Hello World,
Today, after careful consideration and evaluation of recent events, we have decided to defederate from Lemmygrad.
Regrettably, we have observed a significant increase in hate speech and calls to violence originating from the Lemmygrad instance. Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances.
At Lemmy.world, we have always strived to foster an inclusive and welcoming user environment. However, recent posts and comments from Lemmygrad have clearly violated our server rules and, more importantly, our core values. We firmly believe that hate speech and incitement of violence have no place in our community, regardless of personal beliefs or affiliations.
As always, we encourage all users to report any content they deem inappropriate or harmful. No matter one’s stance in any conflict, Lemmy.world will always take immediate action to remove and ban any posts or comments that incite violence or propagate hatred.
We encourage everyone to continue engaging in discussions within the boundaries of respect and understanding. As we move forward with this decision, we remain committed to providing all community members with a safe and welcoming space. We appreciate your continued support and cooperation in upholding our shared principles.
Thank you,
The Lemmy.World Team
Lemmmygrad supposedly is for people who support communism, but when talking to them, they really are supporting totalitarian countries which have nothing to do with communism.
Whenever communists or socialists gather, the tankies take over.
It’s been like that since the past 100 years.
[Looks around nervously]
Aren’t we gathering here too? This defederation seems like tankies not taking over.
Anecdotally I was in a bunch of actual leftist subreddits; I only departed because capitalists enshittified the whole website.
Maybe you just didn’t recognize it. Reddit leftist spaces were famously led by tankie mods.
Yup, you would call out their BS and you get banned. The system was perfect and no one is allowed to fully criticize it.
I’m not even sure they’re really tankies anymore (or the meaning of the word is changing). Actual tankies still ostensibly support communism, but all too often, it’s blatantly apparent that they’re actually right-wing totalitarians cosplaying.
Yep, it’s easy to bait them too. You make a post or comment calling out tankies for supporting authoritarianism, and out of the woodwork scurry all the “socialists and communists” to downvote you.
Thing is, a real socialist or communist hates authoritarianism too.
They’re tankies in the original sense. The word came from an incident where there was an actual honest to god socialist movement when workers were seizing the means of production, and “communist” Russia sent literal tanks to shut it down. A reporter happened to observe the whole thing in person and tried to write up the story, but his editors would only print the official U.N. statement that the tanks were stopping a fascist movement.
Thanks I’ve been wondering where the term originated
It’s amazing what some state-sponsored troll farms can convince people of. Some people can’t evaluate content they see online critically and gobble up the propaganda
The tactics and attitudes definitely make me think of that. It seems like the same people who showed up and fucked up a bunch of subs on reddit 6-7 years ago, like how conspiracy went from discussing things like UFOs and MK ULTRA to conservative political conspiracy theories and opposing the Democratic Party and politicians.
Are you saying MK ULTRA is just a conspiracy theory and never happened? I’ve watched documentaries on PBS, BBC and the History Channel. Clearly the program existed, as for what clandestine operations it ran, that’s certainly loaded with conspiracy theories.
If everything is a conspiracy theory, nothing is a conspiracy theory.
https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/history-of-mk-ultra
No, I didn’t intend any meaning like that. I just said it was the sort of thing discussed on the sub prior to a bunch of bullshit.
The bit that really irked me was that it was purely performative. It seemed like literally the exact same community that populated the_donald with memes and Trump train bots and the photoshopping of Trump’s pic onto Rambo. Their posts have fuck all to do with communism just like the trump posts had nothing to do with conservative politics. It was just edge faux-outrage and basically taking an opposite position for its own sake. They could simultaneously criticize Gov Newsom for not signing a trans rights bill while praising Putin who is doing his level best to make being gay illegal. It’s a mistake to see it as political discourse when it’s really just trolling. Like on the_donald, they egg each other on and have their in jokes and memes (in both the picture sense and in the actual meme sense) about walls the same way the trumpers did with helicopters.
Defederation is the best response imo.
It is funny to mention Trump around tankies and watch their heads explode. They can’t pretend Trump is a communist, but their propaganda masters don’t want them to turn against the Republicans, so they’re just in this weird space where the only thing they can do is aggressively avoid the topic at all.
I’ve seen them actively celebrate that they don’t suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome” like liberals (supposedly) do. The longer you watch them, the more pro-fascism you see slip through
Don’t forget the classical “liberals are the real fascist allies”
Nazism was basically just liberalism taken to its conclusion. Rich people get to live in comfort as poor people die in a mass genocide.
