And for anyone asking "Why are we boycotting/blocking lemmy.ml?" Here's a quick recap:
Lemmy.ml is an instance run by admins who are hardcore tankies and will enforce their ideology on their instance through various means from allowing (and pushing it themselves) propaganda (Such as Russia being justified in some way to invade Ukraine) and known propaganda outlets (Like RT) to removing content on their instance critical of their favored authoritarian regimes such as Russia or China and even banning users for such speech or speech critical of them if it's off their instance (Just like the Reddit mods of ol!).
If it was just some random instance it would have been defederated from long ago like the rest of the "Tankie Triad" (Hexbear and Lemmygrad), but they've positioned lemmy.ml as the "flagship" instance and abused that position and influence to become large enough to keep other instances from defederating from them.
Which I believe is harmful to the Lemmy-verse's overall growth and outside reputation. I have seen it come up before on Reddit threads (and other testimonials from people who came back and tried it again) that "They tried Lemmy but it was a bunch of tankies and went back to Reddit"
I don't know about you, but I'd prefer Lemmy to not end up with the reputation for being "Tankie Central " or even worse "Voat 2.0".
So if you haven't joined the boycott yet, join today and help us foster a better healthier Lemmy-verse!
You can take a look around here on [email protected] for documentation of it or checkout this list of curated documentation
On bans and censorships:
https://lemmy.world/post/28480760
https://lemmy.world/post/28481615
https://lemmy.world/post/28482147
https://lemmy.world/post/28480936
https://lemmy.world/post/28482273
https://lemmy.world/post/28481272
https://lemmy.world/post/28481064
https://lemmy.world/post/27674360
https://lemmy.world/post/27674117
https://lemmy.world/post/27673934
https://lemmy.world/post/27673724
https://lemmy.world/post/27577337
https://lemmy.world/post/27378634
https://lemmy.world/post/27346630
https://lemmy.world/post/27341283
https://lemmy.world/post/27288224
https://lemmy.world/post/27156418
https://lemmy.world/post/27054157
https://lemmy.world/post/27008261
Allowing altered headlines and permitting known propaganda outlets:
https://lemmy.world/post/28275465
https://lemmy.world/post/27428838
https://lemmy.world/post/27416097
https://lemmy.world/post/27314050
https://lemmy.world/post/27288953
Spreading Russia talking points like the Ukraine invasion just being a "negotiating tactic" !https://lemmy.world/post/27012640
General negative sentiment to other instances who haven't "seen the way" yet: https://lemmy.world/post/27426510
Open declaration of support for Russia (direct from dessalines (head admin)) https://lemmy.world/post/27352415
"concentration camps were just reeducation camps and weren't that bad" https://lemmy.world/post/26985447
I think they really have no idea how unpopular their viewpoint is. If you ever go and look around at "Lemmy" based on how it looks when hosted on .ml or Hexbear, it looks pretty dramatically different. I think part of the reason the mods are so aggressive with this kind of censorship is that it creates a really surprisingly effective illusion that a lot of the world agrees with them. You can find off-instance communities where people post a counter-narrative if you search, but that's easy to write off as "the lib instances" or something. I think they have no idea how far in the minority they are.
The name for the cognitive bias involved is "what you see is all there is." Your brain doesn't take account of content which is hidden from you, so if 90% of what you see is pro-Russia, and everyone there is of the opinion that anything outside of that is weird Western propaganda and distorted and fake, it's pretty easy for your brain to run with it. And once you're in that box you have no idea that you're in the box. And also, a lot of propaganda frameworks like that are self-sustaining (describing any contrary information as deliberate lies or giving this huge emotional emphasis to reasons for discounting them, so it's really hard to bootstrap yourself out of the box.)
I'm not trying to make excuses for the people who are running the operation, I have to assume that they know better. Although, maybe not. Maybe they have some other kind of dysfunction and really think they are standing up against US imperialism or something. I do also think that professional troll farms are also involved in creating the impression, too. My point is, I think the average users may be genuinely confused by these events and see them very differently from the rest of Lemmy does.
"What do you mean people don't like us supporting imperialism? We made up our own definition of imperialism that excludes imperialist countries we like."
When I mention russia is imperialistic, they ask me to define imperialism.
Among the things that George Orwell absolutely nailed was the power of redefining words when you are creating a propaganda framework.
I remember seeing a news report after not watching the American news for a while, and I was so confused when it talked about the American troops fighting against Iraqi troops... like it seemed like an uncommonly honest presentation, and also, what they were saying just didn't make sense. I couldn't parse the sentences. Finally after a moment I realized that they were talking about US troops plus "Iraqi troops" (our friends), together, engaging with some kind of unspecified enemy.
Who were the troops they were engaging with? No one really knows. Just some enemy. Not "Iraqi troops," though. They would need to have some kind of specific label attached to them so everyone knew they were the bad guys, and "Iraqi troops" didn't fit that, so they definitely wouldn't say anything like that.