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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
The developers who created Lemmy are leftists, and they run the lemmy.ml instance. The lemmy.ml (.ml is for Mali, btw) domain was allegedly chosen because ML can also stand for Marxist-Leninist.
I'm not an expert on the subject, but lemmy.ml users are known for being tankies. People don't like that.
However, some of you whipper snappers don't know that those of us with really old accounts joined back when lemmy.ml was the most popular instance. I just like FOSS things.
Edit: added "allegedly"
I'm on ML because it is the dev's instance, that's it. Also, I dislike how .world is run.
.ca is a bit more sane and not as authoritarian as .world or .ml. I don't mind .world, but their admins are inconsistent, IMO
Yeah, and them being trigger-happy with the ban hammer is why Lemmy exists at all today. All Reddit alternatives back then were Nazi hotpots, because pretty much only folks who got banned from Reddit joined the alternatives (and back then, Reddit moderation primarily concerned itself with Nazis).
They would show up on dev.lemmy.ml, too, and "just ask questions", like if an immigrant did a certain crime, would you want them deported?
These questions served no point other than to drive the conversation tone to the right.
And yeah, I was glad that the admins were always vigilant about that and immediately banned anyone asking such 'questions', even if it may have thrown legitimately curious folks under the bus, because it allowed proper conversations to exist.
Of course, I have survivorship bias. I don't concern myself with China or Russia nearly enough to have specific opinions about them.
But when someone is not being intentionally intolerant, I am of the opinion that talking to them is worth it and the only way to help center opinions which one might perceive as extreme.
But well, I also don't concern myself with my admins nearly enough to have specific opinions about their opinions either. I don't have to agree with everything they think, just because I'm on their instance, so I don't care nearly as much as some other folks here.
Also a lot of people just join a random popular instance at the start before looking into political shit like this, and they don’t want to switch later on.
At this point I'm not sure if they are tankies, or whether they've just been called tankies by people who call all leftists tankies.
My words. We arent done justice
I cannot support an instance where criticism of countries like North Korea or Venezuela is sanctioned with 30 day bans, even defending the Russian invasion of Ukraine is tolerated. I love open source software and it breaks my heart, but I completely blocked .ml after multiple incidents I witnessed or was part of in the news and worldnews communities.
Also I cannot really understand the argument of having an "old account". All it means on Lemmy is having a year and a month in your profile. It is even a good idea to switch your account from time to time to stay more anonymous.
Okay, so for some context .ml is run by the Lemmy devs and the devs are openly tankies (authoritarian communists). .ml, along with Lemmygrad (also run by the devs) and Hexbear are known as the Tankie Triad. While not as bad as the other two, .ml still has a lot of tankies compared to instances that aren't part of the triad. Additionally, .ml used to be the recommended instance (until .world came along), making it one of the more populated instances. Most other instances defederate with Lemmygrad and Hexbear, but not necessarily .ml.
Basically, there's a lot of extremely opinionated and often combative people there and provoking them (intentionally or not) is very easy.
That's my understanding of the situation anyway.
As someone brand new to Lemmy I'm now learning a lot of horrible new info on myself based on arbitrarily signing up for a random instance.
I didn't realize I was supposed to psychically know about lemmy lore before ever using it.
Please understand that plenty of us do not judge people based on instance at all. I genuinely don't care.
there's always going to be this stigma against .ml users due to how the .ml instance was formed and how the general userbase behaves.
the good news is that you are always free to switch instances if you find out that you dislike the instance you are currently on. while your posts, comments, and "karma" won't transfer, you can transfer everything else such as the communities you follow, your settings, and your blocklist.
FWIW, I left .ml after about a year (and around a month ago) because there were just enough threads shit flinging and just enough posts like below, and just enough people who would dismiss any argument based on seeing .ml that it annoyed the shit out of me.
Not for how anyone at .ml ever treated me. (And FTR I'm not a communist)
So I'd say how much you worry about it is up to you, but switching instances is also pretty easy.
