Look at here and the people who complain about it being too hard to figure out are the ones complaining about “I can’t use muh slurs, this is awful.”
“The left of today is very much in favour of censorship to avoid “harm.” This makes those of us in the middle very wary of signing up to any partisan media.” /u/decidedlysticky23
/u/misshapensteed claims he isn’t far right, but explictly only posts on PoliticalCompassMemes and TheLeftCantMeme and KotakuInAction.
If they are too stupid to figure out we know they’re lying, they’re too stupid to figure out lemmy.
they’re too stupid to figure out lemmy
Please let’s not introduce elitism into Lemmy. I just got here and stumbled upon this post. The social network you use does not make you superior. As much as I agree with anti-racist censorship, there is no need to speak as if Lemmy users are superior beings. It was annoying when Redditors did it back in the day and it will continue to be now.
Exactly this.
As an analogy, I personally think the Linux desktop is better than Windows but I don’t think desktop Linux users are inherently better than Windows users.
Sure, desktop Linux users are probably more tech savvy on average but they are probably also more likely to be less socially capable imo. (like me)
“I use Arch by the way”
(I kid, I kid… I use garuda)
Praise the Arch wiki though
Oh for sure. And pacman / the AUR. It’s the reason I stated with an arch-based os even though I got a little tired of managing all the minutiae myself (I did used to use arch)
I do actually run arch btw :)
Quite. Remember narwhaling bacon? Never again.
s/stupid/lazy
I mean more as “if you can’t look past skin tone and gender, you can’t probably read a sign up sheet.”
Racists are idiots. The ones who learned better aren’t idiots because they applied new knowledge.
Racists just regurgitate what they were told since birth, without questioning anything and doubling down.
Is Lemmy better? Remains to be seen. But if they refuse to join because we won’t tolerate slurs, that’s a bonus.
Yes. This is a different platform, I’d rather we don’t just transplant all the reddit problems here.
Lemmy is inherently political. It was and is a revolt against reddit’s staff, their business model and the influence of US politics, media and corporations on their platform due to their advertising model. This place wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t political differences.
We’re not here to impress people who were banned for spreading Nazism. Go to all the reddit-clones that started in the early 2010s when reddit got called out for hosting toxic racist-or-fascist hate communities and communities sexualizing minors (e.g. /r/jailbait).
Everything is inherently political. If anyone thinks it isn’t, it’s just because the politics favour them.
This is true, politics is not something distinct which can be considered separate from or optionally added to society, culture or economics, although Lemmy is also explicitly political. That might be more what I intended to say.
(The real kicker is realizing that abstaining is not politically neutral.)
Very true. A good phrase is “the personal is political”. Politics refers to organization, power, and decision-making, and so much of our lives is determined by decisions outside our control.
Exactly. I’m not exactly hiding my politics.
If anything, I’m glad being open about it means that a lot of bigots aren’t going to use lemmy in the first place. A natural filter to keep the transphobes and McCarthyites elsewhere.
Yes, exactly. If we can have the equivalent of Reddit without the bigots, it’s a big plus. Tired as a trans woman to go on r/Gaming and see transphobic comments
Agreed!
My teenage son and I recently had a conversation about how the people complaining something is “too political” are the ones with a political agenda you have to watch out for. He pleasantly surprised me by being 2 steps ahead of me (he told me he liked the thing people were criticizing because of the political aspects).
Is there a Lemmy equivalent of r/SelfAwareWolves?
https://lemmy.ml/c/selfawarewolves Last activity was 9 months ago though.
What’s funny is there is nothing stopping them from making their own instance. I think the hesitation stems from them coming to grips with reality that few people really want to engage with their messaging when they step out of their bubble.
Because they can’t make people who don’t agree with them miserable if they’re all relegated to their own bubbles.
One of the funny events on Mastodon was that someone set up an instance that was far right and almost within a few hours, all the other instances had de-federated from it and blocked it
No-one was stopping them setting up their own instance but they all said “you don’t play well with others so go play on your own!”
