One of the mods over there is a Russian who refuses to answer whether he's pro-Russian or not, says Russian propaganda doesn't exist, pretends to be American while intensely engaging in American threads, denies Uighur genocide, etc etc etc.

https://lemmy.world/u/davel@lemmy.ml

https://lemmygrad.ml/u/davel

He has some older account where there was Russian being used but I think he may have deleted it or I just can't be arsed to look enough rn.

Anyway, one of the clearest pro-Russian trolls I've seen. Lemmy.ml is full of them, I don't know why lemmy.world federates with them.

Honestly I think the .ml folks have shown themselves to be such zealots that they should be considered a potential security threat to the broader fediverse.

The more places defederate from them, the more opportunity and initiative there will be for alternatives to their largest communities to grow.

My post criticizing China's high-speed rail network was yanked. I was surprised and immediately thought of Reddit.

Don't use lemmy.ml then?

Just to weigh in here with a bit of political nuance — "tankies" are certainly defined by their leftist politics, but moreso by their apologist defense of regimes that more or less transparently use socialist or communist maxims as a cover for state capitalism or straight out autocracy.

Tankies may be the loudest voices to claim themselves Marxist or socialist, but please don't mistake them as actually representing those ideologies truthfully or completely. Personally, I see tankies as more indebted to a cold war-style school of Soviet dogma transplanted to current autocracies. Marx and Trotsky would have rolled their eyes at either.

These are just my thoughts based on what I've read so far. Do what you will with it. This is just my general advice.

If you like a community on an instance, make friends on it. If you network with enough individuals that feel the same way about a community that you do, fork that community onto a new instance and carry on. I see others weighing in on too much control, not enough control, defederate, remove moderator or admin control from individuals that censor, ban, on lean one direction over another. You'll find these power dynamics are more prevalent or less prevalent depending on the instance you're on or communities your partipate in. If you feel strongly enough about it, be the change you want to see and determine what best course of action you should take that is within your power. Whatever you choose I hope you find or potentially create a community or instance that works best for you.

I wonder how many good, reasonable people have checked out Lemmy and seen all the CCP/Kremlin propaganda then just left.

“So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”

Dismissal of this type of criticism by just telling people to use another instance or saying "fediverse is decentralized" is unproductive, and honestly should be called out as harmful because it ignores the fact that instances when they become large enough and centralized enough, carry weight and can be extremely problematic like shown here.

A big part of dealing with these types of problems is to make people aware of them, another one is to deal with it at the instance level by defederating the problematic instances and cutting off the communities so that network effect doesn't continue to rear its ugly head. Just creating new communities isn't enough, if it was this wouldn't be the problem that it is. When people tell others to stop complaining and dismiss the criticism because the fediverse is decentralized it seems like they either don't understand the issue, or they would just rather it not be addressed.

So while many people would prefer we just leave well enough alone, that's not condusive to these problems being dealt with, people need to talk about them, and action needs to be taken.

Yes avoid .ml and hexbear and life is mostly good here.

When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.

Note, that just means you were sitebanned. This is how the software displays this.

Also !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Frankly, who cares? If you don't want to see or participate in tankie propoganda, then don't. People point out that lemmy.ml is the hub for a lot of communities, so it isn't reasonable to switch to another instance. And then they bring up communities like !Linux@lemmy.ml Guess what, Linux isn't meant to be a hub for political discourse, and for the most part, it isn't. Use lemmy.ml how you want to use it, and if you want to participate in other political leanings, go to a different instance. No one is really stopping you, and that's the whole idea of the fediverse. And there really isn't any value lost, because this isn't a "choose one and only one" situation. You've got all of the fediverse at your fingertips

So this came off a bit abrasive. But the point I want to convey is that if you want to have deep/heated political discourse, either do that on a community (and instance) suitable for it, or use an account specifically for political discussion. I think it helps everyone. The mods can referee communities with more clear boundaries, the lurkers/users don't need to worry about political debates when looking up tech support or whatever, and you (the reader/political dissident) can still enjoy your discussions with less worry about being randomly banned.