Basically, .ml Tankies (I don't consider all .ml users to be Tankies just because they're a .ml users) are authoritarian ~~bootlickers~~ “communists” pretending not to be who routinely deny the human rights violations of the CCP/Russia and hold them up as the gold standard. They refuse to recognize China, Russia and even NK as being authortarian regimes or if they do, its OK/Neccessary because it takes down the west/capitalism. If you have a historical fact that puts any of those countries in a bad light, they’ll probably deny it happend or is just “western propganda.”
So they believe and spread things like the Russia narratives on Ukraine (When it happened they were parroting the whole “special military operation” thing, the current thing is that it was “just a diplomatic maneuver to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table”)
Hex and Grad are very in your face about it, but .ml tends to be more subtle, often opting instead to remove dissenting comments and ban users before letting threads get out of control. So, as a result many instances defed from those 2.
.ml is run by the head Lemmy devs who are, unfortunately, hardcore Tankies themselves and tend to enforce the Tankie mindset throughout with more subtlety through mod/admin action. Or allowing known propaganda outlets to fester
You can check out !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works if you want to see some documentation of their actions, words and censoring. What I've linked here is but a mere sampling of what's been collected there
^ This is the most accurate explanation. I was on .ml for quite a while before I realized the pattern that any time I criticized Russian attacks or war crimes, I got downvoted and brigaded. Any time I promoted Ukraines right to defend itself I got downvoted and brigaded. Often my posts were removed. Try to mention tienamen square there ;-). They will come troll threads on other instances from time to time too. I just block them these days and refuse to subscribe to any .ml communities.
(Takes a deep breath, clears mind, gets into character)
This meme format is a product of capitalism, posted to a capitalist instance, and you should be ashamed. Instead of posting an image of a capitalist pig, why aren't you out in the streets burning shit down??/? There's no good capitalist. If you're not out in the streets overthrowing capitalism and burning everything down, RIGHT NOW, you're part of the problem! Rabble Rabble Rabble, guillotines, violence violence violence.
In a nutshell, anyway. Or at least that's how it was from users there on every 3rd post/comment before my instance finally defederated.
The main problem is that any criticism of China is met with an instant ban, as per "Rule 1, 2".
Their ideology is inconsistent with their rhetoric. They do support capitalism and billionaires if it's anti-west. I just poke a bit here and there with a bit of warning that it's not east vs west but rather it's rich vs poor.
They are, in reality, bitch-made invertebrates who don’t even have the arm-strength to lift their Molotov-sippy-cups out of their premium-outdoor-brand backpacks, let alone form meaningful opinions on economics, political philosophy, or geopolitical reality.
Many (not all) ml users are fairly rabid when it comes to their own flavor of propaganda. If you ever casually chat with them on Lemmy, just understand that they have a completely different world view so don't mention things related to politics, country borders, history, government structure, major battles during WW2, sparrow populations or what color the sky is and you should be fine.
Because even as the Earth burns and the Fascists march directly due to the capitalist's class conquest, domination, and occupation, even many Americans who believe themselves to be politically leftwing think they can dunk on socialists and communists for their "silly" ideologies based in social cooperation and mutual social benefit where... Gasp... You can't grind yourself to death under the toxic aspiration of attaining immoral levels of wealth to live larger than is reasonable within the finite shared habitat known as Earth.
They of course conveniently forget all the military actions the US has taken over the last century to destabilize nations that wanted to become such societies in order to keep their resource markets open to our capitalist's exploitation.
Oh, and get ready for the hottest summer of your life... So far! 🔥🌎🔥
Socialism works in theory, but in practice they have not solved the problem of CIA death squads murdering their leaders and fomenting a coup.
A few kinda solved it, namely Soviet Union and Cuba. And libs will never forgive them for it.
The problem is .ml’s rules are inconsistent. Criticism against China is put under the rule “be respectful”, but you can criticise any other nation or group, except for maybe Hezbollah.
If they would just write it in the rules, like they did on their old PeerTube instance PeerTube.social, I wouldn’t mind.