That’s how a healthy society should be. Bigotry is always a minority of society. The media has been inflating its perceived reality to attract more people away from criticizing the current economical system. Fashism 2.0.
As Buenaventura Durruti said:
“No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.”
I wish the fediverse is able to contain all the ideas, all the political positions and that disconnecting/blocking an instance is only used for behaviors like spamming. Not giving every political stance the opportunity to be a part of the same world fuels extremists.
Beehaw and other instances can kick all the users with far-right beliefs. That’s fair. But Lemmy users shouldn’t be blocked to listen to or even interact with them, in their own instances, if they wanted. Don’t help creating political ghettos.
I’m not super over how the fediverse works mechanically; I was under the impression that users could create their own instances and interact with who they choose to?
Take my reply with a grain of salt because I’m also very new to this. From what I understood, although you can create instances and interact with everyone, other instances can choose to cut ties (blocking) with your instance. For example, beehaw blocked lemmygrad.ml which can be seen at https://beehaw.org/instances (on the bottom of this page there’s a link in “Instances”). So, if your Lemmy account is on Beehaw, you won’t be seeing lemmygrad.ml posts. I don’t even know if it’s possible to comment on them (maybe someone can elaborate on this).
Basically, but it is not seamless. The biggest hurtle is that when you stand up a new instance, you will only see posts and comments from after the instance was created. This is the way most federated social media works. The rationale is that it would be too burdensome (for both ends, the massive established instance, and the small upstart instance running on a budget VPS), and prone to DOS abuse, to request the entire history from every instance in the network. The initial experience on a new instance can be a little barren. After a while, when it has discovered other instances in the network and had time for new posts to roll in, it starts to be natural. This doesn’t happen automatically though. Actions must be taken (following a user, subscribing to a community, etc) for these connections to be made. The first actions must be deliberate, but it eventually begins to snowball with user activity.
When I started up my Mastodon instance, I had a bunch of friends, some situated on the network already, some newbies joining in, all follow each other and recommend other accounts to follow. Within a day, 400 instances had been discovered. Months later, it has discovered over 12,000.
How would I be blocked from “listening to” (that’s never what’s going on) psedo-Nazis in my own instance?
Sorry, I didn’t understood what you meant. Especially the parenthesis part.
That’s the unimportant part.
Let me be clear. I’m asking, “How would I be blocked from listening to and interacting with anyone in my own instance?”
Oh no no no. Sorry, it was probably my fault since english is not my native language. I was referring to theirs instances! in your example, the neo-nazis instances.
In other words, I was trying to say that I agree with instances (like beehaw) being able to block what they consider to be toxic instances, but I’m against removing instances from the lemmy fediverse if that’s even possible. Like, removing them from the network.
Well, you’re in luck, that is exactly how things are.
How can someone honestly claim to be “in the middle” when one side openly embraces Nazis, sexism, and other forms of bigotry? What’s the middle ground there?
There’s a difference between needing a safe space and not wanting to hang out with the KKK.
It’s an Overton Window thing. They’ve watched so much “fair and balanced” far-right media that it has made them believe that they’re centrists.
I disagree. Lemmy is really lacking proper leadership. The current leadership while incredibly skilled and well intentioned really sucks at leading a project like this which is mostly because of their extreme political stances.
That being said, good riddance in this case. It’s perfectly fine to miss out on some people and every instance has it’s own right to moderate itself however it wants.
Lemmy was made with politicals roots. You can disagree with the political views of admins, that’s okay, but it’s certain that here, incitation of violence and discrimination against minorities will not be tolerated
I don’t understand the reddit users who are claiming they don’t want to join Lemmy over political reasons. They could create their own instance with whatever rules they want and push whatever political agenda they want. The fact that the platform is decentralized means everyone can get with they want.
They’re just not smart enough to understand how it works.
Hey!
…Why do you have an 88 in your username?
Some people are born in 1988, lol. I appreciate the concern over dogwhistles but I would encourage you to report content you see that is not nice. If you plan to have a conversation with someone, please give them the benefit of the doubt.
