The Agora

I was super into the idea of lemmy.ml and actually had some extensive conversations with them and with lemmygrad when I first joined Lemmy. I didn't agree with them on practically anything, but whatever, it is fine. Then, lemmy.ml mods started deleting my comments when they decided that I was expressing the incorrect viewpoint and that viewpoint needed to be deleted to clear the way for the correct viewpoint. That's kind of a red line for me in terms of whether or not I feel like fuckin with a particular instance, and I pretty much turned my back on it.

It's a tankie shitshow that I've personally blocked because you can't have unbiased discussions.

Their users are overwhelmingly shitposters or actually believe what they say, which is downright scary. Of all the users I've blocked, half of them are from there (the rest about 50:50 between lemmygrad and hexbear).

First of all, the complaints are not without substance. Some of their admin decisions are highly questionable and obviously politically motivated. However I think the idea of defederation is a huge overreaction.

What do people think about lemmy.ml?

They have always been left-aligned, despite officially being privacy/FOSS focused. This is largely due to the history of Lemmy, which was created by leftist developers and existed in relative obscurity for a couple of years prior to the reddit API exodus a year ago. They have received a good number of relatively apolitical users since the API exodus due to their branding, but many of those users eventually chose to leave to other servers.

These screenshots from 7/16/23 and 9/5/23 show that lemmy.ml experienced a massive bump in users that quickly ebbed away in the following months. This happened with all Lemmy servers, but beehaw and lemmy.ml had the biggest drop offs.

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Right now they are sitting right around 2.5k MAUs, same as us.

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?

I don't believe it creates problems for Lemmy users, but I can see the argument for why it does. I think there's a misconception that lemmy.ml is still the flagship instance or new users are being drawn to them, but I just don't think that's the case. People dont really recommend lemmy.ml to new users, because it's already common knowledge about their political leanings. And they've never prioritized promotion of that instance on join-lemmy.org or anywhere else that I'm aware of. This is borne out by the data I just shared, which shows their share of the Lemmy userbase has steadily declined over time.

For sh.itjust.works specifically, I don't agree that it's creating problems for our users. Our server has literally grown in the garden planted by lemmy.ml users. We are less dependent on lemmy.ml today than ever before, and now is when people decide they want to defederate? That seems really lame and somehow duplicitous.

I think to the extent that there are problems with the lemmy.ml userbase, they have come more recently after hexbear got defederated from most of the fediverse. I think some long time users on hexbear and lemmygrad who got a taste of the wider fediverse decided to move over to lemmy.ml so they could keep pushing their ideology. That's not ideal but I don't think defederation of the whole server is a proper response to a handful of hexbear trolls up to their old tricks.

For me personally as an admin, I can confidently say that I don't feel like lemmy.ml users have been disproportionately involved in bad behavior or trolling. I've removed my fair share of hostile comments in political arguments, but no more offensive or combative than stuff I see from our own users, lemmy.world, lemm.ee, or any big server. I haven't seen them brigading communities or threads, aside from the ones located on their own server, which is obviously fine.

In terms of their admins, I have to acknowledge that they sometimes make mistakes with moderation. But moderation on Lemmy is also a really difficult task. One important factor is that they host a disproportionate number of communities and especially political communities. Here on SJW, our most active communities tend to be fairly non-controversial. I cannot imagine the moderation burden for active political communities such as those hosted on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, and I'm thankful they're doing it instead of us.

TLDR Lemmy.ml is basically alright with me, aside from some minor annoyances. I think it's kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them. But that's just my personal opinion, I will of course abide by the wishes of my fellow sh.it.heads.

Hexbear is a instance run by tankies that spread their shit ideology and quash any dissent where they have the power to do so. Lemmy.ml is the exact same, except it's much bigger and run by the Lemmy devs. I don't think they should get a pass, and I think that Lemmy will become tankie Voat if this is allowed to continue indefinitely.

I came here because Reddit was being run by corporate scum that only cared about profits, and they crossed too many lines. I thought I could get a new start away from all the mod/admin abuse. I'm starting to realize that basically every instance's and community's admins abuse their powers to push their agenda, whether it's political or trying to maximize membership, to the detriment of their larger userbase.

I don't think this is a winning fight, even if LML is effectively quarantined, but I'd like to buy time by mass-defederating them.

