Not exactly. This started yesterday, when a user accused mods on .ml of, “tankie censorship,” (meaning censorship by tankies, not of tankies). He also came with some pretty good receipts that appear to show .ml mods removing criticism of China that, whether you agree with it or not, didn’t seem to violate any rules, and was well within the bounds of what most people would consider civil discourse. He also claims to have received bans from all of the .ml communities he’d ever participated in for pointing this bias out. It’s possible he’s presenting all of this with his own slant, but what he showed seems legit, and I’m not sure he could have provided more evidence without encouraging brigading.
This is now starting to snowball, with users starting to call for defederating from .ml. One .world user also posted on .cafe about Dessalines previous tankie comments, while another user has posted about finding replacements for the largest .ml communities.
So, saying what’s happing on .world is anti-communist isn’t accurate, as most the criticism has been anti-tankie. However, .world has a much higher level of liberals than most of Lemmy (they created a little echo chamber for themselves on Political Memes), and most of them are incapable or unwilling to understand the difference between a tankies and communists (or tankies and leftists…or tankies and criticism of Biden…). So, it will probably only be a matter of time before this group tries to blur the line between valid criticism of baised moderation from authoritarian apologists to general criticism of leftists.
So, tl;dr: .world isn’t broadly anti-communist, but a large portion of the community is upset about what appears to be biased moderation from tankie .ml mods, and there is a small contingent of .world liberals who I’m sure will take this opportunity to bash anyone to their left.
The problem with this is that “Tankie” is a sliding target, including all Marxists. If you claim to only have a problem with Tankies, not all Marxists, but do your best to attack the majority of Marxists, does that mean the majority of Marxists are Tankies, or that .world has become an anticommunist instance?
I’d say this will only end up creating a multipolar Lemmy. Dessalines has already stated that .ml will not be the first to defed, as they believe in an interconnected Lemmy. However, the target boogyman for .worlders has shifted from Grad, to Hexbear, to now .ml. After .world finally defeds from .ml, will they shift towards db0? Lemm.ee, perhaps? Who knows.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, haha.
Honestly i wouldn’t mind. Users on .world that don’t want a butt load of defederations will probably (and hopefully) move to another instance, whilst the rest of lemmy will be free from all the liberals uncapable of discriminating between communists and tankies
I really only started to see the meaning of tankie start sliding once I got to Lemmy, and it goes in two directions; tankies who swear they aren’t tankies, they just have a lot of feelings about why the Uyghurs aren’t being mistreated, and liberals who literally think tankie is a synonym for leftist. (Seriously, if Lemmy has one unforgivable sin, it’s introducing the, “but her emails,” crowd to the word tankie.) Personally, I don’t care if I get tankies in my feed, but I’m not OK with instances that censor opinions they don’t like (I mean, assuming they’re not bigoted). Those mod logs are pretty damning, I’d like to hear from the .ml mods why they felt those weren’t legitimate discourse.
Honestly, my real takeaway from this whole mess is that it’s really dispelled the myth of federation as a silver bullet for all of social media’s ills. Federation was sold to me as a solution to overly-large internet communities, since federation would stop single communities from becoming too powerful, and communities could simply be defederated if they didn’t get along. Meanwhile, .world is whining that .ml’s communities are too large and important to lose, while .ml is bitching that .world defederating would be egregious and unreasonable. The whole thing feels more like a flame war between some large subreddits than the glorious online utopia that I was told federation would bring us. Actually, it feels a lot like the schism that started when r/antiwork fell apart.
I really only started to see the meaning of tankie start sliding once I got to Lemmy, and it goes in two directions; tankies who swear they aren’t tankies, they just have a lot of feelings about why the Uyghurs aren’t being mistreated, and liberals who literally think tankie is a synonym for leftist.
This was already happening in Reddit roughly 2 years ago.
This isn’t an attack on your comment, which gave quality information, but I think it’s relevant to the conversations linked in your comment.
Their definition of authoritarian is a contradiction to their actions and used subjectively. “I hate authoritarianism, so we should defederate to keep out the authoritarians.” This statement is supportive of a fundamentally authoritarian action.
