I’ve been trying to make people aware of Lemmy on discord and Mastodon, but it’s always met with resistance citing “the devs are pro authoritarianism tankies.” Kbin seems to be picking up steam because of the developer baggage.
Do you feel like this negative perception will hamstring Lemmy’s growth?
im just shooting that down outright, what about the devs or the server they run matters? as far as I can tell the software works fine, we can fork and run what we like, its a protocol not a proprietary system.
why are people saying the culture must match the devs? do you adopt the culture of all the devs that make the software you use?
do we all need to list the OS’s and software stacks we use so politics are clear?
this is silly.
I think it’s become an issue because the type of person to actively leave and protest Reddit will be sensitive, even if overly so, to issues like this.
if they can’t come to understand the nature of the opensource software that powers thier lives we might not be able to help them but we can work on messaging and education.
the tankies, if that is what they are, dont matter.
Oh I don’t disagree with you. It’s frustrating trying to explain this to this type of person though because they’re typically dead set on hating Lemmy by that point.
remember its a type of pre-poisoning thats being done there, people dont generally care until someone comes over pearls pre-clutched. We need to do better marketing mainly IMO.
RE: decentralization and control, we should likely be running forks for our instances rather than actual. There should at least be a few major forks to choose from too.
This. I grew up considering myself to be on the lunatic fringe of the left. It drove my conservative mother crazy. Then I got banned from WhitePeopleTwitter because apparently I’m a fascist.
elaborate lol
im just shooting that down outright, what about the devs or the server they run matters?
It matterd because the servers those devs run with their heavy pro authoritarian red fascist moderation and cultural bias were the two largest instances, the flagships, both by virtue of their size and their official nature. That size means they influence users’ overall experience of the lemmy network’s culture and atmosphere via posts and comments and votes, so yeah, you can sign up for a different instance and that local community won’t have that atmosphere and those moderation problems but you’re still connected in the network to the tankies and the tankies have the largest and most dominant instances so they have the most effect on the content of the network, and you can’t completely avoid them except by deferating and basically hamstringing yourself by separating from the two largest instances.
Thanks to Beehaw and especially lemmy.world though, I think this is rapidly changing and won’t be a significant problem for much longer, although there is the remaining concern that the developers’ biases will show through in how they develop the underlying lemmy server software. For instance, unlike Mastodon, right now there is no way for you as an individual to block an entire instance, and I foresee it possibly being difficult to convince the lemmy developers to allow that, since one of the hallmarks of Marxist-Leninist ideology is a focus on mass movement building where everyone is forced to interact and join this one giant movement, even with people they don’t like or can’t get a long with, which could make them hostile to allowing more freedom of association in the fediverse. I’m already seeing tankies from lemmygrad accusing instances that defederate from them of sectarianism and endangering the “movement”, in fact.
Kbin is new, the distinctions between Magazine and micro-blogging creates an extra barrier to understand the system, the few instances are straining under the load, and it’s very much in beta.
New users won’t be terribly forgiving, so I feel like Lemmy’s the better option.
I never understood why questionable views from software devs might be a problem.
- It’s not a corporation, so you’re not financially supporting tankies.
- Lots of devs don’t share your values, because everyone has different values.
It’s not like I can only use software made by people who don’t eat meat, and everyone’s doctors are partially informed by science performed by the Nazis.
I have no idea what kind of world these people think they’re living in, as if everything were developed with shared values, and a pure conscience, until Lemmy came along.
Is “Magazine” just a community/subreddit/forum? I took a quick look at Kbin and found the terminology odd. I would have expected something called a “magazine” to combine communities or something, but I couldn’t otherwise find any communities on Kbin.
Yes, a magazine is just a community or subreddit. I prefer the UI of Kbin but the terminology takes some getting used to. There’s also regular posts and microblogs.
It is. A magazine is essentially a subreddit. I too found kbin a bit confusing at first but it’s not so bad once you get used to it. One thing I really don’t like about kbin is all of your up/downvotes, boosts, magazines you’re subscribed to, etc. are exposed for everyone to see.
Thanks for the info. I had a closer look at Kbin today, and it wasn’t apparent how visible which things were. Finding info over there is also a challenge, because all documentation/help articles are pretty much aimed at admins setting up servers, which I’m not ready to do.
I’m still checking it out, though the services are all up and down, so I don’t have a full handle on it yet.
