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?
Not exactly but Lemmy.ml is run by the devs so it's quasi-official. When I first joined you virtually had to participate with Lemmy.ml because most of the communities were there. Thankfully now there is more diversity and you can avoid it without missing out on too much.
Calling .ml the “Official” instance is a disservice in my opinion.
Yes, I only called them that way as a saying, and because in practice they operate as a de facto one, similar to how mastodon.social holds the title in Mastodon.
I searched and found only one single comment in the entire Threadiverse to the term "Lemmy official". It had no upvotes.
A search instead for "official instance" reveals many comments saying that it is not an official instance. So saying that it is an official instance is disinformation, easily disproven by spending roughly two seconds looking it up.
Probably you meant it as a tongue-in-cheek meta-commentary, but those of us who are too unintelligent to be able to read your exact thoughts can only glean information from what you actually shared with us? This detracts from your very real point when you interject your own biases, without a clear distinction - like a /s would have gone a long way there, but especially for the title, you would have gotten better responses if you had just left that phrase out entirely. Sometimes life isn't about IQ, it's about wisdom, specifically knowing when not to do something.
What is more relevant is that the instance is used for testing new code prior to deployment across the rest of the Lemmy instances. Except even then there are so many loopholes and caveats, the top one being that PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, and soon(-ish?) flarum all exist on the Threadiverse alongside Lemmy, but also several instances barely ever update their codebase and/or otherwise have an extraordinarily heavy modification process (e.g. beehaw.org, Lemmy.World and Hexbear.net). As one of the comments in my second link explains:
In short, read more before speaking if you want a higher quality discourse, and also show concern enough for others to speak your mind clearly and succinctly. Otherwise people will simply ignore the noise and move on.
As I said before, I just said it as a saying, no malice intended, and as I said too, they're de facto similar to mastodon.today, so that's why I called them so. I could be more clear and specific? Of course, but I don't have infinite mental—and mental too—energy, and I didn't had sufficient of it at that moment. You shouldn't thus make hasty conclusions about the intentions or thoughts of another person. You can of course ask for more details if you want, but you're not about to know the circumstances under something was wrote or said—in my case, I was hugely tired so I hadn't time nore energy to lose 30 minutes of my life searching on internet for something that at the very end isn't really important to the point of my post.
About the IQ, where I said something about that? I don't really understand where do you take that from; I never boasted about any of that, you can read my post again so you can see that I never made any comments about my IQ or anyone else's. It's taken totally out of nowhere.
And about your disinformation claims, that's defamation and I feel (although of course I can't say for sure, so I won't affirm or deny anything about it) that there is some kind of malice behind it, because again, as I mentioned before, you are completely going around the bush, taking a lot of things out of context and inventing others, and on top of that exaggerating something that is not even the point of the post and at most is a stupid mistake due to oversight, without even trying to take the context into account.
As an explanatory note, it's nothing against you, it's just a defense of how I expressed myself; I'm trying my best to be civil, cordial and respectful—as much as I can—, and I ask you to be reciprocal on that.