This is also why people who use the term “tankies” seriously are themselves deeply unserious. Their understanding of the topic is superficial at best and colored only by Western biases rooted in anti-communist propaganda. The concept of authoritarianism was itself a product of propaganda.
Saying “no” is authoritarian. Holding elections is authoritarian. Authority itself doesn’t matter, what matters is who is in power and how they use their power to influence the world.
Some people recognize and accept this reality and then openly support the power that best aligns with their own benefit.
Anger at tankies is usually just a lack of class consciousness and ignorance based on a term that changes based on who you support and who you do not.
there is a small contingent of .world liberals who I’m sure will take this opportunity to bash anyone to their left.
They are very active though, and they don’t lose their chance to mention and antagonize .ml, which I think is kind of shitty. It happens even in threads where people are commenting about stuff unrelated to politics. lemmy.world is constantly looking for targets to defederate from.
edit: I’d like to mention that I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m just giving my perspective on it.
Oh, yeah, they’re a very loud, obnoxious little group, and removing users that are only interested in picking fights is perfectly valid. But the screenshots from the original post really only seemed to be talking about China’s censorship of Tiananmen Square, and while it’s impossible to say without of context, their tone really didn’t seem to be combative. They just seemed to be expressing opinions about China that didn’t align with the .ml mods’ beliefs, and that’s troubling.
What’s more, Dessalines gave a response that’s kinda telling about all this. A user called .ml out on censorship (in a very respectful tone), and Dessalines basically replied saying asking questions is OK when it’s done in good faith, but a lot of people only ask them to start fights. When the user replied that he was actually talking about people being censored for expressing opinions in good faith that run counter to .ml mods beliefs, Dessalines chose not to reply.
I really seems like .ml wants to remove opinions that run contrary to the mods beliefs about communism. If that is the case, fair enough, but then maybe it does make sense for instances that don’t moderate that way to defederate. I don’t want to worry about policing myself on a bunch of the communities in my feed because I might get banned for my opinion on a news story.
Maybe these fears are unfounded, and this whole thing is being blown out of proportion, but none of the .ml mods have addressed the original post yet. Dessalines has left several comments on the Ask Lemmy post Are You a Tankie, but he’s chosen not to reply to the censorship claim. Given the silence, I have to assume the worst.
He also came with some pretty good receipts that appear to show .ml mods removing criticism of China that, whether you agree with it or not, didn’t seem to violate any rules, and was well within the bounds of what most people would consider civil discourse.
but what he showed seems legit, and I’m not sure he could have provided more evidence without encouraging brigading.
Based on just your link, it just kinda looks like he was posting unsourced gore. That doesn’t feel like civil discourse to me.
I don’t really see any criticism being removed. If Katana314’s message was congruent with reality it would count, but otherwise just making accusations isn’t criticism.
I love being able to block individual people. I’ve seen much less “pro-Biden a vote not for Biden is a vote for Trump” political compass meme shit lately because of that.
You better block me as well. I don’t know why we should help support Bibi’s favorite candidate by doing exactly what Repubs want and voting for someone who barely broke 1% of the popular vote. I guess people really want more far-right theocratic judges who are blatantly unqualified and corrupt?
I’ll bite. The democrats aren’t listening to us, we have two options: not support them in the election or (it was surprising to see this one end up in the news recently) an appeal to heaven.
If you think trump is too much of a threat, that the president we already had will destroy democracy and there won’t be a 2028 election, that the most important thing is to keep out a candidate who didn’t accept it the last time he was declared the loser of an election and has had four years to prepare for this one as evidenced by project 2024, stop trying to get people to vote for the democrats and start stockpiling ammunition and training to oppose trump supporters in the streets instead.
Your Savior, Genocide Joe, had the ability to put more people in the Supreme Court but he didn’t. Stop with the bullshit.
You support genocide.
Wish granted.
time to block me because not voting for biden increases the ods of trump getting in office
Do you think trump is going to accept being declared the loser this time?
Last time some people tried to reverse the election results.
This time they’ve got a plan to harness the administrative states power once they get the presidency. Do you think there hasn’t been an equal amount of planning what to do to stop the steal a second time?