Kbin and Lemmy operate on the same network, so if somebody has a problem with that they are better off on the first platform. Or they can just host their own instance like Behaw mods do. I just wish people would finally shut up about Lemmy’s developer views, it’s a circlejerk at this point
They are better off picking another instance anyway, enough people are joining lemmy.ml at the moment. I hope that the way things have taken off during the last few days show people that Lemmy is a diverse community, just like Reddit was.
Tech geeks, political nerds, sex pests, sports fanatics, and gamers all in one room.
It’s just normal Reddit behavior. You’re not going to escape it by going to another version of Reddit.
No, it’s not a circljerk. Developer views turn into “we’ve surpassed benevolent dictatorship views”. It’s the same reason Twitter and Reddit are turning into crap - the absurd views of those in change absolutely impact the community whether we believe they don’t and it’s high time we stop shrugging it off and hold people accountable.
I hope the dev changes his views… but i’m not holding my breathe.
Development of the platform itself has nothing to do with what anyone on it actually does though. That’s the entire point. Reddit is a problem because the control is centralised in the admins who can unilaterally make mods on the site do whatever they want. Fediverse by-design is decentralised and absolutely nobody can be told what to do or forced into anything by any centralised power because none exists.
I’d argue that if the code is open source and the instances are independent, then the dev doesn’t matter beyond merely the marketing, and the marketing will be affected by the rise of larger instances, like Lemmy.world.
I think it might for a little while but not for much longer.
When the influx started, the two oldest and biggest Lemmy instances, the ones maintained by the developers, and thus presumably the flagship instances, were lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml. Tankies are definitely overrepresented in those two instances, and since the devs themselves are tankies, there’s a lot of moderation bias in favor of red fascist authoritarian regimes even in the nominally “neutral” lemmy.ml — such as them refusing to remove genocide denial or outright genocide justification, while also removing posts critical of China and so on.
You might argue that this doesn’t affect you if you just pick a different instance, because the culture of that instance will be different and so will the moderation, but the problem with that is that if the vast majority of users on a network are tankies and are moderated by tankies then that’s going to influence your experience of the network as a whole pretty much unavoidably unless you defederate with the largest instances and thereby intentionally hamstring yourself.
So even if you joined another instance, your experience of the site as a whole would be dominated by a tankie leaning culture via comments and posts, and that’s where the reputation (deservedly) came from. And it probably did and maybe still does hamper the growth a little bit. It definitely made me, a trans anarchist, think twice about joining.
However, with the more neutral and professionally-run lemmy.world taking over as the second largest and flagship instance, and beehaw as the third (iirc), as well as the overall influx of a variety of users from Reddit, I think over time the dominance of tankies in how the network is experienced by users, even from other instances, will drastically decrease, especially as many instances defederate from lemmmygrad, and so the reputation will also fade.
red fascist authoritarian regimes
Do you include Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Vietnam, Laos, Nepal, etc in that? Is there a type of “red” (marxist) that you don’t call a fascist?
Nice strawmen. Nice combative response. This is why people don’t like to interact with your instance.
Huh? I asked you a real question. You’re dodging answering it?
This is not rhetorical, I want to know whether there is any kind of marxist (those of us waving red flags and organising the trade union movement) that you do not call a fascist and whether you include all of the above countries in your assessment of “red fascism” or whether you leave any of them out. Let’s put Nicaragua and Angola in there too although I would call them quite flawed in a number of ways myself. Also the Kerala district of India, do you call that fascist?
I’m dead serious. I’m trying to understand what you are.
I admit, it was a dodge. I do lack the knowledge of these countries or regions to actually give an honest answer. But IMHO your question was not in good faith as the answer was already given:
fascist authoritarian
If any of the regimes ruling the countries you provided fall in that category, OP is against it. And it leaves me with the opinion you are just trying to put OP in a bad spot and fish for a ‘gotcha’ moment in their answers, as they (and I) do not know all the details you apparently have.
But you want to know ‘what’ I am. First, I am human. Second, this is my personal opinion and I do not speak for any group: I don’t like autocratic, totalitarian, fascistic, oppressive ways of ruling.
If people chose a ‘red’ government, and they are chosen through continued fair elections with no disingenuous means or force, all the power to them. And even if your chosen way of ruling doesn’t do elections. If people want change, and you deny them that change through force and oppression. You are wrong in my eyes.
And this isn’t just for communism, this is for all flavors of government:
- I don’t like the Nazi symbology that some Ukrainian troops are displaying. Which I recently learned through lemmygrad.ml.