Hello,

Any reason to not include the thread that started it all, and has documented abuse from lemmy.ml admins? https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058

Also, if people want to avoid lemmy.ml communities, here is a thread that discusses alternatives: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20431762

At minimum the .ml admins have shown a desire and willingness to keep their finger on the scale of the broader fediverse, which makes them a clear existential threat and possibly even a cyber security risk. In addition, they protect hexbear and lemmygrad, which openly state that their intention is to wage information warfare on the fediverse. We also see some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them some special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content. This alone is extremely concerning. The idea that we can individually block their instance does nothing to mitigate the ideological or security concerns I have.

My personal experience is that they protect propagandists and do not enforce their own rules evenly at all. My bans have been for me extremely petty things, and even for thing I have said on other instances. Meanwhile I have been called names, told that my family deserves to be tortured and that my country deserves to be nuked by .ml users (or hexbear proxies). I also find their defense of Russian and Chinese autocracy personally offensive, as I have family who have been directly impacted by both. It would be one thing if this was happening in a forum where these issues could be debated, or defenses mounted against misinformation and historical revisionism, but that is simply not the case. Even the most modest pushback against these ideas results in quick bans. This is not something we should associate with.

I definitely think the problems lie with a certain set of individuals within the base, as opposed to the instance as a whole, but it’s a pretty sizable amount. It mostly comes off as a moderate annoyance to me, and not enough to warrant blocking the whole instance, much less defederation.

I will say, however, that the problems seem to be becoming more prevalent. It’s a really annoying situation, as .ml has some of the more popular communities, including the largest meme community, and it would suck to lose those. But at the same time, I’m starting to get really tired of the auth-left bootlicking and one-sided moderation.

It’s no hexbear, not by a long-shot, but it’s definitely becoming an issue.

The one hand, it's important to explore the conversational landscape in order to enrich one's perspective. I am always interested in calm, composed, respectful discussion of even controversial topics.

On the other hand, echo chambers aren't really valuable to that end, and lemmy.ml is edging up past that threshold. I feel as if engagement with lemmy.ml users is, more frequently than not, typified by emotional antagonism out of the gate, and only becomes more accusatory and divisive as time goes on.

I had hoped, after all the hexbear nastiness, that lemmy.ml might emerge as the more rational and respectful leftist space. I consider myself a leftist, and I enjoy engaging in polite and nuanced leftist political discussions. But the prevailing sentiment that I personally encounter is the sort of strawman nonsense you'd expect from bad faith actors trying to fracture leftists.

I'm no mod, certainly no admin. I just like having interesting conversations with people on the Internet. I can't speak directly to censorship or specific logistical problems with Lemmy as a whole, or sh.itjust.works specifically.

All I can say is that I find conversations with lemmy.ml users to be petty and exhausting more often than not, and the writing is on the wall in multiple other instances. This seems like a band-aid rip moment on lemmy at large.

Personally, I blocked .ml already. Yes, they are a large instance with a lot of legitimate content, but theres such a disproportionate amount of extremism, hate and discrimination, and toxicity that I didn't find it worth being connected to.

Learning the ml is a shitty place for news and politics is a right of passage for using lemmy. Defederation isn't the answer, at least not until they do something more than ban people who disagree with them.

I don't believe that defederation is necessary nor wise. The complaints about Lemmy.ml that I've seen have generally revolved around how they moderate their instance and how communities they host are moderated. If one doesn't like how they moderate their communities, then one should be the change that they wish to see — start a replacement community, nurture it, and try to make it better than what was seen on lemmy.ml. This is the beauty of the fediverse — you aren't forced to utilize anything on any other instance. And if one really dislikes seeing lemmy.ml users, then they can even block the instance themself. Lemmy.ml provides a steady, and considerable amount of traffic and content to the Lemmyverse. While that isn't an argument for continuing to use their communities, it is an argument for why it would be unwise to fragment the network by defederating from them.

The only time that an instance should consider defederating from another, imo, is if it finds that users from other instances are violating the local rules at a rate higher than what is possible, or economically viable to handle via administrative action. It shouldn't be a simple matter of passive difference in opinion.

This was my only meaningful personal interaction with lemmy.ml that stands out. It was not a good experience. It became very clear, very fast that I would simply have no meaningful discussion with these people. So I left some downvotes on the awful comments promoting violence and stopped engaging.

I haven’t blocked the instance or any users. But i am considering it.

Just chiming in to say a lot of communities I participate in are hosted on ml, I'd be pretty bummed losing access to those. For that reason I'm against wholesale defederarion. I do think the communities need to explicitly diversify away from the instance though, ml admins seem demonstrably untrustworthy.

Late edit: after continuing to interact with their communities over the months, I now believe most everyone on Lemmy.ml instance is either braindead, or acting in bad faith. Their administration is biased, they'll remove any discussion they don't agree with as "misinformation", while their admins actively spread real misinformation and inflame division. Whatever community they've fostered is a negative for lemmy, at large.