Uhhhh. No. That’s not how it went at all. Rich Jews did not get to live in comfort, they had their wealth stolen and were killed all the same. Nazism was ethnic cleansing, antisemitism, and purging society of the “unideal”, rich or poor. The only German Jews who I think could get amnesty were those who fought for Germany in WW1 – soldiers do not tend to be rich, and their families were not extended the same amnesty, from what I recall. Otto Frank had military service but it did not save his family.
It’s rather disgusting to ignore the antisemitism and homophobia that led to genocides and reduce it to only economics.
I don’t think you’re really considering that liberalism does a lot of the same shit, only their targets are different groups which you don’t consider because it makes you feel uncomfortable.
I’ll clear that one up since everyone here seems to be boldly making inaccurate claims. They say that because media outlets and people will spend more time analyzing and critiquing Trump eating McDonalds or typing covfefe than the US, say, drone striking innocent Afghani people or the utter shit show that Libya has become due partially to the efforts of Clinton and Obama.
hexbear had an entire thread with hundreds of comments where they all agreed they hated trump and viewed him as an odious fascist
https://lemmy.ml/post/4040923?scrollToComments=true
The closest thing you find to support for trump in there is some of them thinking he is a less effective imperialist.
May I see the hate speech?
Thank goodness.
I’m reminded of a story I read a while back - not sure where - about how if you let a Nazi into your bar, you eventually end up running a Nazi bar. I think the same applies to online forums. You let Nazis overrun a forum, everyone else leaves, and eventually you might as well just be running Stormfront.
Isn’t that also kind of what is happening to Twitter right now?
A stupid thought that I just had. An X is 4 bars from a swastika.
X is a sans serif swastika.
These are not Nazis being blocked
Amazing, Lemmy.world admins are giant cucks who try to censor other people based on their beliefs.
You can ban me all you want but I’ll keep coming back.
Thank fucking god. It’s exhausting being around people for whom any meme, any post, any comment, has to spin into how good communism is, how bad the libs are, how good China is, and how bad The West TM is. It is exhausting.
It would be good practice if admins would link a selection of the offensive material. That would allow both sides to debate how they judge such behavior.
Right now there are celebrating comments but I haven’t seen bad behavior myself, even in heated debates. That let’s me assume that many are thin skinned or unable to refute lemmygrad’s political opinion.
If I understand lemmy correctly then banning lemmygrad will prevent its users from participating in any debate on a lemmy. world community. Does a lemmy instance exist that federated with everybody where important communities should be hosted?
It would be good practice if admins would link a selection of the offensive material.
Duh. They already have. It’s there all day every day. Peruse it as often as you like, at your own convenience. You can even filter by removed posts, removed comments, and banned users:
Modlog tells you all you need to know. Unless, of course, you don’t actually want to know it and you’re just JAQing us all off, lol.
Right now there are celebrating comments but I haven’t seen bad behavior myself, even in heated debates.
That’s because the moderators here are very, VERY good at what they do – which again, you’d know if you’d looked at the modlog.
Does a lemmy instance exist that federated with everybody where important communities should be hosted?
No one knows what “important communities” are to you. Stop looking for mind readers and start looking for instances that do not defederate for any reason, because they are out there.
You’re not trapped here. You have options. Take them.
Have you actually read through that modlog? Lemmygrad is a tiny fraction of it.
Yes, that’s how I know about it. When I want to find something specific I filter by action, and then I simply skim.
It’s a little time consuming, but not at all difficult.
The person to whom I was responding wanted a selection of offending comments, here it is:
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemoveComment
I will note that usually the number of removed comments is so low that one page, maybe a page and a half will cover a full 24 hour period.
From what I saw when I looked at it just now – over five pages of removed shite in just half that time, 12 hours – I support the admins’ actions even more than I did when I first posted. And I didn’t think that was possible.
There is no way to filter modlog by user instance. After a few minutes pressing Next for removed comments and ctrl-f for lemmygrad.ml I didn’t find anything, but it looks like sometimes the instance url isn’t in the text anyway so maybe ctrl-f won’t even work here. It isn’t actually easy to find these examples.
It isn’t actually easy to find these examples.
Yes, it actually is:
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemoveComment
You now have pages upon pages of offensive content through which you may browse at your leisure, which is what that commenter to whom I responded was demanding:
It would be good practice if admins would link a selection of the offensive material.