- I don’t like the greed we as a human race are displaying and are allowing to be displayed. More money over people and nature should have never been allowed.
- I am not a fan of what is happening in:
- Turkey
- Russia
- Hungary
- China
- Palestine and Israel
- Saudi Arabia
- America, yes even them:
- Their voting system is too easily manipulated and is actively being exploited.
- Giving corporations too much power there is affecting the whole world.
- Turning a blind eye to their own oppression of anything socialism, their history, their patriotism that is just veiled fascism.
- I can make this list very long, I hope this is enough to bring across my point.
I always voted ‘left’ and ‘green’, which might not be the ‘red’ you wave on your flag. I am not religious, but I am hoping, wishing, and praying for any power that is willing to listen, that the people of my country would vote for a different party besides the VVD (conservative liberal) and the PVV (populist) when we will vote for our next ‘2de kamer’.
But allow me to explain my hostility: I have only been a member for a very short time. And every time I see a post come up from lemmygrad.ml the comments are filled with just degenerative and reductive comments about ‘the others’, the ‘not enlightened us at lemmygrad’. I see comments being celebrated for being banned for posting shitty pig balls as replies. I see people talking down on people for having a less ‘red’ view. I see open hostility being upvoted, while voices of temperance are being downvoted. All I see is us versus them. And them are allowed to be ridiculed and made lesser of.
Maybe it is the selective behavior of the ‘all communities’ overview: that it prefers to show the controversial topics and charged comments. But it is painting any interaction that I see on or from the lemmygrad.ml instance with in that bad light. Just like I explained my view on your question asked in the first place, and you asking ‘what’ I am like I am an object.
In conclusion: I am a human. I have my biases. These biases are fed by what I see. And I have the same bias to other instances if I see them do the same shit I have seen rise out of lemmygrad.ml.
America, yes even them
It’s weird how hating Russia is considered reflectively justified, but questioning anything about America requires all this hemming and hawing.
Like, you can’t just say that America has serious problems. You have to argue with a bunch of nationalists who might have hurt feelings and coddle the fence sitters because they don’t like your tone of voice.
Can’t help but think this is because we’re more reticent of people we’re neighbors with, while foreigners just don’t matter.
Only one of the countries you listed is a socialist country that “tankies” defend.
I listed countries that the people who accuse of being “tankies” defend. So-called tankies do not defend any of the countries you listed barring China, although we have plenty of criticisms of China as well. The only defence of Russia that we put up is that the conflict that is currently ongoing was caused by nato, and that no amount of pouring weapons into the country will save any lives, on the contrary it will in fact kill many more people. This is spun into “you support russia” by many but is an unfair characterisations of what those on the left actually believe. Yes you can probably find Z people to refute this but they are a minority. Russia is a capitalist shithole and we want to change that in the longterm just as we want to change it in every capitalist country.
If people chose a ‘red’ government, and they are chosen through continued fair elections with no disingenuous means or force, all the power to them.
What would that look like? Specifically, let us imagine a world where it is true that Cuba or the DPRK or wherever does indeed hold free and fair elections on a regular basis, but that everything else about the world was exactly as you, I assume, admit it is (such as the vicious sanctioning and libel by western powers). From where you are sitting, what would the difference be? What sort of information would you be aware of, would you receive from where you are in the world and the media you consume, that was in any way different?
The other person was calling them a supporter of fascism, no sense whining about them being “combative” when that’s a serious accusation
And I also misused straw man here as well. In hindsight, with a rested mind, I shouldn’t have listened to my primary response and instigated shit. But here we are.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not against communism. I am against the results of every experiment we have experienced so far with communism. I do recognize the way we currently run the unchecked capitalism and liberalism will also end up in authoritarianism I despise. Back to kings and fiefdoms but named companies and their CEO’s and their shadow council of shareholders.
I believe the golden road is somewhere in the middle. Where people can still choose who they want to be, free to choose how they wish to live as long it doesn’t hurt others, and enjoy the fruit of their labor. Companies are not faceless entities and everybody inside a company are held responsible for the actions they make. Where money can only buy yourself comfort, not power.
I know that is just a pipe dream. We were never able to achieve it now and never will. We humans can never hold a balance. Some people who just get a smidgen of power over others just abuse it for the thrill of it. And some won’t stop until they have everyone under their thumb. Greed, the worst human flaw of all. Even the fairest system we might ever think of will break as soon as we allow greed to fester. And greed does not care how power is collected, money, favors, goodwill, popularity. One wrong person who thinks they deserve more than the others, think they are more equal than the others, getting just that bit of power will set off a snowball that always ends in suffering of everyone except the few. Until the many revolt and bring justice to those on high.