Defederate and leave them in an echo chamber to rot.

First of all, lemmy.world admins do have history of overreacting (e.g. with piracy & shroom) . So I don't think we should base our decision on theirs.

I have heard of lemmy.ml users being an issue at some point in the past, but it seem to have settled.

I personally don't have any issue with lemmy.ml; maybe in the past, but I cannot seem to recall any. What I do know is there are active communities there (Linux comes in mind) and we'd lose all that if we defederate.

When I found about the existence of Lemmy, I wanted to create an account, and found that Lemmy.ml is the official Lemmy instance ran by the Lemmy developers (who I knew nothing about). Seemed like the obvious, default, non-controversial choice.

Of course I later learned about... All this. I'm not interested in any political content so it took me a while.

So I guess I'd be a casualty, due to picking the biggest instance suggested to me by join-lemmy.org. How is someone new to Lemmy supposed to have the context here?

I'm against defederartion, but I also actively avoid their communities.

I don't think the problem is with a majority of users, just a handful, but many in that handful are mods. As an anecdote, I got temp banned from a community there because somehow our discussion shifted to Russia, despite the topic having nothing to do with it, and the mod banned me for "anti-Russia" something or other (nothing I said seemed to violate community or instance rules), but I think the real reason was me challenging that user's authority.

I've also noticed a lot of downvotes for well-cited but "against the left" comments, and the responses I get are often low-effort.

I've also had some decent discussion there as well. I've challenged people's views and had good reubuttals, so it's really not all bad. I'm guessing it's a fraction of very active users that cause a lot of the issues.

So I'm against defederation, but I also recommend avoiding their communities. It seems to be a strong echo chamber, but those who aren't interested in that do seem to branch out. So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Lemmy.ml is the reason I don't even tell anyone I use the Fediverse, let alone recommend it.

Even if they hadn't followed around an old account downvoting everything I posted (mostly memes) I'd support defederation.

On the whole, they're not real leftists, let alone communists. It's a facade for them to spread disinformation.

Lemmy.ml is a propaganda machine for a murderous, authoritarian government.

IMHO, some of their communities are sketchy, but as long as it's contained in their communities, that's easily manageable with just the user-level instance block feature.

Hello! I'm a guy who decided to join lemmy a few months ago, specifically because I was absolutely enraged by how moderation on Reddit worked. I am also taking part rather vigorously in the conversation about how much I dislike .ml moderation practices! I think I might be a little bit of an agitator in all this, because In joined lemmy after about a medium bit of research, and then jumped into it full tilt with the idea of "why not, I spent so much time as a revolutionary, myself!" And then I hit whatever the internet/globalization has done to what I recognize as leftist political spaces.

AMA, I guess!

For some background about myself, I'm an older millennial, who grew up with disparate web forums which were generally hidden behind a random website. My favorite haunt was punkbands.com, and loved LAN parties and early MMORPGs. Anyways, I had to get off the internet for a while to make a living, but eventually got to a spot where I could again visit the world wide web during working hours. One of my coworkers introduced me, through my first "smart phone" (an android, like, whatever was around in 2011 and cheap as fuck but still let me get online) to reddit. I really loved that old(ish) school internet, where people could spam and insult eachother within limits, and the community policed itself through a somewhat democratic process. I was legit excited to join lemmy, given how far I think reddit had fallen and how much disinformation had infected it, and how similar it appeared to the older, more democratic internet of my youth.

However, I found that a large part of lemmy is dominated by people who profess to be leftists, but ambush you with ideological purity tests and subsequent abuse if you don't pass. I questioned a post on the .ml world news sub that came from a source that is literally a Syrian and Bolivian governmental news outlet, which alleged that the US military was stealing crude oil and raw wheat from Syrian oil derricks/Syrian farmers. I used mediabiasfactcheck.com to support my questioning of this source. I also appealed to logic, questioning why the US would steal things that it exports. A mod there (I believe the username is davos) engaged me in a conversation spanning hours, where we exchanged information about whether mediabiasfactcheck.com was a reasonable source to help assess the validity of media. While the conversation was uncomfortable, we each exchanged information and links supporting our arguments. Because I did not accept his outright rejection of medibiasfactcheck.com as a way to assist with the judement of media, I was banned and all of my comments were deleted.

