The Agora

Just chiming in to say a lot of communities I participate in are hosted on ml, I'd be pretty bummed losing access to those. For that reason I'm against wholesale defederarion. I do think the communities need to explicitly diversify away from the instance though, ml admins seem demonstrably untrustworthy.

At minimum the .ml admins have shown a desire and willingness to keep their finger on the scale of the broader fediverse, which makes them a clear existential threat and possibly even a cyber security risk. In addition, they protect hexbear and lemmygrad, which openly state that their intention is to wage information warfare on the fediverse. We also see some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them some special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content. This alone is extremely concerning. The idea that we can individually block their instance does nothing to mitigate the ideological or security concerns I have.

My personal experience is that they protect propagandists and do not enforce their own rules evenly at all. My bans have been for me extremely petty things, and even for thing I have said on other instances. Meanwhile I have been called names, told that my family deserves to be tortured and that my country deserves to be nuked by .ml users (or hexbear proxies). I also find their defense of Russian and Chinese autocracy personally offensive, as I have family who have been directly impacted by both. It would be one thing if this was happening in a forum where these issues could be debated, or defenses mounted against misinformation and historical revisionism, but that is simply not the case. Even the most modest pushback against these ideas results in quick bans. This is not something we should associate with.

Learning the ml is a shitty place for news and politics is a right of passage for using lemmy. Defederation isn't the answer, at least not until they do something more than ban people who disagree with them.

When I found about the existence of Lemmy, I wanted to create an account, and found that Lemmy.ml is the official Lemmy instance ran by the Lemmy developers (who I knew nothing about). Seemed like the obvious, default, non-controversial choice.

Of course I later learned about... All this. I'm not interested in any political content so it took me a while.

So I guess I'd be a casualty, due to picking the biggest instance suggested to me by join-lemmy.org. How is someone new to Lemmy supposed to have the context here?

Hello,

Any reason to not include the thread that started it all, and has documented abuse from lemmy.ml admins? https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058

Also, if people want to avoid lemmy.ml communities, here is a thread that discusses alternatives: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20431762

I'm going to echo what seems to be the majority opinion here and say that defederation should not be taken lightly. The last big defed discussion here I was in favor of, but that was a very different case. That was a hatespeech instance with the barest veneer of "just asking questions bro", run by a free speech absolutist who was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Their daily posts consisted mostly of transphobic, islamophobic or anti-semitic rage-bait (or some combination of those). EDIT: Oh! There were also a lot of covid conspiracy posts there too, now I think about it.

There are some communities there I avoid, but that doesn't merit defederation. In my mind at least, that should be reserved for instances that allow illegal content, pure unadulterated hatespeech, instances that have been overrun by bots so badly the admin can't handle it (temporarily for that one ofc), or instances that regularly brigade and the admin encourages this behavior.

And besides, I've also had some pleasant and interesting conversations with .ml users. There are some problematic users and communities, but that's why we have block buttons.

I'm against defederartion, but I also actively avoid their communities.

I don't think the problem is with a majority of users, just a handful, but many in that handful are mods. As an anecdote, I got temp banned from a community there because somehow our discussion shifted to Russia, despite the topic having nothing to do with it, and the mod banned me for "anti-Russia" something or other (nothing I said seemed to violate community or instance rules), but I think the real reason was me challenging that user's authority.

I've also noticed a lot of downvotes for well-cited but "against the left" comments, and the responses I get are often low-effort.

I've also had some decent discussion there as well. I've challenged people's views and had good reubuttals, so it's really not all bad. I'm guessing it's a fraction of very active users that cause a lot of the issues.

So I'm against defederation, but I also recommend avoiding their communities. It seems to be a strong echo chamber, but those who aren't interested in that do seem to branch out. So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I might be following the right communities, because I never noted problem with user from .ml.

I start to wonder whether we don't have some person using tankie the same way as mainstream right-winger use woke.

I am generally against defederation. The way I see it .ml has problems with how their instance and communities are run and moderated. Unless there is content that puts sh.itjust.works in legal jeopardy I don't think defederation will solve a fundamental discourse problem.

Honestly I don't want to see .ml users unable to interact with our communities where they are subject to local rules. It is a foundation of the fediverse and the discourse it enables to avoid defederation.

I don't see instance issues with .ml: just user issues. Users and communities everywhere can exercise their own discretion with bans and blocks. This isn't a defederation issue as I see it.

Lemmy.ml is the reason I don't even tell anyone I use the Fediverse, let alone recommend it.

Even if they hadn't followed around an old account downvoting everything I posted (mostly memes) I'd support defederation.

On the whole, they're not real leftists, let alone communists. It's a facade for them to spread disinformation.

Lemmy.ml is a propaganda machine for a murderous, authoritarian government.

IMHO, some of their communities are sketchy, but as long as it's contained in their communities, that's easily manageable with just the user-level instance block feature.

Hexbear is a instance run by tankies that spread their shit ideology and quash any dissent where they have the power to do so. Lemmy.ml is the exact same, except it's much bigger and run by the Lemmy devs. I don't think they should get a pass, and I think that Lemmy will become tankie Voat if this is allowed to continue indefinitely.

I came here because Reddit was being run by corporate scum that only cared about profits, and they crossed too many lines. I thought I could get a new start away from all the mod/admin abuse. I'm starting to realize that basically every instance's and community's admins abuse their powers to push their agenda, whether it's political or trying to maximize membership, to the detriment of their larger userbase.

I don't think this is a winning fight, even if LML is effectively quarantined, but I'd like to buy time by mass-defederating them.

First of all, lemmy.world admins do have history of overreacting (e.g. with piracy & shroom) . So I don't think we should base our decision on theirs.

I have heard of lemmy.ml users being an issue at some point in the past, but it seem to have settled.

I personally don't have any issue with lemmy.ml; maybe in the past, but I cannot seem to recall any. What I do know is there are active communities there (Linux comes in mind) and we'd lose all that if we defederate.

I was super into the idea of lemmy.ml and actually had some extensive conversations with them and with lemmygrad when I first joined Lemmy. I didn't agree with them on practically anything, but whatever, it is fine. Then, lemmy.ml mods started deleting my comments when they decided that I was expressing the incorrect viewpoint and that viewpoint needed to be deleted to clear the way for the correct viewpoint. That's kind of a red line for me in terms of whether or not I feel like fuckin with a particular instance, and I pretty much turned my back on it.

I've literally never noticed an issue tbqh