The administration of lemmy.ml routinely abuses its rule 1 anti-bigotry policy to conduct political censorship, deleting documented facts regarding the ukraine invasion, holodomor, and xinjiang abuses under false pretexts of imperialist propaganda, misinformation, and nazism while leaving pro-Kremlin talking points untouched.
Verifiable public moderation logs prove this systemic shielding of state propaganda, down to moderators inverting standard geopolitical context, such as noting that fringe extremist units do not make an entire democratic nation fascist, to ban dissenters under the explicit excuse of being a Nazi.
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=25800386 and https://lemmy.world/modlog/446?page=1&actionType=All&userId=20355358.
The Europe community moderator (https://lemmy.world/u/geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml), who focuses exclusively on criticizing the West and never Russia or China, banned me as a Nazi.
I decided to block the lemmy.ml instance entirely to avoid any further interaction.
I see that there are dozens of relevant posts; you can find the relevant report posts here
- https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
- https://lemmy.world/post/5697017
- https://lemmy.world/post/50302822
- https://lemmy.world/post/13238608
- https://lemmy.world/post/43978041
Log screenshots
There used to be several of such posts, in this very community iirc, though most ended up being removed for whatever reason, sometimes after being locked for toxicity in the comment section.
Particularly when those “try a Threadiverse instance at ‘random’” websites send people to Lemmy.ml (the main one sends people to either Lemmy.ml or hexbear.net ~90% of the time - btw that is not hyperbole, try it and see), people who joined here truly will not be made aware until after they arrive and almost inevitably find out the hard way.
I believe this is the secondary reason (after overall lack of content) that Lemmy’s active user community is not growing even as Reddit continues to degrade.
This is the main reason we have to get a fork up to feature parity with all the major clients. I don’t want to recommend Lemmy any more, I want to recommend some other threadiverse alternative that does the same thing.
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.
Piefed?
And mbin. They have like 4 or 5 servers accepting new people. I think it’s good to have multiple different softwares going on the fediverse.
https://piefed.social/
Recommend some instance that defederates the Tankie Triad. Problem solved?
And beside that, maybe choose an instance that is running PieFed, PyLova or mBin?
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 not without it’s issues (mainly that rimu has the social skills of a grapefruit) but it’s wild how violently .ml users hate it. I know they’re from the dev instance so some bias is understandable, but holy cow some of the shit that gets made up to scare people away from it is absurd.
I feel the mbin devs must be watching the shitshow from within a popcorn filled bunker, just praying nobody remembers they exist long enough to drag them into it.
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.
I don’t want Lemmy to be in the conversation at all. I want to just be able to recommend Pylova or Piefed