2025-22-08: Due to a (suspected .ml) troll spamming the comment section, you'll now need to sort the comments by "Top" to see the actual comments from users on this post.
Good job everyone blocking and boycotting .ml! It's having an effect, users are noticing and MAUs on their comms are falling!
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 !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for documentation of it or checkout this list of curated documentation
Noteworthy Selection
Full collection list at the end
Dessalines - Head .ml admin - Head Lemmy Dev
"Slava Ukraini" is considered a "Fascist slogan" - https://lemmy.world/post/36065538
"NK is actually good, and anything counter to that is Western LIES" - https://lemmy.world/post/31595035
"The BBC is not a credible news source" - https://lemmy.world/post/35824465
Showing support for Ukraine on .ml is worthy of a site ban - https://lemmy.world/post/32775563
Open declaration of support for Russia - https://lemmy.world/post/27352415
"Don't worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! - https://lemmy.world/post/30580167
Censoring criticism of China while allowing fellow "in-crowd" user "concentration camps were just reeducation camps and weren't that bad" misinfo to remain - https://lemmy.world/post/26985447
Censoring when users call out propaganda - https://lemmy.world/post/32776038 | https://lemmy.world/post/33416433 | https://lemmy.world/post/34051329 | https://lemmy.world/post/35919522
Discussing winnie the pooh and/or the negatives of china is a 30 day ban - https://lemmy.world/post/35374967
Davel - .ml admin
Spreading anti-ukraine Russian propaganda - https://lemmy.world/post/34655572
General negative sentiment to other instances who haven't "seen the way" yet - https://lemmy.world/post/27426510
"See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn't count!!" - https://lemmy.world/post/30673342
Response to a valid report of "NK is actually good" as propaganda/misinfo https://lemmy.world/post/32627834
Removal of a credible article that was on the Uyghur genocide - https://lemmy.world/post/33205310
It's totally fine when Russia kills woman and children, war is war after all - https://lemmy.world/post/33224299
Nutomic - 2nd in command Lemmy Dev
Their continued transphobia - https://lemmy.world/post/29222558
General Tankie user behaviour
"Propaganda is good actually" - https://lemmy.world/post/36162233
"The China censorship tool isnt actually censorship! And if it is, it's actually a good thing a state has that much power!" https://lemmy.world/post/30010789
Rooting for Russia in the Russia-Ukraine war https://lemmy.world/post/29274763
Spreading Russia talking points like the Ukraine invasion just being a "negotiating tactic" https://lemmy.world/post/27012640
Biden is worse than Trump - https://lemmy.world/post/33631617
Uyghur Genocide denialism - https://lemmy.world/post/33873969
Full Collection
Evidence of bans, censorship and bias to push their 'ideology'
https://lemmy.world/post/34395059
https://lemmy.world/post/32720369
https://lemmy.world/post/32298242
https://lemmy.world/post/32471440
https://lemmy.world/post/35919522
https://lemmy.world/post/32292143
https://lemmy.world/post/35254858
https://lemmy.world/post/32222856
https://lemmy.world/post/32426343
https://lemmy.world/post/32058315
https://lemmy.world/post/35919814
https://lemmy.world/post/32775892
https://lemmy.world/post/33554899
https://lemmy.world/post/33194656
https://lemmy.world/post/34502019
https://lemmy.world/post/34502777
https://lemmy.world/post/34503244
https://lemmy.world/post/35919218
https://lemmy.world/post/36120253
https://lemmy.world/post/36120386
https://lemmy.world/post/32825174
https://lemmy.world/post/32426884
https://lemmy.world/post/32191006
https://lemmy.world/post/32720652
https://lemmy.world/post/32676095
https://lemmy.world/post/32298242
https://lemmy.world/post/32292143
https://lemmy.world/post/32221990
https://lemmy.world/post/32222278
https://lemmy.world/post/32222991
https://lemmy.world/post/32223697
https://lemmy.world/post/32224698
https://lemmy.world/post/32425984
https://lemmy.world/post/31569892
https://lemmy.world/post/31368129
https://lemmy.world/post/31329952
https://lemmy.world/post/31596159
https://lemmy.world/post/30665418
https://lemmy.world/post/30876228
https://lemmy.world/post/31090903
https://lemmy.world/post/31329952
https://lemmy.world/post/31368129
https://lemmy.world/post/29490804
https://lemmy.world/post/29507466
https://lemmy.world/post/29878102
https://lemmy.world/post/29980157
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 known propaganda outlets, altered headlines and general misinfo tactics
https://lemmy.world/post/32764202
https://lemmy.world/post/32323822
https://lemmy.world/post/32283425
https://lemmy.world/post/32289824
https://lemmy.world/post/32337368
https://lemmy.world/post/30843744
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
Update 6/1/2025 - adding additional links since original post
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Update 9/20/2025 - adding additional links since last edit
Ok, I'll bite.
