• 7 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • In practice, software is simply software, and it matters far more who your instance admins are than which software platform you use. All the more so if you use something like Voyager that replaces the front-end UI component.

    And I didn’t get into it above, but Lemmy is quite opinionated as well. For instance, when you choose the option to so-called “block” an instance, what that does for you is:

    1. hide post content offered to communities located on that instance

    However what that so-called “block” does not do for you includes:

    1. hide post content offered by users of that instance to communities on other instances
    2. hide comments from those users in other communities
    3. prevent such “blocked” users from sending you DMs
    4. which are even allowed to trigger notifications

    Thus this so-called “block” of an instance is nothing at all like a block, and acts more as a community muting.

    Also, when a mod removes content it makes it disappear as if the page never existed, giving a 404 not found error afterwards (Reddit leaves the page active to anyone with the URL, even allowing conversations that were already started to continue).

    Users are never notified of the event - leaving people to find out literally years later that they were banned from something, or that their content was removed, when in all that time they were not aware (Reddit sends notifications).

    There is no modmail for users to contact the mods to ask for clarification - instead, Lemmy forces people to individually ask each of the mods why, e.g. via DM (Reddit has a modmail).

    Even when someone goes looking in the modlog to find out why their content was removed, it often says that it was done simply by a “mod”.

    Instance admins have supreme rights, community mods have a bit less so, but end-users have next to none at all. Even Reddit offers more rights to end-users than Lemmy does!!! Authoritarian practices are baked right into the Lemmy codebase.



  • I never paid attention to the word until I came to Kbin and subsequently Lemmy.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie says:

    Tankie originated in the UK as a term for hardline members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who continued to pledge support for the Soviet Union even when doubts had begun to emerge elsewhere in the party.

    … Politically speaking, tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China, etc.

    Practically speaking, tankies are pro-fascist and pro-genocide, plus individual (literal) murders, so long as it is done by their favored in-groups (e.g. Russian aggression vs. Ukraine portrayed instead as poor whittle russia forced to defend itself, whoopsie), and opposed to anything (even outright socialism) when done by their opposed out-groups - chiefly Western Civilization.

    So their cries of “Death to the USA” are meant literally, and also inclusive of other NATO states.

    Source: go visit Lemmy.ml, which unlike most other instances by default without being logged in shows only Local rather than Global content, and see for yourself, it should only take a couple of minutes to find such evidence. Or possibly better yet lemmygrad.ml, except that most instances actually defederate from that one whereas almost none defederate from Lemmy.ml.





  • Stated answer: bc it is “opinionated”.

    This is actually true - it already has been and is getting more strongly biased against “social media” type of content (as opposed to more serious, less emotional discussions) all the time. e.g. lately it will reject additional votes beyond a daily quota, which is applied even to people on Lemmy (or Mbin, Friendica, nodeBB, Mastodon, etc.) - for the stated reason that votes are not meant to make people feel good and instead that somehow is indicative of “vote manipulation”, when you, you know, upvote content that you would like to see more of.

    The trick though is that it doesn’t bother telling people this, in anything remotely resembling a transparent manner, so it is a type of shadow-censoring people’s offered contributions. Also, this anti-feature, forced over the objections of most people in the community, is enabled by default, and was barely announced, leading multiple instance admins to express surprise at the new behavior of their machines after the relevant update. Several migrations of people and entire communities to PieFed were cancelled as a result.


    Real answer: tribal Lemmy love somehow must imply hatred of any “competition”.

    People made a bunch of shit up, it got disproven, but nobody seemed to relent and people still spread the disinformation about it. Like saying that things were “hard-coded”, when not only was that not the case, but (unlike the shadow-censoring mentioned above) they were even opt-in, i.e. disabled by default.

    There are several valid reasons to prefer Lemmy over PieFed - like a more polished UI, and a superb search functionality, or just being too lazy to move once already established. But some people like to create drama, it would seem, and don’t care whether their battle cries are based on actual facts or not.


  • Your argument that lemmy.ml cannot be an echo chamber due to it allowing other machines to store content that it disagrees with is noted. Btw nobody ever said that it was for that reason, so once again ridiculous.

    Your second whataboutism is also noted (counterpoint: 2 things can both be true at the same time) - and expected. Once again I reiterate that I really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really wish that I did not have to be subjected to this level of argumentation. But it seems that as long as I continue to use Lemmy, my only option is to block each account individually, over and over again, ad nauseum.


