this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad

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"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"

Welcome to MoG!


Meanwhile On Grad


Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!


What is a Tankie?


Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.

(caution of biased source)


Basic Rules:

Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.

Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.

Apologia(Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism, Islamic Terrorism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.

Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users as it handwaves their extremism.

Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.

Off-topic Discussion — Do not discuss unrelated topics to the point of derailing the thread. Stay focused on the direct content of the post as opposed to arguing.

You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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

(page 5) 39 comments
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

I've had them muted on Boost for a while, haven't missed 'em XD

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I actually like seeing their posts on my main account. It allows me to keep up with their lingua franca, so I can more easily identify their alts on normal instances, so I know not to attempt to engage in good faith.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

I got banned to 40 days from .ml memes for arguing that the republicans were worse than the democrats or something mild like that.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 day ago (4 children)

"Arguing against the far right party? That's a no-no for our leftist instance!"

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago

I find it time and again.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm on Mbin and started on Kbin, so I've tied my cart to a sequence of single devs. But, are there any Lemmy devs who aren't connected to ML?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I think both the Lemmy main developers @[email protected] and @[email protected] are also the ml Admins. There are other contributors but none of them is doing this as their main job.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That makes it a challenge. If you defed from them, you might lose access to upstream patches, or beta features. I'd love for Mbin to become the standard-bearer for the threadiverse, but Lemmy has gotten name recognition.

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 day ago (48 children)

In a recent discussion in the Matrix chat, it was mentioned that donations to support development have recently fallen off quite steeply. I mentioned my reason for not donating anymore is because I can't support anyone who runs an instance like .ml. @[email protected] said I could donate directly to him since he doesn't do as much moderation over there, but also mentioned that donations for development go towards server costs for .ml. Hell no.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 day ago (3 children)

@[email protected] said I could donate directly to him since he doesn’t do as much moderation over there

Having observed a few different types of small team dynamics in my time, my speculation from a distance is that nutomic is the sensible one who does the bulk of the actual work, and dessalines is the other one.

He kind of has my sympathy and I do like Lemmy as software and it is clearly a good thing, but at the same time, at this point in the world if someone on your team is working to silence anyone who talks about Russia in unflattering terms, you can go fuck yourself as far as I am concerned. I am happy their instance is failing and I hope it keeps on failing until they stop doing legwork for murder, tyranny, rape, and torture. Honestly, “I wish my internet place had more users and people didn’t make fun of me so much” is a pretty mild negative consequence to experience from that.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I could donate directly to him since he doesn't do as much moderation over there

I'm in the modlog a lot so I can confirm that that is true, however, like @[email protected] mentioned, he shares a transphobic flavor of their mindset sooo yea

but also mentioned that donations for development go towards server costs for .ml. Hell no.

LMAO "Donate directly to me and you won't have to worry about it! Butttt it'll still go to the exact thing you're opposed to."

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago

Nutomic is .ml, not doing much moderation is an excuse probably because he has underlings to do it for him.

[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Also nutomic is a transphobe

https://lemmy.ml/post/18761554

Which is reason enough to not give them any money in my book

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think the whole "saying anything different from what we like? You're banned" thing is also playing a good part.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 97 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Every time a ml/hexbear community that I might be interested in pops up on my feed, I block it, then manually search for a non-tankie version of the same thing and immediately subscribe. The amount of pro-authoritarian content I've been exposed to has dramatically dropped.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

I just instance blocked them, good riddance. Too bad I do occasionally have to see posts from their users on other instances.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thanks for the recap!

Anyone wanna remind me how to block an entire instance? I’m on Fedia, if that matters.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (7 children)

so thats why ive been seeing so much communist propaganda lately

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ahh is this why I’ve seen a noticeable uptick in shitty responses in threads? I should check their instances more often. I’ve definitely seen a lot of grad/bear bullshit lately.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

could you pls put the exclamation marks on the links to those posts in the same way you did for [email protected] ?

thanks for this concise list of stuff .ml has done btw

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago

He can't.

Unfortunately, lemmy only supports instance-agnostic links (like, that are written to link to a user's own home instance) to a community. It has no syntax permitting for this with links to posts or comments.

If you're using Firefox, you can install the Instance Assistant for Lemmy & Kbin, and it will modify pages on non-home instances to have a button in the right sidebar that will take you to the post on your home instance. With that, after you follow a link to a non-home-instance post, you can bounce to the corresponding post on your home instance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

~~Edited, but I wasn't aware it was needed for direct posts URLs, does it not work on your client if there's no exclamation mark?~~

Reverted

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

You had it right originally. You can't do what he's asking for, which is unfortunately something that Lemmy doesn't support today. See my response to him. The exclamation syntax lets you make a link that, when viewed by viewers on different home instances, will take them to a view of that community on their own home instance. Can't be done (today, anyway) for posts or comments, which is what you're linking to.

EDIT: Looking on fedia.io, it looks like unlike lemmy, mbin automatically converts links to other instances to local links, without any special syntax. All of your links on fedia.io's view of your post are to views of the posts on fedia.io.

I suppose that mbin's approach might get a bit annoying if you want to link explicitly to the other instance, for troubleshooting or something, but I think that it's probably addressing the most-common situation that people want correctly.

EDIT2: Looking at piefed.social, piefed appears to have lemmy-style behavior rather than mbin-style behavior and doesn't convert the links to local ones.

EDIT3: And for completeness, since my own home instance runs a number of alternate lemmy Web UIs, and those could theoretically do the conversion in the frontend:

EDIT4: Oh, wait. Voyager is working. It just doesn't use the same URL path syntax as the other frontends.

Voyager does not do the conversion, so lemmy-style behavior.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

LMAO ah the intricacies of Lemmy lol

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