Here's one reason to pick one over another: Self-Consistency. In the same way as in math, a set of axioms that is internally consistent is preferable.
If it's not, feel free to clarify. You seemed to make a bunch of claims about morality then say "math isn't like that".
See above for one reason.
I'm sorry if I remain unconvinced that morality is fundamentally different from math, but it sounds like you're conflating math and science. I dont know if it's generally accepted that math is empirically derived, or what sort of experiments discovered the exponent.
Imaginary numbers?
I should have included that, since my point isn't that literally any collection of stipulations is equal but that any of the dozens of moral systems you can point to historically that are all self-consistent but strongly contradict each other, but we have no way besides preference of asserting one over the other. That is my main point and I regard the rest of my response below as basically a waste of time, but here I am anyway:
But of course there's also a category problem, because we need a mathematical system that doesn't explode in order to make calculations, and some calculations are correct and some are incorrect, and this can be observed in our attempts to apply them to real systems. Morality demands itself, but there is no external problem that it is the necessary solution for, so logical explosion is not actually a problem for it in any manner but rhetoric. So my initial claim is right, but it's rhetorically very unsatisfying and not very important, so I'm happy to drop it in favor of the concession in the previous paragraph.
I did clarify. I did make claims about morality and then say that math isn't like that, but you misrepresented the claims. I therefore reprinted my claims, which were not the same as what you said.
We don't have access to a platonic world of ideas. Math either originally came from observation or it's built into our brains (which would still make our connection to it a product of the material world via mutation and natural selection). Now that we have formalized systems, obviously we don't do math on that basis except for teaching children (i.e. they sure seem to learn about it observationally in order to build abstract systems in their minds).
I never said anything about experimentation, that is a cartoonish misrepresentation of what I said. I said empirical observation. For example, to the best of my knowledge, the first use of exponents was describing the surface area of a square with sides of the length X, or the volume of a cube with sides of the length X, i.e. squaring and cubing, based on practical and observable issues in the physical world. If you have a group of people arranged into rows of five and columns of 8, there will always be 40 people, etc. If you need to tile the floor and it has these dimensions, it needs this much tile. If you need to fill in a wall, etc.
This is why I said "most math" a couple of comments ago. To the best of my understanding -- and while I definitely know a good amount about formal logic (which I would be inclined to say is part of our brains, if you're wondering), which is a type of algebra, I'm not as knowledgeable about quantitative systems -- imaginary numbers don't exist just because some mathematicians dreamed them up, but because mathematicians have come to the conclusion that their existence is necessitated by existing systems that are grounded in other things, and help us to model and understand various real phenomena. They are not crudely observable the way numbers on the number line are, but they exist in the properties of real, physical systems. If this were not the case, they would be regarded as much more trivial than they are (but in our world, they are quite important).
Fair enough. Thank you for elaborating.
My initial point was that there's more than one plausible explanation. I am ultimately undecided, I don't understand the sheer certainty some people seem to have.
Yeah, my intention is not to have a definitive thesis on the ontology of mathematics, but just to say that it's part of material reality and that is inextricably the basis of our relationship with it and our ability to judge it, while morality does not have that reference point.