Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
I don’t mean to instigate an argument, but I think this comment illustrates pretty well why .ml might actually be justified in judicious use of the ban hammer. If people are coming in specifically motivated by an ideological disagreement, then maybe they’re well within their right (ethically I mean, they’re within their right just on the basis of owning the instance as it is)
But the person you replied to wasn’t talking about ideological disagreements - they were talking about factual disagreements.
As in, the .ml mods seem to deny facts.
Yes I’m sure OP was having a very rational conversation about widely accepted and not at all contested facts that are not at all important to any ideological perspective.
The Tiananmen square massacre is not a contested fact. It’s just a fact.
Yes, a famously uncontested fact
And I am sure that fact was brought up completely organically and not specifically because op knew it was a source of ideological tension
Truth isn’t an ideology though. You keep trying to draw a false equivalence between the two. Truth is just truth. Ignoring the truth is simply acting in bad faith, and that’s something any ideology can do for any truths. If a group is denying that truth then they are trying to spread misinformation.
I’m not making a statement about the truthfulness of the specific claims being raised, i’m just pointing out that the topic is very famously contentious, and going to that space specifically to raise it knowing full well it is not a welcome one is itself bad-faith trolling and deserving of removal and possibly a ban, depending on how hostile you’re being.
It isn’t your space where you can decide what topics are fair game, and frankly whining about it here isn’t going to change anything about their moderation policies.
Seems to me you’re just skirting around the fact that there’s a group that specifically against the truth.
Not only that, but now you’re saying a group has the right to pretend that a fact is not a fact, and they did he allowed to have a space where they can push lies without repercussions.
But even ignoring all that, moderation where you get banned and censored from communities unrelated to the where you post a fact is just acting in bad faith. It’s no longer moderation as you state, it’s actual censorship.
I’m not skirting around anything, I’m just pointing to the problem. If someone walked into a LGBTQ forum and started harassing users about male and famale biology phenotypes, they’d be within their right to ban that person. It doesn’t matter if what they were saying was factually correct or not if the reason they’re there is to harass them along an ideological fault-line, especially if they’re instigating that topic themselves to begin with.
It’s their space, they’re allowed to keep certain charged topics out of it, even if you disagree with them or if you feel like they’re trying to censor what you consider to be factually accurate. You can talk about that topic anywhere else you want, they can’t censor you in your own space.
Honestly I think they’re not being strict enough, if it were me i’d be taking notes on everyone here affirming their intention to push this topic in my space and just preemptively ban them.