Since then, I have met another .ml mod (username yogthos), and engaged in a long conversation about this same topic (.ml censorship). It was in a meta sub, hosted on the .ml instance. The conversation I am referring to has since been deleted, and I am not sure if it is possible to find it again, since my own history has disappeared; I will be happy to answer questions of anybody with the tech savvy to retrieve these exchanges. Anyway. In this meta thread, I engaged several users about the issue of unfair .ml moderation, alongside several other lemmy users. During the course of this exchange, a .ml user made an assertion that the OP (who was complaining about the "tankie problem") was banned from the .ml instance because they had, somewhere undefined, insisted that the Tienanmen Massacre had actually happened. As a note, please understand that this was about a week before the start of June, and nobody so far in this thread had mentioned Tienanmen Square. Anywhere. Anyways, I questioned this particular statement, and yogthos suddenly butted in with a ton of weird sources that supported his claim that Tiennenma Square never happened. They insisted that the whole thing was a Color Revolution that was sponsored by the CIA, and that actually the students of the Tienanmen Square had attacked the Chinese Soldiers. I insisted that this was inconsistent with prevailing evidence, but was told that I simply needed to watch the various videos and read the blogs to understand that it was all untrue. I also engaged with some uders about my own ideology, where I was insulted as a "lib" for stating my intense distaste for authoritarianism. yogthos, the .ml moderator who I spoke with, told me that "libs don't understand" that authoritarianism is ok if it is in defense of fascism... but did not expound as to how fascism was defined.

As for my evidence, I have shared it in some of the other posts. However, if you'll look at the moderation history of .ml, under my user name, you will see that I am banned from several subs, and I think from the whole .ml instance. It will be for "Rule 4," which from what I can tell is spam, or advertising. I have never taken part in anything that resembles spam or advertising. I have, though, had comments that insist that there was some kind of violence surrounding Tienanmen Square, or debate the validity of news from Syrian government media sources, removed from .ml instances. You may also notice that I was banned from subs like palestine and usa, which I have never actually participated in, aside from upvoting or downvoting.

You will also, looking back, hopefully find the initial conversations I reference in this post. If you have specific questions, I will try to figure out how to find them, using the mod log.

This is a long post... and I'm sorry. I guess I just really don't want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.

I'm sure I have missed a ton here, and paradoxically written far too much. I am happy to answer any questions or critique, as long as it is relatively polite and relevant.

Edit: I'm also just kind of a nerd about propaganda and discourse in international relations, especially in online spaces. I've studied it. Ive written papers on it. I find these things incredibly meaningful and important, so I've gotten involved here.

I think that any accusations regarding their moderation policies or agitprop should be supported with actual, physical evidence, and not just personal accounts from individuals who claim to have had negative experiences. It's lemmy. There's a record of everything. Getting that evidence wouldn't be difficult. Time consuming, maybe, but not difficult. That said, if we are banking on personal accounts, I've been on .ml for a while, and while I don't comment in political threads, generally, I've seen little to nothing that coincides with what other users have said they've seen or experienced. I have an array of accounts across several major lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml seems...normal....banal even? There's a lot of benign, largely apolitical communities there that are worth participating in. Saying "well, their political communities are terrible" is all well and good if that's your opinion, but there is such a thing as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Honestly, the ongoing discussion of defederation I keep seeing here and in places like lemmy.world comes across as ideological competition. If some instances, like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, want to reproduce the same kind of vaguely liberal ideological soup that you find on reddit, that's up to them. And that's what it seems like is happening. I could be wrong about that, but lemmy.world comes across to me as a Fediverse Democrat stronghold. I've seen a lot of people there unironically defend things Joe Biden and the Democrats have done that are, from a leftist perspective, completely indefensible. And I have to wonder how many of the complaints about moderators abusing their authority are a result of people going into a Marxist space and pushing unwelcome liberal perspectives where they are obviously not wanted and suffering the consequences of those choices.

I suppose it's probably a natural course of events that you'll see instances defederating from one another as time goes on in order to produce the ideological echo chamber that generates the least amount of complaints from users. It'll start with .ml, but I imagine eventually .world and .works will defederate from any instance still federated with .ml, like hexbears and blahaj. This will, of course, reduce the content and average user count across all instances, leading to people becoming progressively dissatisfied with lemmy instances that already had little discussion and content as they become virtual ghost towns, with people eventually abandoning lemmy and going back to reddit with their tail between their legs or some other godawful source of corporate-sanctioned content.

But part of what's great about allowing self-determination in a profitless, federated network like ours is the choice of allowing said network to slowly wither and die for the sake of its users avoiding minor inconveniences, like having to interact with people they might disagree with in any capacity or suffering a temporary ban from a community.