Dear Admins and Users of lemmy.world,

I am writing to express my concerns about the impact of lemmy.ml on our community. It has come to my attention that lemmy.ml frequently disseminates propaganda and engages in historical revisionism. Moreover, there have been instances where their admin privileges were used to suppress dissenting views, reminiscent of the already defederated lemmygrad instance.

While personal blocking of lemmy.ml is an option, it does not address the broader issue of new users potentially being influenced by misleading content. It is crucial that we protect our users from a continuous stream of biased information.

To illustrate these concerns, I have provided a link to a detailed post on the Fediverse that documents these issues comprehensively [Here].

Given these points, I urge the admins to consider a defederation from lemmy.ml. If their users wish to remain part of Lemmy.ml, that is entirely acceptable, but we should take steps to prevent the propagation of harmful misinformation, especially in their comment sections.

Thank you for your consideration.

  • Alice@hilariouschaos.com
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    6 months ago

    Ok so I’m no one here and not on the .world team.

    So don’t take what I’m saying personally or anything bc I’m not meaning it in any kind of angry or combative way. Not trying to argue with you or anyone.

    I’m not of the same beliefs that .ml or the developers are. So I guess you can say you and I agree that yea their messed up I get it.

    But that’s the issue with the whole fediverse thing. Even though I do agree with you about .ml

    People are allowed to do whatever they want and believe whatever they want. That’s not up to you. Don’t Take that as an attack, I’m not meaning it as one.

    Think of it this way:

    It’s like .ml making this post but about your personal beliefs (they probably already do)

    OR

    let’s pretend lemmy was heavily conservative instead of liberal making this exact post. You’d think wtf ?

    You get what I’m saying ?

    But that’s not up to them to get what I’m trying to say ? Yea it’s fucked up but ppl are allowed to believe whatever they want. Even if what they believe is shitty. The thing is, one person doesn’t and shouldn’t get to make that call for everyone else.

    No one person knows what’s best for everyone

    • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
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      6 months ago

      let’s pretend lemmy was heavily conservative instead of liberal making this exact post.

      I think you misunderstand the issue, so as you mentioned conservative, let’s illustrate it with an analogy.

      The situation with lemmy.ml right now, and apologies for the reddit analogy, is the equivalent if on reddit the batshit crazy mods of formerly /r/the_donald or /r/conservative could ban you from /r/linux because you said something bad about Trump on /r/memes. At that point it’s not about dissenting opinions, it’s about them wielding power they shouldn’t have over those dissenting people.

      An instance that operates like that shouldn’t be part of mainstream lemmy and host general purpose communities. The only way to take that power from them is to shun them, i.e. defederate.

    • Eheran@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I could agree with you if they would not specifically suppress anyone not agreeing with them. That is the big issue, meaning that anyone there only sees that one side of everyone agreeing with their nonsense, with no chance to get out.

      And we absolutely know that making shit up is not good for people and where that can lead to. It does not need to be "best’, just not the absolute worst.

      • Alice@hilariouschaos.com
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        6 months ago

        Unfortunately though… that is lemmy though dude. That’s what I’m trying to say.

        It’s by design. That’s how and why the fediverse is the way it is. It’s stupid yes I don’t agree with it either. But that is the truth.

        Echo chambers. That’s how they want it.

          • Alice@hilariouschaos.com
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            6 months ago

            So…you think youre in charge of what everyone gets to believe 🤔

            Get the fuck outta here 🤣

              • Alice@hilariouschaos.com
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                6 months ago

                Someone who believes they should control what others believe and think by managing social media typically exhibits *authoritarian or controlling tendencies, and have developmental issues such as a lack of empathy, an overdeveloped sense of superiority, authoritarian personality traits, insecurity and control issues, poor socialization, low emotional intelligence, cognitive rigidity, and moral absolutism

                That ends up leading to a problematic worldview where they feel justified in imposing their beliefs on others undermining individual autonomy and stifling diversity of thought.

                That type of developmental background results in poor interpersonal relationships and ultimately harming societal harmony and personal freedoms.

                Might wanna seek mental assistance

  • steventhedev@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Calling to defederate merely on the basis of political opinion might be premature. However, I suspect defederation will happen for legal reasons: they host users who openly support terrorist organizations designated as such by the EU. LW is subject to Dutch law - hosting such content is more of a gray area than CSAM, but still very much illegal in most countries.

    The reason I’m not pushing here with examples is because I have not yet contacted the mods/admins to remove said content. They may have simply not been aware and I’ll give them that chance. But even seeing that content has a chilling effect on users who would contribute - even in unrelated communities.

    • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 months ago

      Like in the other comment, it’s not their view on politics what is the problem. Its that they straight up lie. They try to rewrite history and deny well established facts. And if you try to call them out, they lie even more and ban you.

  • Kabe@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    There are some good points here, but I think defederation should always be a last resort and especially so in this case, given that we are talking about lemmy.ml here.

    Since it was the former flagship server (in activity, at least) before LW came along, there are still many thriving, non-political communities hosted there. To cut them all off would be a net-negative to the average Lemmy user, I would argue.

    That’s not to say that I agree with the actions of the .ml admins, or think that opening a dialogue with them about moderation policies isn’t a great idea, of course; I just think it’s overall a better approach to let the individual user figure out for themselves which communities/instances they want to engage with and which ones they want to avoid.

    • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 months ago

      there are still many thriving, non-political communities hosted there

      And that, in fact, is my main concern with ml. They have lots of communties which are non-political for sure but, these communities come along with an assortment of lies and Propaganda. At which point the negative outweigh the positive?

      And even in the non-political Communities your comments gets censored when they are not on line with their views.

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Not only are they heavily censoring content and comments, they do it at the database level so there’s no mod log of the events, and users are unaware that their content has been removed.

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    6 months ago

    I think dissenting views is helpful in a community, even crazy psychotic and editorialized views.

    If instances defederate just because they have different viewpoints is going to get really lonely in the fediverse.

    A more generalized rules of cooperative federation would be a better solution then doing a case by case debate. I.e.

    • Instances we federate with must have a clearly defined moderation policy at the instance level

    • Any user banning at the instance level must follow the published moderation policy

    Just the basics.

    • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 months ago

      It’s not that their views are diffrent they straight up lie. And if you call them out, you get banned from all communitys and silenced in any way possible.

    • Ibaudia@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      They do not have a clearly defined moderation policy, they are flagrantly banning any dissenters to their political views from communities unrelated to the posts in question. Allowing them to grow more power in the space by keeping them federated with other large instances is a bad thing imo.

  • Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    I’m with roflmasterbigpimp here because I mean look, strongly-worded letter format

    This guy fucks

  • Ibaudia@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I also got banned from all communities on .ml that I had participated in after making a joke about how Tienanmen Square was like a glue trap for tankies. Really bad image for Lemmy. Considering we’re growing as a community, I don’t see why we should allow authoritarians to participate. Allowing that will just ingratiate their standards into the culture of the platform.