Humanity loves their systems. Thinking of them, building them, bending them, corrupting them, and then breaking them with bloodshed. To just start the cycle again and again.
I will stop my nihilistic TED talk here. Best regards and may you find the communist utopia you seek.
Thank you for the sources.
I have some memory of you being reasonable when actually presented with arguments. I would strongly encourage you to try to actual talk to these people that you speak about in such strong pejoratives, perhaps by asking them non-presumptuous questions. I think you will find that they have more to say than you give them credit for.
The people running beehaw are extremely dishonest about this issue, citing “hate speech” as a reason for defederation with platforms that aggressively ban and remove hate speech, including the only instance I know of that actually displays pronouns with the username (Hexbear.net , which they preemptively banned).
I never encountered the term “Tanky/Tankie” until yesterday, here, on Lemmy. I’m just trying out a bunch or Reddit alternatives and some fediverse stuff. I mean, some of the founders of Reddit aren’t my kind of people, and I’ve been over there since it was founded. If they’re not doing something extremely horrible, then meh.
It’s niche political drama, and it doesn’t really affect the development of Lemmy.
It’s a silly meaningless word
I don’t think it matters. If people want to use Kbin instead, then great! It’s still a fediverse platform (even though they had to temporarily turn off federation), so we’ll still all be in the same pond.
I’ve suddenly started seeing the word “Tankie” around. WTF does it mean?
Same thing “woke” means to conservatives, except it’s used by liberals instead - absolutely anything they want it to mean in any given situation.
It’s deployed by people generally referring to any kind of marxists that have anti-imperialist politics, but I frequently see it used by liberals against even anarchists if they’re not pro-nato.
It is complete garbage, should be ignored, and the people using the word derided as cranks. Once you start to realise that their behaviour is exactly the same as the people that scream about the “woke” all the time you realise how ridiculous it is, they filter EVERYTHING through hating the “tankies” (which can mean anything in different situations remember) in exactly the same way.
A tankie is a leftist who doesn’t agree with mainstream geopolitical opinions or shows any interest in nuance
Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
It originally was used to describe Leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist. It was used originally to describe Marxist-Leninist members of the Communist Great Party in Britain who supported the use of tanks by Soviets to quell a couple of uprisings in the late 50s and late 70s. It has since evolved as a term since then to include Leftists (or maybe not even leftists anymore, it’s getting thrown around a lot now) who support similar actions in China and Russia. Usually they have an obsession with Mao and/or Stalin and China can do no wrong in their mind while claiming the western world is evil.
The term has an interesting history (to me as I’d describe myself as leftist, but I look at is as we all suck and can all improve) and Wikipedia has a decent article on it that I pulled most of this info from to double check my memory. Unfortunately they tend to be the most vocal part of leftist communities so I just tend to ignore any of them…
It originally was used to describe Leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist. It was used originally to describe Marxist-Leninist members of the Communist Great Party in Britain who supported the use of tanks by Soviets to quell a couple of uprisings in the late 50s and late 70s.
And history proved that support to be 100% correct given what those uprisings were. Have you ever actually looked at who was riling it up (gladio implanted fascists), who backed them and who was coordinating it? The US and CIA played a huge role.
It’s fucking weird that this gets brought up as some huge gotcha thing by people when the supporters have been shown to have been historically correct in their decision. It was unpopular and split a lot of parties but they were on the right side ffs read a book.
And now it’s used to describe people who ignore things like the genocide Uighur Muslims while saying things like China is so great. I actually never even mentioned the US in my brief (very brief) history of the term as it was just about why the term was there and why people are using it.
I mean, you used that reference because you are implying that shutting down those pro-capitalist counter-revolutions by literal fascists using force was a bad thing, that’s why you said “leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist”.
You’re just demonstrating that you have never actually engaged with learning about any of these events. You have the vagueist knowledge about them and only understand them within the lens of “tankies bad” instead of what actually happened during those events, why certain decisions were made, and what we have learned in the decades since they occurred that proved the supporters to be on the right side of the decisions.
