For all your boycotting needs. I’m sure there’s some mods caught in lemmy.ml’s top 10 that are perfectly upstanding and reasonable people, my condolences for the cross-fire.
- !memes@lemmy.world and !memes@sopuli.xyz. Or of course communities that rule.
- !asklemmy@lemmy.world
- !linux@programming.dev. Quite small, plenty of more specific ones available. Also linux is inescapable on lemmy anyway :)
- !programmer_humor@programming.dev
- !world@lemmy.world
- !privacy@lemmy.world and maybe !privacyguides@lemmy.one, lemmy.one itself seems to be up in the air. !fedigrow@lemm.ee says !privacy@lemmy.ca. They really seem to be hiding even from another, those tinfoil hats :)
- !technology@lemmy.world
- Seems like !comicstrips@lemmy.world and !comicbooks@lemmy.world, various smaller comic-specifc communities as well as !eurographicnovels@lemm.ee
- !opensource@programming.dev
- !fuckcars@lemmy.world
(Out of the loop? Here’s a thread on lemmy.ml mods and their questionable behaviour)
But that’s what’s happening now? They broke their own rules - not merely removing comments, but also mass-banning from communities people have never commented in before, and then deleting the mod log entries afterwards. The former is not ideal but expected, the middle is… extremely excessive and warrants all of this right there alone, but the latter bumps the whole matter up significantly to be outright disingenuous, so that “that side” making its case is no longer expected to yield any results, given the not only manipulative but outright deceptive practices that have been (allegedly) proven.
I do worry about the use of a pejorative term though. In thinking about it more, I waffle back and forth between it should never be done, vs. whether someone can “earn” that badge not by holding a belief but by their actions?
We should definitely respect their contributions to the code and actually I would guess that they may legit believe that what they are doing (supporting China by suppression of alternate viewpoints, using any means necessary including ones that violate and abuse their own code of conduct) is right. But that does not make it so.
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If you hear of an instance that has defederated from them, I would be interested to know. Otherwise, this OP at least seems to be helping prepare people for that eventuality even if not yet happening now.
So moderating their instance?
Where’s the evidence for this? I didn’t see that in the original post.
You are correct that it is not in the OP wording itself, but it came out as part of the discussion i.e. it is in the comment section if you want to read through that.
It is now getting significantly harder to find the comments I saw originally as lemmy’s UI decides now to hide comments by default, bc there are so very many on that thread, but to get you started, one is https://lemmy.world/comment/10461570, and another is https://lemm.ee/comment/12369094.
Even if the former issue was the result of that new feature being tested out on Lemmy.ml first (and perhaps having bugs causing issues with the mod log), the other issue remains that the modding in such occurrences is accused of being rather… “over-zealous”. As in why remove someone from a meme community, if they merely made a comment about China in a political community somewhere else on the same instance? What does someone being (potentially) incorrect in their facts have to do with being able to interact with people in a meme community that they have (reputedly) never commented in even so much as once? (presumably they must have interacted with it somehow, according to the wording of the new mod feature, so probably they did vote)
I agree that if that happened (which I dont have the time nor the nerve atm) its very scary.
Most likely, as always on the internet, the truth is they have certain beliefs which are problematic and triggering, and they are programmers, not weathered social workers who can solve heated conflicts.
And then comes the most important part: they have not engaged in these alleged practices all the time so it is likely that bad coincidences came together and brought on the perfect storm on them/us.
I stand by my initial statement. We can condemn the actions, we can harshly disagree on ideology but we should refrain from dehumanizing them.
Have a good one. :)
Well, more to the point, it’s too late for us to test this all now. We’d have to spin up our own instances, watch all of the signals coming out, and compare those signals to what they used to be vs. then become. As someone did - with screenshots demonstrating the before vs. after. But we cannot now go back in time to confirm that particular instance, we’d have to catch a future occurrence.
Unless you meant the mass removals - but people have been complaining about that for quite awhile now iirc? This is not an isolated incident, by any means. For months now I have been defending Lemmy.ml to various random commenters across the Fediverse, citing how different it is from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net (and truthfully, the situation is quite different, here being isolated more if not exclusively to the admins), but lately I have given up b/c the collective weight of all of these actions seems indefensible to me now, as a pattern of behavior.
I actually have compassion for them - as you say they are programmers not social workers, and if they truly want their goals of FOSS acceptance and socialist world-views to be exported around the world, then they are working against their own goals but do not see that. Put another way, they may truly believe the local Chinese propaganda, but in order to export their ideals to a global audience, it needs to be tempered with a greater mix of acceptance that people exposed to more Western-style media are accustomed to (where we are allowed to watch things like videos rather than be forced to read state-sponsored bulletins telling us what to believe).
But anyway, the removal reason is far from the point - it is the manner of the removal that concerns us so greatly. But sure, start up a dialog with them if you wish - you sound like a good person to initiate such, since you go to lengths to understand their POV:-).
Btw do you have any suggestions as an alternative to “tankie”? I am not 100% convinced that it is fully “dehumanizing”, but I do see where it is somewhere along the spectrum towards that goal. Would “fascist” or “authoritarian” work better?