almost always mean those created under this new scheme. Examples includezone(which my instance runs on),new(owned by Google and restricted to people who use it to perform “new” actions, like Google’s own docs.new which creates a new Google Doc), andtokyo(intended for use by things related to Tokyo, but not restricted to such. Other city gTLDs also exist, likemelbournewhich restricts to businesses and citizens of Victoria). gTLDs are very expensive to create, but whoever owns the gTLD can choose what rules it applies to domains registered under it.So if you want a domain name that calls to a particular thing, you can find a gTLD that matches that thing and is open for registration for your purpose, or you can spend big to register a gTLD for yourself, or find a ccTLD that’s open to those outside the actual country and which fits your purpose.
Mali’s a weird one because the reports were that .ml domains not related to Mali were being restricted last year, and fmhy.ml lost their domain over that. So it’s weird that lemmy.ml did not.
It was free making .ml domains good for web development.
I’m sure @dessalines and @nutomic has a chuckle about it. Definitely a fitting TLD to use, especially for lemmygrad.
I understand that, but I’m asking whether a .ml domain was chosen as a quirky little reference to communism? Like, I can start selling contacts on contacts.contact. I’m curious about the intent
To be fair, it is a large coincidence. I get that it’s wrong, but it’s widespread because the dots are close enough the brain closes the gap by itself.
It’s not exactly wrong, though. It’s clearly intentionally chosen because people are gonna connect these dots.
I’ve been told directly by the admins that it was picked because it was free. I don’t doubt that the reference wasn’t thought of, but the driving factor was that the domain is free.
Fair enough, then.
The fact that each instance can have its own rules and culture is f a b. I love that’s one of the criteria. Mander.xyz should have a ‘identify all the creatures from the Triassic’ image captcha.
I don’t know how to set up a specific image captcha, but I like that idea! I have added that to the registration form 😛
To their credit, I think the Principles of Communism thing is partially meant as a floodgate, since the devs really do believe in their project and want to avoid over-centralization from everyone defaulting to one instance. They know many people will go “What the hell? No!” and go somewhere else and that’s exactly the point. I’d be surprised if they really thought it would get almost anyone to engage with Marxism with the prompt, especially since you can copy the first sentence of the text and not read anything else (and even just reading it is not engaging with it). I think it’s more like a little joke.
Also, copying a sentence of your choice to a pamphlet is not a pledge and I think it’s silly to view it that way. If it helps, iirc, one of the sentences that appears is “No.” and they will accept that as an answer.
But assuming this was “promoting an ideology directly,” would you find it less sketchy for an instance to promote ideology indirectly? Because if you aren’t directly doing ideology, that just means you are indirectly doing it (sometimes very deliberately). Personally, I appreciate transparency.
I think it’s very funny that a lot of people will post “omg communism boogeyman? is this legal???”, but they won’t do a very basic introspection of ideology and online community moderation which is at the core the entire intent here.
Almost every lemmy instance has the same rule 1, those rules textually are often the same, those rules are often have the same meanings, but those rules are unevenly enforced between instances based on the ideology of that instance. That’s why you can be a transphobe on .world without actually getting the same amount of mod action going your way as if you were a transphobe on hexbear/lemmy.ml/lemmygrad/blahaj.
Furthermore there’s sociopolitical drama between the instances like between blahaj and hexbear on what transphobia actually is and what level of irony is allowed.
A lot of people interpret rule 1 as “don’t be mean” rather than “be mean in ways that aren’t racist/bigoted/sexist/transphobic/etc”. Which is why they often complain that certain communities they can’t post certain words, but user can dog pile them with community approved shitposting.
And then there’s the lib instances who think that being mean to the Ukrainian war effort online is rule 1 and if not it’s rule no disinformatsiya.
It’s like when Twitter had to clarify, you cannot call for violence unless it’s a call for violence that is part of the United States of America’s foreign policy, because Trump as POTUS called for violence over Twitter as part of US FP. But we gotta always put the the damn commies under the microscope for making us copypasta Marxist thought.
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communism is good though? that’s the only reason i signed up with lemmy. also because .ml is too strict
Communism will win!
why does the sign-up process on lemmy.ml involve having to copy a sentence from “The Principles of Communism”?
The OP is trolling.
Looks
Fuck me. It’s real. I’m at a lost of words…WTF.
EDIT You can’t escape censorship on Lemmy. If you run your own server with full Free Speech. You will have instances blocking you. Welcome to the modern Internet.
You are free to self select a commune… Oops I mean a instance of lemmy that best reflects your values.
The issue you’ve faced varies instance to instance. If you want complete freedom and censorship resistance, you have to run your own server.
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☭
So um here’s the thing.
The fediverse is a network of interconnected servers/instances that are independently hosted.
Within the fediverse, there’s Lemmy
There are many different “servers” (I’m just gonna call it servers, instances is not a commonly used word) of Lemmy. Each have different owners. But they all run the Lemmy software of their servers.
The Lemmy software is an open source project, contributed by many different people who know how to code. The main developers believe in Marxism-Leninism, basically what countries like USSR and People’s Republic of China claim to also follow this ideology (or at least they used to).
lemmy.ml is one of the first servers, run by the main developers.
So there, if you disagree with their ideology, you should probably use a different server.
Thanks for that information!
Lemm.ee is a great neutral instance and the admin seems nice, you probably made a good choice choosing it over .ml. Glad to see you were not scared away from Lemmy by it. Welcome! It can get confusing, but it just takes time. It’s a nice little place, overall and feels more like reddit used to be once.
“Neutral” here meaning “holds space for nazis, baby-fash, and other assorted vile-assed settlers”.
Any particular reason for those claims?
The many fascists on lemm.ee and their abhorrent, ahistoric, unfactual worldview being regularly celebrated is the reason for those claims. I constantly see the dumbest shit upvoted, the most trite clichés presented as novel insights. Actually reading an article is a rarity of the people on lemm.ee and I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve met a lemm.ee user capable of introspection.
It’s not just the spawning ground for the most basic neoliberal baby-brained takes on lemmy, it’s also incredibly dull. It’s like someone managed to gather all the worst redditors. Just a bunch of stupid, uneducated, unfunny, smug, idiotic assholes.
A disturbing preponderance of settler-colonials who can’t help but go to bat for theologically-motivated genociders every opportunity they get seemingly originating from .ee, .world, and .works; never mind the obnoxious sealions who never fail to come out when these descriptors are ascribed.
Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.").
Yes, exactly, you can host your own or sign up at one someone’s already hosts. The resistance is in the ability to choose which admins you trust and align with your views while still interacting with the rest of us.
The devs run their own and have their own rules and censorship but you don’t have to sign up there. Does that help?
Helps a lot, thanks for your answer!