No I never implied that at all (that’d be like linking the history of the word Yankee would imply that I support the British rule of the American colonies), I said here is the history of the word, which does have that history. I’m not a fan of all the shit the US does, especially the CIA. I actually never implied one thing or another besides saying where the word came from and what it’s evolved into today. I honestly have no opinion on the origin of the word, but what it’s used for today is perfect. It even fits perfectly to evoke images of the Tiananmen Square protests, which when I heard it originally is what I would have assumed it meant. Honestly getting so bent out of shape about this word is just odd to me, if you support this stuff wear it. Quit picking teams in your politics, seriously the whole “but actually the killing of those people was good because my favorite government did it” gets old whether it comes from the US or China
Of course you implied that - you WROTE IT.
You are now backtracking instead of admitting wrong, what you should be saying “you know what, you’re right I actually don’t know anything about it but I regurgitate this because I’ve seen other anti-communists regurgitate a thousand times with literally no opposition so I’ve never taken any time to properly examine events, learn about them, or critically analyse whether the accusations have weight or not”… A response that would be mature, laudable, and the sign of a person who actually wants to grow as a human being. Instead what you seem to be doing is deflecting from this and trying to segue into something else. I am asking you to properly learn about this specific event first, if you want to talk about other events then I am fine with doing that… But one at a time. This practice of bombarding people with dozens of different things at once is called Gish Gallop as is a tactic used in bad-faith to avoid any real critical engagement with the events.
insufferable
And this is why people hate talking to tankies on the internet, you constantly rely on whataboutism and twisting everyone’s words. I’ve never even said I’m anti-communist ever, literally just said that I don’t support the actions taken by China and Russia when it comes to killing innocent people. I even said in my first comment I’m leftist, it’s fine though, you really should read that Gish Gallop article you linked better.
No I never implied that at all
Emphasis mine
It originally was used to describe Leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist.
Get out of here with that bad faith nonsense
AFAIK It’s people who are pro-russia/china and vocal about it.
Gotta wonder how people like you describe White Nationalism…
no because no normie knows what a tankie is
I literally just found out what that word means because of Lemmy
The users from certain other instances are talking about it nonstop and trying to make it a wedge issue, so it’s not surprising
To be fair, while they might not know the term, encountering someone unironically defending North Korea or such probably would still make one uneasy.
Sadly, it will. People are too used of the whole “administratives of the product I consume represent me”.
Federated applications (and open source for that matter), don’t really have an “owner”, nor a CEO. Yeah the devs may have some questionable opinions, but at the end of the day the software is free as in freedom for everyone to use as they please, the only thing they can control is their own instance. Just join another and block theirs if you like.
LOL wait til you hear about the political views of the devs of other social media sites. At least you know the moderation will b strict ;)
Probably but it’s a non issue for me. Don’t interact with it and move on. There’s shitty people in every facet of life.
I think I was having a quality discussion with some “tankies” last night about politics and philosophy. Not really sure what their thoughts on ccp were exactly as it was more a broad discussion.
I don’t condone authoritarianism. Hell I don’t condone most govt systems lol.
as opposed to what? pro authoritarianistic capitalists?
fuck big money and reddit/twitter/etc is the bigger money
It doesn’t help, but i don’t see it as a massive problem. the project is decentralised, free and open source, so as long as that codebase is open and you can choose to join a server instance that doesn’t federate with the more extreme groups it’s fine.
The influx has led to a big increase in contributors to the codebase, more moderators, and there are no central admins to worry about due to the way the network works, so it would be effectively impossible for them to censor unrelated communities.
I’m pretty auth-left on a lot of topics but those guys are crazy, they’re the far-left equivalent of far-right conspiracists and cant be reasoned with.
Well, if the people around you are more interested into left-shaming for supporting an open to everyone technology (You should remember them that Truth Social is a shameless fork of mastodon code) than trying to understand the true « free speech » potential of Lemmy / Mastodon, maybe you should move on and find some more suitable friends.
Since the pandemic I kicked off those « I’m not political but » people of my life and I’m way happier now.
Doesn’t really help with the reputation among non-users, but I found myself much more comfortable with the platform and seeing dramatically less of the “Mao did nothing wrong” kind of extreme views once the instance I joined decided to defederate lemmygrad, maybe recommend an instance that does that? Lemmy.ml is also kinda concerning but at least there the typical user isn’t really much of a problem, it’s just the moderation policy there, so I just try to avoid the politics and news communities from that instance.
In the long run, I imagine that some instances will just end up setting up their own forked versions, I know the owner of my instance has been talking about doing that although i don’t really know how that’s going or how likely such a thing is to work out.