And there it is. If you wanted to find lemmygrad-specific material in there, I don’t think you actually tried because it is certainly there in abundance. I was able to find numerous examples just by hovering a mouse over the usernames.
I just gotta say, the moderation here makes me so happy I joined this instance.
Oh no! How will I stay informed about the great utopias of places like China and North Korea???
Good riddance
I’ve read a few posts from that instance and just no. I myself are on the left but both lemmygrad and lemmy.ml is just not places I go to.
Lemmy.ml is perfectly fine and I’m there sometimes. I signed up there because it was described as being specifically free-software focused, though in reality it’s mostly a meme farm just like here. Lemmygrad is much weirder and I only looked at it for a minute or so. Its crazier political angles looked like mostly trolling to me, but who knows.
You guys were still federated with Lemmygrad this long?
Most of their communities were blocked since months, that’s why you didn’t see much of them.
The phrasing of “an increase in hate speech and calls to violence” suggests that there is a tolerable level of those.
I’m pro voilence against people who block grocery store entrances because they figured that was the best place to chat with someone they ran into… so yes.
People going slow in the fast lane on the freeway
Escalefters 🤬
Why not defederate them before things got outta hand?
Lemmy.world is run by the feds
lmao an ml user mad about tankies getting defederated. Totally on-brand.
What’s the deal with lemmy.ml? I’ve noticed a more aggressive/4channy tone to it compared to lemmy.world but I can’t find any more information about it
It’s got a lot of tankies. Also, they’ll ban you if you say you hate tankies because they love tankies on .ml
Lemmy.ml is one of the major main Lemmy instances, and it has a bunch of the development crew for the project on the admin team and moderation squad.
The ML, incidentally, was picked to stand for Marxist-Leninist. The core Lemmy devs are very politically left leaning, but that usually doesn’t cause many issues because there are enough instances running the software that you’re not locked into their echo chamber.
Gold
The ML, incidentally, was picked to stand for Marxist-Leninist
That’s not true. At the time it was simply picked because the TLD was cheap.
Most likely yes. The worldnews community is evidence of this.
And they immediately blocked all the piracy communities. Most of the .world and .ee users sound like AI posts. It’s likely a massive AstroTurf
Didn’t those get unblocked though too recently?
I understand that they are staunchly pro-communist and also take a pro-Palestine, including some of them (many of them?) a more clearly pro-Hamas stance. And that all of this could annoy many of the centrist liberals that seem to dominate here. But from perusing the lemmygrad link I do not see clear signs of hate speech, certainly not a clear hate speech agenda as you would see with some hate groups. And judging by the comments on here many seem to be happy to be “rid of them” because they are “annoying”, or “immature”, or “tankies”, or whatever. It really reads largely like “their opinions annoy me” so I’m glad they’re gone.
There may be more to it, I don’t know, but personally I wouldn’t like lemmy.world, an otherwise fine instance by all means, to become a centrist liberal silo where no other opinion outside (mostly US-centric) liberal orthodoxy is heard. So yeah, not convinced that this was the right decision, basically because of a lack of evidence.
Yes… agree with this take. I’m disappointed in the Lemmy World Admins for this move…
If Lemmy World is going to just defederate from instances where the opinions of users of one instance annoy the admins, then I will withdraw my monthly donation and go elsewhere.
Also, seems like there should be more of a process involved in defederation than a knee jerk post where the admins assure us it was a decision made with lots of deliberation. Despite that, it all feels very abrupt and top down and driven more by the admins’ personal geo-political opinions about recent events than other factors.
Already canceled my patreon subscription, haven’t had the time to figure out a new server yet.
Can we transfer our account like on Mastodon, or just create a new one? (I don’t currently plan to, just wondering.)
Just gotta create a new one unfortunately. It’s a highly requested feature but real low on the devs priority.
Finally a voice of actual moderate reason. Thanks for the well said contribution.
Hexbear and Grad users defend genocidal regimes like Ruzzia and China. They excuse their crimes and argue in bad faith. I had so many insane discussions before I decided to block both of these instances entirely.
They are, by every single sense of the word, tankies.
Tankie is not just an oblivious term that has no meaning. It signifies a red fascist. It’s like arguing that it’s bad that we don’t let neonazis in discussions. They do not care about discussing. All they want is to spread their disgusting ideas while hiding them behind leftism.
By defederating from these instances, we don’t become less leftists. These people are not leftist.
This is not a slippery slope. It is a necessary step to ensure the growth of this website and actually worthwhile discussions.
These people are not leftist.
