Many might not know, but the developers of Lemmy are communist tankies - and i’m not joking - that spread propagranda and misinformation. They for example deny the genocide of the Uighurs in China as it is a “hoax perpetated by the western propagandists”.
Now, we don’t know where the creator of Kbin stands, but hopefully they aren’t as controversial. As how I see it all the attention they are getting after the great Reddit escape is going to get quite a bit backtracked when all the tankie stuff starts to get a apparent and drives people away again.
Honestly I’d feel the most comfertable with something as close as possible to Reddit, like a one plattform company connected to the fediverse, instead of umbrella plattforms like Kbin, Mastodon, Pixelfed Etc.
But I am hopeful for Kbin and we will see over time where the Kbin creator goes. Luckily as it is the fediverse I can just jump ship to a different project if I see things going to wrong way lol
I really like the direction and vibe here far better than what’s going on with Lemmy. Beehaw seems to have less skeletons in their closet, but it’s hard for me not to be turned off of Lemmy instances as a whole with some of the issues. Beehaw is also limiting community creation at the moment which I totally understand their perspective on but makes it less useful in terms of what I am personally looking for.
I think Lemmy is ready for the moment that’s happening right now but I have a hard time seeing it as a solution with some of the things lingering under the surface.
…been through some situations like this before with platforms/communities ending and I really think the best thing we can do is be the change we want to see. Create and use magazines on kbin. Engage with people and be part of building things up as opposed to waiting for others to do it. As a non-dev, that’s really all we can do. It’s also something that can make a big impact.
Joined Lemmy, discovered tankies, posted about it on Mastodon, and came here. So, yes, exactly.
I joined /kbin because @feditips warned about lemmy, but https://kbin.social federates with lemmy.ml and in the China topic somehow within 3 hours or so me using /kbin I got into an argument with Tiananmen Square massacre deniers and the moderators started deleting my comments. Damn, I did not expect this to escalate so quickly. And this was not even on lemmygrad.
Anyway, I’m hoping for better blocking tools in /kbin because this will let me survive on that platform :D
I was there for a day before I looked at the modlog and saw all of the deleted posts/comments that didn’t even say anything racist/xenophobic, but they simply said they don’t like/trust the Chinese government. Most even said they don’t trust the US government either, but that doesn’t matter to them if you don’t like China or Russia. I for one don’t like most governments, definitely not the US all of the time. But anyone that doesn’t blindly accept whatever the Chinese government says gets banned from the lemmy.ml instance because that’s “orientalism”. Crazy
You can’t convince them you don’t hate Chinese citizens before they call you a racist and downvote you to oblivion.
What’s the evidence that Lemmy’s developers are tankies?
Just to be very clear by the way, a “tankie” is, at the very least, someone who sincerely and unironically believes that Stalin was a heroic do-gooder, that North Korea’s “Juche” ideology will soon unleash utopia, and that China under the CCP is the very model of a communist society.
Furthermore, a tankie is someone whose gospel is Marxism-Leninism, i.e. Lenin’s extremely conservative spin on communism. A tankie will claim supreme knowledge about what Marc “really” said and boldly proclaim that dialectical materialism is pure science.
Organisationally, tankies tend to insist that all activist groups must be strictly hierarchical, with all decisions made by a Central Committee. “Activists” are merely the minions who’ll do the Committee’s bidding (btw, now how this is basically how Reddit is run). They’ll normally try to monopolize social movements into the banner of the local Communist Party of their region.
Socially, tankies also tend to actually be conservative, because their dialectical materialism dictates class reductionism. This means that, strictly speaking, queer issues are secondary to class issues (for example). There are definitive tropes of toxic masculinity, militarism, possibly even nationalism, in tankie discourses.
Now, in my opinion, a tankie is not someone who “merely” defends, say, the success of public health in Cuba, the fact that China has seen dramatic reductions in poverty since the 60s, or that India’s most literate state (which, btw, just announced free wi-fi for those in poverty) happens to be under Communist rule for a few decades now.
I’d also say (and this as someone who personally knows people involved with XJ) that “merely” questioning whether there’s an ongoing genocide in Xinjiang also doesn’t make you’re a tankie. Jeff Sachs, whatever else you think of him, has this position, and yet he’s as far from a tankie as you can get (the guy literally enforced hardcore capitalist “Washington Consensus” policies in Latin America).
Furthermore, a “tankie” is also not someone who talks about NATO’s role in the ongoing Ukrainian War. In fact, even the best Ukrainian scholars (e.g. Volodymyr Ishchenko) agree on this point, and again, they’re as far as you can get from tankies.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that these views aren’t problematic. China is obviously a totalitarian state (as is Cuba) and the situation in Xinjiang is obviously hideous, but this is nowhere near saying that China/DPRK/USSR are/were communist utopias. These are individual claims that many people hold.