:) Deal.
Yep! That’s the thing about federated platforms that seems really hard to drill into people’s heads. Go make your own thing. It’s genuinely not that hard.
I’m glad that Beehaw doesn’t do it, but the other instances shouldn’t be federating the Tankies.
Authoritarian, genocide-denial, Stalin-praising politics have no place on the left.
Personally I’m not sure I consider tankies leftists. Although communism is a leftists ideal, it’s based on the premise of people being equal and deserving of basic needs. Tankies often embrace misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and authoritarianism and deny or even support injustices against other humans. Not very leftist of them imo
I get where you’re coming from, but this feels like a no-true-scotsman kind of thing that both the left and right do to renounce and endorse their extremes as and when necessary to ensure they can always claim they were right from the beginning.
Things are what they are (including the results they produce), not what they ought to be. Whether that divergence happens because of orchestrated dog-whistles or poorly set up incentives is irrelevant.
Don’t get me wrong, I have the same tendency and the above is more like a mantra rather than an ingrained belief for me. A good litmus test has always been “Can I extend this argument such that I’m never wrong?” If so, I’m probably wrong already.
The term “Left” is nothing more than a team sport since the inception of the term in the 1800s. It’s not a useful term, nor a consistent term, and we only really use it for convenience. It’s not a meaningful model of classifying politics. That’s why we should consider just saying what we mean: progressive? socialist? egalitarian?
Same with “right”, of course.
But what are the ideals of the left? Isn’t there a focus on social equality and human rights? There are circles and movements on the left that i don’t fully agree with because you’re right, it’s not a monolith, but the core value of equality amongst humans feels like a requirement. I just think excusing genocide and supporting authoritarianism or totalitarianism are incompatible with the core leftist value of equality.
“Generally, the left wing is characterized by an emphasis on “ideas such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism” while the right wing is characterized by an emphasis on “notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism”.”
Where would tankies fall on that scale?
“Tankies” is basically a meaningless slur at this point, but I’ll try to answer your question.
There are two overarching branches of philosophical thought, Idealism and Materialism. Idealists believe the world is shaped by ideas. Materialists believe ideas are shaped by the world.
Liberalism is an example of an idealist philosophy. If enough people believe in civil rights and democracy, then they are sure to manifest. Liberals approach politics from the standpoint of evangelizing their beliefs. They believe with the correct rhetoric and the correct positions, they can win the day and bring about their version of a just society.
Marxism is an example of a materialist philosophy. Social currents, ideology, and history are driven by the material conditions. Marxists aim to apply an empirical analysis to historical events, to identify the underlying systems and processes which are at play. To figure out where the meager resources of the oppressed and downtrodden might be applied most effectively. From this style of historical analysis, many theses have been formed, creating a very deep theoretical canon.
We can all agree that democracy is good. We can all agree that civil liberties are good. At the same time, when the United States declares it is going to bring democracy to your country, you know are going to have a bad time. Or when the Untited States, jailhouse of the world, brings up complaints about civil liberties, you know there are ulterior motives at play. This is because the United States is a world-hegemonic imperialist empire, always seeking to expand its markets, its influence, and its profits. There are other countries which exhibit imperialist tendencies. Imperialism is the inevitable endgame of capitalism, but none compare to the US Empire.
The idealistic paradigm of categorizing states as democratic or authoritarian crumbles under the past century of cold war. A state like Cuba, living under siege, facing very real threats of espionage, sabotage and infiltration, is forced to take a warlike posture. It can never let its guard down. It will take measures which seem repressive in order to defend its sovereignty. This is unfortunate, but there is an underlying material reality which drives this state of affairs. The artificially imposed scarcity. The constant threat of a coup and the imposition of western finance and privatization. And still, you can make a very strong argument that the conditions in Cuba are far more Democratic than they are in the US. You can make the same argument for China. These places are far from perfect, but when you examine them in the context of the geopolitical reality we live in, there are reasons why they are the way they are (and a giant steaming pile of sensationalism and vile slander dumped on top).
