The developers who created Lemmy are leftists, and they run the lemmy.ml instance. The lemmy.ml (.ml is for Mali, btw) domain was allegedly chosen because ML can also stand for Marxist-Leninist.
I’m not an expert on the subject, but lemmy.ml users are known for being tankies. People don’t like that.
However, some of you whipper snappers don’t know that those of us with really old accounts joined back when lemmy.ml was the most popular instance. I just like FOSS things.
Edit: added “allegedly”
I’m on ML because it is the dev’s instance, that’s it. Also, I dislike how .world is run.
.ca is a bit more sane and not as authoritarian as .world or .ml. I don’t mind .world, but their admins are inconsistent, IMO
As a casual lemmy user… how do you switch instances? Download your data, create a new account, upload your data?
That was the state of things back in '23 when the first migration happened
I am confused now. I was just called a “leftist Nazi” and “liberal right wing nazi”. Lulz.
My point is that I think the terms “leftist” and “liberal” have been redefined again, just as a heads up.
It’s a weird situation. Billionaires successfully dissolved the left into factions of people who all in-fight over whether or not you’re allowed to say retard, or the n word (hey look I must be one of them). Identity politics. Really unimportant nonsense.
They also successfully got the right to worship billionaires.
Not to get too tin foil hat, but at this point I think it’s safe to say reddit was a psyop.
Billionaires successfully dissolved the left into factions of people who all in-fight
I think this goes all the way back. Leftist groups have been competing basically as long as there’s been a right and left. Going back to the OG “Left,” the French Revolutionaries, you see the Jacobins seize power from the monarchists, after which they start to eliminate competing revolutionary groups who have some ideological differences. In Russia, you’ve got the Mensheviks being eliminated by the Bolsheviks, and then the Trotskyists being eliminated by the Stalinists.
Wherever there is a small difference in ideology and people willing to die for it, the left will always be at each other’s throats.
On the other hand, I think the right keeps succeeding precisely because of identity politics: they unify under an identity instead of an ideology, or I guess maybe more specifically they succeed at turning identity into ideology. Identity politics are pushed by the right as a way of forming out-groups so that the majority can remain unified and always have a “them” to distract from what the ruling “us” is doing.
Also a lot of people just join a random popular instance at the start before looking into political shit like this, and they don’t want to switch later on.
I cannot support an instance where criticism of countries like North Korea or Venezuela is sanctioned with 30 day bans, even defending the Russian invasion of Ukraine is tolerated. I love open source software and it breaks my heart, but I completely blocked .ml after multiple incidents I witnessed or was part of in the news and worldnews communities.
Also I cannot really understand the argument of having an “old account”. All it means on Lemmy is having a year and a month in your profile. It is even a good idea to switch your account from time to time to stay more anonymous.
Yeah I made this account with my reddit username. Made another account that I’m building up with a dif username to be more anon and less attachment so more easily abandon able
At this point I’m not sure if they are tankies, or whether they’ve just been called tankies by people who call all leftists tankies.
Good to know, I totally thought it was a pejorative term for people who supported Kruschev’s use of tanks, and I rarely see people talking about that so I was very confused.
Note: this comment is dripping with sarcasm
This makes sense.
I do think “tankie” is the wrong word, as “bootlicker” sounds more apt since Russia hasn’t been communist since '91.
As in, these devs are definitely authoritarian, but communist? Absolutely not.
I dont think they are tankies. I am an anarchist and I believe communism is as evil as capitalism. I am lemmy.ml so I dont think they are tankies.
I’m an anarchist, these people are the kind of genocide appreciators who call all dissenting leftists tankies
Nope, clear definition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof.
Yeah, and them being trigger-happy with the ban hammer is why Lemmy exists at all today. All Reddit alternatives back then were Nazi hotpots, because pretty much only folks who got banned from Reddit joined the alternatives (and back then, Reddit moderation primarily concerned itself with Nazis).
They would show up on dev.lemmy.ml, too, and “just ask questions”, like if an immigrant did a certain crime, would you want them deported?
These questions served no point other than to drive the conversation tone to the right.
And yeah, I was glad that the admins were always vigilant about that and immediately banned anyone asking such ‘questions’, even if it may have thrown legitimately curious folks under the bus, because it allowed proper conversations to exist.
Of course, I have survivorship bias. I don’t concern myself with China or Russia nearly enough to have specific opinions about them.
But when someone is not being intentionally intolerant, I am of the opinion that talking to them is worth it and the only way to help center opinions which one might perceive as extreme.
But well, I also don’t concern myself with my admins nearly enough to have specific opinions about their opinions either. I don’t have to agree with everything they think, just because I’m on their instance, so I don’t care nearly as much as some other folks here.
That doesn’t follow. Truth Social exists, is full of fascists, and is way bigger than Lemmy.
If it weren’t for Reddit deciding to turn against their users in a very dramatic way, Lemmy would still just be a tiny leftist community rather than what it is now: a larger, but still small, mostly leftist, but slightly more centrist, mix of communities that fight all the time.
I came over with the initial wave of Reddit refugees. Lemmy was quite bad back then, with a lot of crap I had to block. It’s better today but it still has a very long way to go.
Tankies aren’t real leftists. They’re morons who honor authority over freedom to the point they’ll suck off authoritarians from history. Basically (very, very basically), they’re the authoritarian “left”… as much as anyone who is rightly left honors undue authority…
The problem is that y’all believe, that acknowledging many of the claims about those countries to be CIA hoaxes, is also somehow a declaration of approval of those countries policies.
You may not like those countries, but you’re taking that to mean you have to personally adopt the position of defending the bullshit lies you’ve been told about them.
No, it’s really not that way, unless you’re a guilt-by-association simplifying dolt. One can be a communist and not like how China is ran nor have to defend it.
The lemmy.ml (.ml is for Mali, btw) domain was chosen because ML can also stand for Marxist-Leninist.
Do you have the developers actually claiming this, or only second hand information? I was under the impression that they chose .ml because they were handing those domains out for free.