  • Not from Voyager iirc, which also iirc is by far the most used third party app? Also, for multiple years that what is Lemmy.ml link did not work - it pointed to a post, which I think a later version of Lemmy.ml allowed communities to be made private, and then they never bothered to check what would happen for anyone not logged into a ML account, so it would just give like a 404 not found error for everyone else.

    Agreed that it’s not impossible to find out who they are - just that ML makes an exceedingly poor representation of the Threadiverse to people coming over here from Reddit. So when they see “death to the USA”, and they are… you know, in the USA, they often nope right out and not only never come back, they spread the word to anyone who will listen that that is what “we” here who use Lemmy are.

    Btw, in case you were not aware, we are a tankie bar (see: Paradox of Intolerance).

    Also, despite all the curation they perform within their garden, they won’t allow people to block the Lemmy.ml instance - so it’s not entirely a walled garden so much as it is a delivery system for the messages shared by Lemmy.ml users.




  • This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies

    Literally nobody has ever claimed that users on Lemmy.ml are not allowed to see content on other instances - this is not merely a strawman argument but an absolutely ridiculous one.

    Please don’t bother to reply to this if this is the level of content that your messages will contain.

    For anyone else that is curious, the complaint is about the lack of transparency in describing what content is vs. is not allowed - a community of people discussing FOSS comes nowhere close to mentioning that you are not allowed to come close to criticizing Russia, China, or North Korea - e.g. it is not allowed to state that Ukraine is not the aggressor and that rather Russia is, or to state that Uyghurs are being killed by China.

    I really really really really really really really really wish that Lemmy would implement a true instance block so that I did not have to spend time reading such comments as this. But for some reason that option is denied to me. Go figure.


  • Yeah the vast majority of criticism is completely made-up, and even after it was proven to be falsehoods nobody seemed to recant (that I saw anyway). Instead, people continue to point to the debunked conspiracy theories despite the months and months that have passed since then. It really underscores the point about how an echo chamber functions - facts truly do not matter in the slightest to some people.

    And it’s especially odd given how PieFed has more recently shot itself in the foot by shadow-censoring offered upvotes, but people still cite the long-debunked conspiracy theories rather than such an actual reason for criticism of the software.

    Tribal. Sad(ge). Bad.


  • There are no major Lemmy instances that defederate from Lemmy.ml in particular.

    Lemmy.zip comes the closest, not fully defederating but something similar. I forget if programming.dev does similarly as well. (Edit: ah, I forgot - only 2 of the 3 tankie triad instances are thus blocked by default, so here too there are zero major instances that block Lemmy.ml in particular.)

    There’s also PieFed.zip by the same excellent admin team as Lemmy.zip. So Lemmy.zip and PieFed.zip are excellent general-purpose recommendations to offer to people. (Edit: despite how they don’t block the triad - but at least PieFed.zip allows individual users to do so, if they wish. And after they figure out how, and that there is a need for such, which nobody it seems will officially recommend to them.)


  • PieFed is leagues ahead of Lemmy at this point. The main thing that it lacks iirc is a great search function like Lemmy has. Mind you, third-party app support is minimal, but that’s an issue with each one of those choosing whether or how fast to catch up, which will never end - the same as they do for Lemmy’s features also.

    Unfortunately PieFed by default also shadow-censors people’s contributions, plus other anti-social media type features, which doesn’t affect someone running their own instance (for that purpose PieFed is unquestionably far superior) but does affect anyone posting to communities located on an instance running PieFed where that opt-out feature is left enabled - including users currently on Lemmy, Mbin, Mastodon, Friendica, nodeBB, etc. Many planned migrations - both user accounts and whole communities - were cancelled as a result.

    Therefore a new fork was born - not of Lemmy but of PieFed - called PyLova. Last I checked it has even more features than PieFed, though PieFed recently borrowed many (though not all) of them.

    Lemmy, as far as the bleeding edge of new features is concerned, has been left behind in the dust, and seems unlikely to ever catch up (writing in the Rust language I hear is quite slow). And PieFed and even more PyLova are running circles around it.

    There’s also Mbin, which few people use except those who want to access both threaded conversations and user microblogging style content from the same account on the Fediverse.