Why not?
If you support brutal totalian regimes, with your only excuse being “America bad,” you only use leftist as a label, not a belief system.
Probably the authoritarian fascist governments they support.
I mostly agree, except:
These people are not leftist.
They are leftists, on top of the genocide they support they’re also all for workers owning the means of production. Leftism isn’t “when good,” right isn’t “when bad,” left and right are economic distinctions symbolizing the people on one side and the aristocracy on the other. There can in fact be “bad leftists” just as there can be “bad rightoids.” Bad people exist everywhere, not just at republican conventions.
I’d argue that they are more leftists because of that as many if not all leftists I’ve known behave pretty similar to them
No.
I agree with you about grad/hex ultimately being or supporting red fascists, but I’m not convinced that world’s admins are using this much nuance to make their decision. They probably saw some angry anti-Israel comments and just assumed it’s all hate speech.
I could not agree more. Not only are comments removed, and users banned way too easily, is the nuclear option, defederation, used perhaps a bit lightly too.
In my personal experience I much more enjoy the comment sections of the more open instances. Feels much more like the thing I enjoyed most about reddit.
I expect you need to look in the Lemmy.World moderation log to see to what degree lemmy.ml users were or were not problematic (I’ve no idea either way.)
Good idea, if anyone can point me to it or to specific examples, I would appreciate it. Also do not care enough to start an investigation by myself.
Fwiw, I wouldn’t judge an entire instance by a handful individual posts. Users will be users. But still, some evidence would be a lot better than no evidence. Plenty of evidence would be even better.
No one owes you anything. If you don’t like it, move instances. If you want the evidence, go find it. It’s pretty easy, and you don’t need to be handholded to get there. You’re talking like you’re a decision maker for a decision that’s already been made and for which you have no authority.
And judging by the comments on here many seem to be happy to be “rid of them” because they are “annoying”, or “immature”, or “tankies”, or whatever. It really reads largely like “their opinions annoy me” so I’m glad they’re gone.
Edit: If lemmygrad truly are tankies, then the collapsed doesn’t apply and I’m misinformed. I’m just concerned we did a sentencing hearing. if they truly are being cult like, “soaked in the enemie’s propaganda” and intolerant, okay we have a different situation. we should still limit our anger before we whip ourselves into a mob.
(written during anger)
Its true and im rather disgusted by it. Its depressing to see the largest face in the fediverse
self isolatemake bitter enemies with a different shade of hateful.One bad Hexbear user made me want to defederate, the second one made me think otherwise.I used to want to defederate from hexbear, now I really don’t. Ive seen toxic people from every instance, including our own.
Fuck you reddit 2.0, took you long enough. Thanks though, we’ll stop seeing your crap posters pollute our comment section from now on.
90% of people we ban come from world. Very funny that they said they saw a rise of hate speech from our instance though considering the worlders we ban are fucking genocidal maniacs and fascists. You can check the modlog (it’s unfortunately federated), we are one of the tamest instances when it comes to banning people and deleting comments/posts.
For any worlder that was based and liked interacting with lemmygrad (you will notice we did not ban good faith participants), I recommend you make an account on a third-party instance that federates with us, like ml or ee until they also defederate from us because we have principles 🙃
The post is as idiotically angry at world as world are at them.
I will likely change my primary instance from now on to one federated with both world and lemmygrad because
your and their people can hopefully exist in harmony there.the anger on both sides is frankly unsettling I want to be neutral on this matter.Take better care of yourself, Hikikomori lemmygrad and Hikikomori lemmy.world.(stop being a prick, @HelloHotel)The fact that this whole thing may be secretly abou the war bugs me too.
I mean, im pretty sure more than 90% of people who join started at .world so it makes sense.
The above quote tells me all I need to know it was a good choice. This wasn’t a mature, unbiased response that understood there are different values and opinions in the world, or that wanted to address issues between the two - no instance owes any other anything unless they want to try get along and these clearly don’t.
no instance owes any other anything unless they want to try get along and these clearly don’t.
that’s absolutely fair but tragic. They have the right, absolutely. I updated my comment to hopefuly have more clarity
Good Job! You make my experience of Lemmy continuously better! You cleaned that CSAM up with the speed of light (I’ve never even noticed it), you managed the Piracy Community Troubles very well and now you made an well thought through decision about Lemmygrad. Well done Mods! And thank you all very much!
A well thought through decision that gives no examples or arguments?
With the timing, I have to assume the reason is “they support Palestine.”