Democracy is good, but you can’t just let the NED (a known CIA front) pour millions of dollars into reactionary media organs across your country and hold a direct election so every little victory the revolution has achieved can be sold off to gangsters. We got to see exactly what this looks like in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. We got to see exactly what this looks like when the US-backed coup in Chile overthrew Allende and installed the military dictator Pinochet. Shock doctrine, privatization, mass killings, neoliberalism. It looks like the parliament getting shelled by tanks, the former citizens of a socialist country getting sold into sex trafficking, and the dreams of millions turning into ashes while the capitalist gangsters take everything for themselves. It looks like the greatest decline in life expectancy and living standards in modern history.
Antiimperialism can seem perplexing at times, and nothing makes this clearer than the war in Ukraine. The invasion and the war are clearly abhorrent, but if that is where your analysis begins and ends, that Ukraine is a wholesome smol bean democracy and Putin is punishing them because he hates democracy on principle, you are missing a whole lot of what’s going on. The Reddit response to the war was that everyone became Ukrainian nationalists overnight. Even as Ukraine descended into martial law, banned opposition parties, media and labor unions, and devoted itself to full mobilization. The actions of the Ukrainian state are somewhat understandable under the circumstances, but I’m not sure how you get back to egality, fraternity, and liberty coming out of these conditions. You might just get the fraternity, but a very dark, nationalistic one.
Instead of taking sides, what most of these “tankie” / “russia apologist” leftist communities are trying to do is figure out what the hell is actually going on. They certainly aren’t on NATO’s side, which is enough for most to call them Russian stooges. There is an intense fog of war, and the only thing you will find from either side is war propaganda. Ask the Ukranians and they have killed a million Russians. Ask the Russians and they have killed a million Ukranians. The enemy is constantly on the verge of running out of munitions. Tons of “great man theory” attempting to do psychoanalysis of Zelensky or Putin, instead of examining the political and economic factors driving this war. At the end of the day, it is the working class killing each other in another war for bourgeois states, and the apologia for national chauvinism only makes excuses for it. No war but class war.
Yeah, I agree, I don’t really see a lot of “left” in the position that Imperialist ethnostates are okay for some, but not for others.
ML-tendencies have also historically been opposed to the goals of even the Marxist movements. Considering the way that the Bolsheviks removed power from the People, Soldier, and Worker’s Soviet to instead centralize into their own centralized “Soviet” organ of power. Or the reactionary, authoritarian and socially conservative policies pushed by the contemporary and often the historical CCP (though the history of Maoism is obviously complex).
It’s refreshing to be around folks like you. Thank you.
The beauty of it is that we don’t necessarily have to use lemmy.ml at all. Beehaw and Sopuli.xyz, two of the largest instances outside of lemmy.ml and the tankies, don’t federate with the tankies. It some ways it’s a good thing, as it encourages people to branch out instead of clustering around a “main” instance.
Yeah it’s not like theyre uncomfortable with socialism in general, this is like full on self identifying STALINISM. That’s something that comes with it’s own mess of human rights totalitarian crap, and pointing out that the US has also done terrible things(and oh boy has it) doesnt make that any better.
Like they arent the power to the people kind of socialists their logo is literally a tank.
I consider myself a socialist.
But Stalinists and other authoritarians have essentially reactionary politics.
I’m anarchocommunist (though I often say anarchosocialist because of loaded term stuff), and I view all authoritarian stances as truly horrific. The big great huge tragedy with capitalism is that the people with capital control the state, and therefor have authority to harm the populace. Bolshevism does not do anything to fix the tragic part. Vanguard party politics consistently devolves into authoritarian regimes, and those authoritarian regimes then harm the people.
The standard by which we should be judging any political or ethical framework is the degree of agency the most disenfranchised person in the system has.
China is also an Imperialist state, with borders and a realpolitik firmly grounded in ethnic supremacy.
Worth repeating that line I think. That China is an Imperialist ethnostate, because it is very true.
