In advance, this is NOT a complain, but just myself looking for some opinions, views and experiences around this topic. Also, the screenshot is marked as NSFW because it contains language that might be sensible for some people (and that's also present one time in the post itself).
I'll start it short: I've just been banned for 14 days from the memes community on the official Lemmy instance (!memes@lemmy.ml).
Why?
Apparently, just critizicing chinese state and authoritarism in front of some China's authoritarism deniers (and, maybe, some CCP infiltrators [I have to I must clarify that the latter is just my speculation, but the possibility is not zero and does not seem low, and as a hypothesis I think it is sufficiently solid]), it seems like pointing up chinese's government authoritarian character is sinophobia and "not being sufficiently polite" (as it shows in their modlog).
Censorship and FLOSS
This raises me a concern. I can't say that happens in all of Lemmy.ml communities or that's anything that they are condoning that; I understand that they give autonomy to the moderators of each community and everything else, and I also do not want to attack the moderators of that community with this, or anything similar. But, seeing that I have already seen several similar cases being reported throughout the Threadiverse, and that the majority of the Fediverse tends to the left (which is not necessarily bad either, I myself am center-left), I have noticed a growing radicalization and a growing polarization within the Fediverse, and that worries me because that was exactly one of the things that attracted me to it, outside of the obvious fact that it is Free, not proprietary like shit in Silicon Valley.
And with that, I increasingly notice a greater spiral of silence here. I've been lurking on Lemmy for quite some time, but I only recently created my account on Disroot when I felt ready to start socializing and I felt like I understood the fediquette well enough, but being banned for not thinking the same as the rest of the pro-Chinese people there doesn't give me a good taste in my mouth; It doesn't bother me so much that they insult me (in fact, they can do it all they want, I'll just laugh in their faces and move on xD) and that they don't let me express myself freely, especially when I live in a country where freedom of expression is a luxury and there is a humanitarian crisis of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of political prisoners and tens of thousands of deaths for precisely that reason.
I really can't say that they want to censor me since it is one of my first interventions there and it is the first time they have banned me, it would be drawing conclusions too hastily, but I am still worried about this ideological homogenization. Mainly due to the asymmetrical application of that rule, since I never insulted or denigrated anyone and they constantly did. Probably the only failure that would justify a ban is the fact that I wished the death of all the politicians and governments in the world, but it is difficult not to do so when my country is hell on Earth and I can barely trust in any of them. What raises my concern more than anything is the fact that they do it without even having notified me beforehand (really, I never received a notification where they warned me, or any warning, or anything like that, and I have moderator notifications activated by all means in my client, not a message, nothing like that), which makes me feel very arbitrary, especially when they only vaguely mention "Rule 1" in the moderation logs.
I would like to know what you think; Is it just my paranoia and trauma, or is there really a culture of conformism that tends to silence ideas that are foreign to their ideological views, creating a spiral of silence?
Yes, I was thinking about the broader discussion; targeting more .ml because that is where it is most visible, but it is not as if it does not happen in other instances or even in other Fediverse spaces; I had to go to fsebugout, poast and veenus.art on Pleroma for the same thing, and I'm doing pretty much the same thing on Fediverse in general. It's a shame how it's evolving, even if in theory you can just migrate to another instance or create your own, it won't actually be a solution if everyone defederates from your instance and then you isolate yourself, because that will create another echo chamber on your side; That's how 4chan started and that's how any tabloid starts.