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.
I‘m glad that the fediverse resists excessive moderation and silencing of unwanted political opinions. I‘m not a fan of some of the things said or done on .ml but we wont do anything which is awesome. You can make your own instance and defederate, ban, block whoever you like.
To make my point clear, I made a large donation to the lemmy devs as I think they are doing awesome work. @[email protected] especially is a tremendous help for the open source community.
But of course you‘re entitled to your opinion. Have a good day.
Nice comment, have a good day too
Yes let’s all just pretend their propaganda is actual opinions held by real people.
This entire thread glows and is extremely consistent with CIA goals.
You’re beyond naive if you think the Marxists are brainwashed, yet you and the “people” in this thread aren’t.
I don’t think Marxists are brainwashed at all. Can’t you contribute without putting words in my mouth?
- how will you prove they’re not „real people“?
- you‘re using a platform made by them
- the post itself is also propaganda since it pushes for a „solution“ against „tankies“.
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Hold my hand and we’ll go visit their house and ask them
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Creating something doesn’t give them the right to spread lies, and they probably funded it specifically in order to spread propaganda
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This post isn’t a systemic campaign of disinformation… a single person saying we should do something isn’t propaganda. I’m talking about government-driven efforts to change thought and opinions. In this case, from a government with a long history of murdering and oppressing people.
I‘m not saying you cant be right. I still dont agree with your assumptions. Have a good day.
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Maybe political repression and the mass killing of protestors and the internment of ethnic minorities has very little to do with a countries mode of production. Maybe you guys can advocate for an alternative mode of production without defending genocide and using the military to crack down on protests? And maybe liberals can do the same when Western Capitalist Countries do it?
please… :(
What are you implying here? People don’t use Lemmy because of this guy’s politics? Do we know the politics of other developers?
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
And people believed they’d escape the days of power-tripping mods by exiting Reddit.
At least with the festive there are no alternatives.
I appreciate the mod log here because at least you can see the receipts
festive
Like that new neame
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.
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 great this 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.
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.
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.
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
No problem. Of course, you can always change the instance to something else if you dislike the default.
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
My lemmy client is able to locally block anything I do not want to see. And I do not want to live in a bubble, so I didn’t block .ml. There are many quality post and comments so I would advise against a premature defederation.
But what do I know
“Look at the prisoners per capita,” lol China has mobile execution vans, my guy.
US for-profit prisons and slavery are still fucked up, don’t get me wrong.
China has mobile execution vans
Not heard about this, got a source?
There’s a lot of [Citation needed] tags on a lot of those claims. I’m not denying they exist but it’s also a bit of a flimsy source.
The main source for this is Amnesty International page 76. The relevant text:
In an effort to improve cost-efficiency, Chinese provincial authorities are introducing mobile execution vans in which convicts are given a lethal injection, replacing the traditional execution method of firing squads. Eighteen mobile executions vans, converted 24-seater buses, were distributed to all intermediate courts and one high court in Yunnan province in 2003. In December of the same year, the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing urged all provinces to acquire execution vans “that can put to death convicted criminals immediately after sentencing”. The windowless execution chamber at the back contains a metal bed on which the prisoner is strapped down. Once the needle is attached by a technician, a police officer presses a button and an automatic syringe injects the lethal drug into the prisoner’s vein. The execution can be watched on a video monitor next to the driver’s seat and can be recorded if required.
And I think barsquid’s point is that China is keeping their imprisoned-per-capita low through executions. Even if that’s incorrect, China does use execution more liberally than the U.S. And execution is evil.
In the US we call government vehicles that come kill you “police cars”
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.
I’m glad that this is the controversy on Lemmy, and not things like Reddit had with r/JailBait.
I’m perfectly fine with just avoiding interactions with lemmy.ml communities. They can exist, even if I disagree with them. And if I wanted to participate, I’d probably be welcome so long as I follow the rules. Unlike r/Conservative, which required proving yourself to the mods to get a pass to enter or something…lol
But yes, it’s definitely good to know what the .ml stands for, and to keep that in mind whenever one sees Lemmy.ml.
Everyone that has been on the Internet for more than a few days has an illinformed hot-take floating around. You can learn something for a perspective even if it’s not based in fact. Read with compassion and you don’t have to believe everything you read.
They do the shit constantly and dudes profile pic on git hub is still Fidel Castro
But go off defending these people I guess lol
I’m not defending these people. I’m saying illinformed hot-takes are common on the Internet. However they are an useful opportunity to understand an opposing perspective even if they’re based in factual inaccuracies.
In my experience, most people are great. If a stranger has a wildly opposing opinion to myself, it’s rarely because of differing values and more likely because of differing experiences.
But what we’re saying is that there’s a difference between a mistake/a hot-headed take and a pattern of abuse.
Patterns of abuse need to be taken seriously and no amount of “we’re all human” will mend that, until they themselves choose reform. Plain and simple.
People who choose not to agree to the social contract of tolerance, do not need to be treated with tolerance. Period
Indeed, but this is more about admins banning users from the entire instance because they don’t share the same political views.
.world does this all the time though, especially if you criticize Israel or Biden (or other CIA projects)
This would also be deeply problematic. I’ve seen it posted elsewhere, and asked the same thing:
Can you back this assertion up with any proof?
Yeah, I’ve had comments deleted and have seen others deleted that criticized Israel or that criticized Biden’s support of Israel.
So my own eyes have shown me that this is true. My own eyes have also shown me that .world is run by mods who push an agenda that conforms with the CIAs goals of domestic control over the US population. Which, if I wanted to read that midwit drivel, then I would’ve stayed on Reddit.
So you don’t have any proof?
I personally witnessed it. Which is proof.
What I don’t have proof of is that you’re a real person and not a CIA asset. Weird how you haven’t verified your identity to me yet. Something to hide?
I looked at your history: you were banned for calling people autistic as an insult, among other things.
There’s literally zero obligation for me to verify anything to you, and my identity doesn’t have anything to do with the conversation at hand.
That’s fair. I appreciate that every instance host has the right to moderate their community any way they want however moderation rules should be clear and consistent. Banning people for posting respectful criticism of communism is inconsistent with the rules of lemmy.ml
Don’t lemmy.worlders like to defed for slight disagreements? Just do it and save us from your brainworms.
Yeah this is the origin of Lemmy. Reddit banned some far left subreddits years ago and so some Communists went and made Lemmy.
Just block the instance if it bothers you. Jeez.
Judging from other threads on the matter, a lot of people don’t even know what “tankie” means.
So here’s a pro tip: replace “tankie” with “dipshit” and the meaning remains the same.
YSK: lemmy.ml is managed by dipshits, and lead lemmy developer is a dipshit
FYI, the second main dev, Nutomic, although he doesn’t write as much, is in the same ideology, his avatar is Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.
During their AMA, 10 months ago, I directly asked them:
Since you’re very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?Thanks for your work, it’s projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive. https://lemmy.ml/post/2920188/2385128
They intentionally ignored my questions and answered to other later questions with fewer points.
Eventually, 10 months later, my personal observation is that it seems that they keep their ideology tendencies to their home instance, which is fair enough since people are free to leave and block. And they don’t seem to be developing some centralized International political oppression feature into Lemmy, like their role models may have, so far.
Don’t forget that you can block an instance personally now.