There is no doubt china is an imperialist state that views itself has having a manifest destiny like right to rule the world
Fellow AnCom here. Say it loud and say it proud.
Yeah I’ve been going back and forth between this one and lemmy.ml and a recent thread on Ukraine made really really appreciate that beehaw has that instance blocked
I have to say that I had a really rough whiplash when I saw what kind of communities the admins of lemmy have created and are maintaining (I guess that is what you mean by tankies). Absolutely shocked that this is the credo of people making this “open/free/not controlled by company” software. A company might be preferable at this point >.>
These 2 people are the ones we’re supposed to put the faith into to maintain and develop the framework and architecture for all these potential sites? If we fund lemmy we fund them, if they give up then nobody else is probably going to take over, it sounds like a disaster just waiting to happen.
And okay, nice to hear that beehaw is blocking those communities but we’re still federated with everything else there, if I’m understanding it correctly, and it’s the same users that can easily cross between the instances? That’s not very reassuring either.
Considering that Reddit’s capitalist shenanigans is what brought redditors here, having socialist devs is not necessarily a bad thing.
You’d probably also be shocked at how many communists are strongly involved in FOSS development, and just how nice and great people they are on average.
In any case, don’t worry too much about it, their software is open source so if they suddenly turn evil, a fork is enough to fix it.
Socialism is not the same as what’s going on here. Socialism means you believe in good for the common citizen, not denying reality and wishing death and destruction on peaceful people.
While I have to admit that I’ve been frustrated by the tankies during my short stay on lemmy.ml, I don’t think that’s a fair representation of their views.
Most I believe seem frustrated by a western world that seem entirely too content in accepting a narrative heavily biased in favor of laissez-faire capitalism and right wing narratives, to the extent that it has blinded them to the cruelty of regimes in China and Russia.
I think that in order to foster a fruitful discussion here and avoid the trenches that often form between differing political views on the web, trying first to understand and empathise with an opposing view is crucial. It’s been a good heuristic for me at least, except in those cases where there is zero intention of even trying to understand each other (where just ignoring works well).
I think it is a huge culture shock for redditors who are used to the idea of extremists being the alt right, and the ones that they are used to mainly associating with hate speech and being in agreement they are an unsavory group.
Particularly with a lot of redditors who joined lemmy just looking for a reddit alternative for their hobbies. Usually in reddit when you hear someone say they don’t want politics the image that comes to mind is some alt right fascist who get hung up on how other people live their personal life and complain about not being able to use hate speech.
So encountering supposed liberals who are very reminiscent of the alt right is incredibly jarring. It’s leading to some going wait…what?..
I am not worried about socialism, I am personally anti-capitalist too, at least in theory. I am worried about their extreme anti-NATO and seemingly pro-putin propaganda. If they kept these private I also wouldn’t mind it but they literally named the tech after their ideals. Ignoring these enormous red flags seems naive.
Or maybe you’re right - I’m misreading the situation and people like me who are bothered by that just shouldn’t be here in the first place, wrong place for us.
In any case, don’t worry too much about it, their software is open source so if they suddenly turn evil, a fork is enough to fix it.
I am not going to get into this discussion since we can’t know what will or wont happen but I am sure that maintaining a project like this requires much more than committing a bugfix to a fork.
Yep, it’s kind of like finding out something you use is made by antivaxers, flat earthers, holocaust deniers. Broad political ideology such as supporting communism isn’t an issue at all, but finding out some of them hold what feels very reminiscent of alt right extremists is eyebrow raising.
You’re very right, it makes me a bit wary, especially with uh, familial experience with authoriarian rulers.
Practically all modern technology stems from some pretty brutal history and a hell of a lot of colonialism. I think being informed is important but in most cases there’s exceedingly little you can do with this information.
Not using it is an option for something like social media. If this place turned out to be for instance a stormfront run one then it’d definitely be an easy pass without hesitation. At this point I’m new to this type of service so seeing how disconnected and independent from the problem players each instance is.