Lately, the “tankie” label has been a gift for chiefly Western hawks who’ve used it to silence anyone who speaks of Western and non-Western war crimes in the same breath. They do so because it’s in their interest to paint themselves as honest, freedom-loving liberals.
I think it’s best if we wise up to this sleight of hand, and don’t do Western overlords’ biddings for them, for free.
And while we’re on the topic, I personally don’t think a Dev’s political beliefs matter when it comes to their platform, unless there’s clear evidence that they’re using their platform as a tool to attack those who don’t hold the same views. This is why I ask: could you share evidence that 1) Lemmy’s Devs are tankies and 2) Even if they are, that they’re throttling non/anti-tankie discourse on Lemmy?
To take another example, Alexandra Elbakyan is the creator of Sci-Hub, perhaps the single biggest gift to scholarship worldwidein the 21st century. She’s also a hardcore Stalinist. That doesn’t stop me from using her platform, since her platform benefits me everyday. I find her views loathsome, but I’m also grateful for her work.
See feditips
TL;DR: close affiliation with lemmygrad.ml and no moderation of content supportive of human rights abuses.
Oh geez wow, thanks for sharing. Ah crap, what a shame. Here I was just getting comfortable with Lemmy.
I’m gonna be an optimist and hope that other communities get enough traction to eclipse lemmy.ml, as this month progresses. Judging from what I’ve seen from the devs’ comments so far, they say they don’t care if someone just makes a new instance and runs communities there.
Then again, I feel like if they’re MLs, you never know if they’ll try and actively stop other instances from overtaking lemmy.ml if it comes to that. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt – for now, anyway, haha.
Oh, I totally forgot about that one. This is probably the best thing to go to. lol
- They do not hide it, they will honestly answer you if you ask them. You can also see it if you look through the post history of the devs on lemmy.ml.
The two main guys:
https://lemmy.ml/u/dessalines
https://lemmy.ml/u/nutomic- I think they try to have a wider community, the issue is more that you’ll get dogpiled and continually massdownvoted if the communists on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml doesn’t particurarly like you. This is a common reason some people switch over to Kbin I have heard too. And the bar for being a ‘western liberal’ is very low. This is not something they take much responsebillity over even though it is their own crowd.
And I’m not someone who uses the word Tankie without care. It’s properly assigned in this case.
While political opinions aren’t required or something you have to be neutral on, their particurlar political positions and crowd are so radical it taints their project and any meaningful possibillity of success. And not only that, but they are active members of their community pushing their narrative, as well as fosters a community of the same kind, it all making it really unlikely for others to want to collaborate with them, or any greater audience to stay.
Also the ‘ml’ in ‘lemmy.ml’ stands for ‘marxist lenninist’, which is their flagship instance, and the Chinese genozide example is just 1 example among a long line of problematic views. (Their avatars are different pictures of Fidel Castro btw) As well as there being sentiments of Russia going back to the USSR and all that. Some of that has been altering a bit after the Ukrainian war in terms of how they talk about it, but they are still in the same boat as years ago, pushing NATO being created by nazis to battle the communists, and started the project because they were getting banned on reddit.
Damn, and they’ve got Mao and Fidel on their profiles hahaha. Wild.
It’s such a shame, I was just getting used to Lemmy and staying to encourage others to join up.
For now I suppose I’ll still keep at it, just because I do see some good instances worth engaging outside lemmy.ml. in fact, I’ve barely engaged with lemmy.ml at all, I’ve mostly been into slrpnk.net. Totally recommend checking it out.
Yeah, sure. And if you feel the heat you can always jump over to kbin.social whenever
They hard-code censorship, so no, it’s not a case where the tech is agnostic. They’ve intentionally engineered the platform to enforce conformity at a technical level with their own personal worldviews.
The filter list hasn’t been hard coded in quite some time.
What did they do in terms of hard-coding censorship? So far my understanding is that the devs are horrible but the tech itself is fine.
unfortunate to see, is making an account on another lemmy instance (such as lemmy.world) still indirectly supporting these creators? I also have an account on kbin and kind of confused between Threads, Magazines, and Microblogs.
unfortunate to see, is making an account on another lemmy instance (such as lemmy.world) still indirectly supporting these creators? I also have an account on kbin and kind of confused between Threads, Magazines, and Microblogs.
unfortunate to see, is making an account on another lemmy instance (such as lemmy.world) still indirectly supporting these creators? I also have an account on kbin and kind of confused between Threads, Magazines, and Microblogs.