I think Lemmy is too political, but still joined a long time ago. Things can improve with time. We’re seeing this happen now.
Good reverse riddance
I dunno, “too political” can just mean people don’t want every discussion to devolve into politics. Having these strong left communities front and center can give that impression. I don’t need to read a low effort “capitalism bad” on every topic. I hope this doesn’t devolve into that, but filtering out the politically apathetic sends us in direction for that to happen.
Honestly, other than threads that are specifically about politics I’ve barely seen any politics on here lol
Especially here on Beehaw cause I’m also on lemmy.ml with another account
In my experience, like 4 times out of 5 when people decry things getting too political, what they’re really saying is they like things the way they are and they don’t want anyone to change anything. the other 1 time out of 5 they’re just super exhausted fighting the good fight all the time and need to turn off for a bit just to survive the next day.
it’s the one thing I like about mastodon - the CWs - even though it seems like so many people are against them. but in my view, it gives people who are wrung out and highly upset over politics and general disappointment an ability to let their batteries recharge, while still allowing others to agitate for change and shine a light on political problems.
it also neatly pulls the rug out from under the 4/5ths of people who are happy with their lot in life and don’t want anyone else to win like they are. I see this as an absolute win
like 4 times out of 5 when people decry things getting too political, what they’re really saying is they like things the way they are and they don’t want anyone to change anything
Exactly. Everything is political; if saying or doing something is political, then not saying or doing it is also a political stance.
You’re totally right tbh, such types are ideally gonna go elsewhere for their freeze peach.
/dev/nullseems to have ample room, they should try thereI understood that reference :D
As this is a post on Beehaw, I’m going to abide by the rule and omit any unsavory words I was originally going to include 🙂
Whether intentional or not, the slur filter was one of the most genius things the Lemmy developers have ever done. No one was under any false pretenses that it was the absolute best way of moderating a space. In fact, everyone knew from the get-go that it had its fair share of problems! But it did one thing splendidly: it acted as a barrier against people obsessed with free speech who claim a slur filter is a tool used by some nebulous participants in the current culture war. I’ll refer to this comment made by user
uabstractionon Hacker News 2 years ago.Even to this day you see those people using the slur filter as a talking point against the devs, the software, the wider community, etc. even though it hasn’t been hard-coded or required for over a year at this point!
Meanwhile, as they continue to avoid Lemmy and prophesize its downfall, the people actually participating on Lemmy are growing a community and just generally vibing! No one is fainting at the thought that they can’t say a slur.
I don’t see an issue with slur filter either but from what I’ve read it was hardcoded and couldn’t be customized by other instances. Can you explain the reasoning behind that, why not let instances decide how far they want to go with their censoring policies? In my experience the only good moderation is manual context-aware moderation done by a person, text filters accomplish nothing except making people come up with slang terms or other workarounds. Seems weird to have this policy enforced in this way.
It’s open source software. You could even then remove the slur filter manually trivially, and with a small amount of technical skill, make that persist across updates.
It took them quite some time to move it to a user friendly place. It can be set in the server settings in the UI presented to administrators. Previously it was hard coded requiring a fork or maintaining code every update.
However, I’d like to highlight that many people interested in federated software are not as technically proficient as you are. Your thoughts on what is challenging probably doesn’t match what less technically proficient users think of as challenging. If federated software is to succeed, it needs to be approachable to many different kinds of people, not just the most tech literate of us.
Not just the slur filter, the whole strong leftist flavor, hard moderation, and no stupid ideals of free speech lemmy had basically sent all the right wing extremists running.
claims he isn’t far right
Right-wing extremists do this to make it seem like their position is widely held and “normal.” The worst extreme right-wing party we have here in Finland (Valta kuuluu kansalle or “Power Belongs to the People”, aka Valta kuuluu Kremlille or “Power Belongs to the Kremlin”) claims to be center right. The head of the party is a pro-Russia flat earther who doesn’t believe in climate change, and the party is staunchly anti-immigration
Performative Overton acrobatics.
