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.
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.
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Instances we federate with must have a clearly defined moderation policy at the instance level
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Any user banning at the instance level must follow the published moderation policy
Just the basics.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
but, these communities come along with an assortment of lies and Propaganda.
So block those individual communities that post what you consider propaganda. Hell, even block the whole instance - that option is readily available to you.
At which point the negative outweigh the positive?
With a server like, say, Hexbear, this would be an easy calculation. Defederate and what does the average user miss out on? Not a whole lot. On the other hand, .ml has a wide variety of technology, open source, gaming, hobby, etc. communities that don’t even touch on politics.
I regularly visit many of them, so for me at least, it would take a lot more on the negative scale to even break even.
For sure I can block them for myself (as I have mentioned in my Post itself) but this won’t solve the Problem of policing non political Communities and injecting them also with propaganda.
To what extent is this actually an issue? What examples do you have so far?
Pardon me but have you read the Post i linked? He talked about politics, granted, but banning him from non-political Communities (in fact, ALL Communities) is completely out of proportion. And that is just for reciting established facts!
Yes I have, which is why I’m asking. While I agree that the admin response was totally out of all proportion, this is not evidence of either of the things you previously claimed.
If you’re going to justify defederation based on non-political communities being policed and injected with propaganda, you need to provide some concrete examples of that happening.
First and for most my main reason for defederation is that they straight up lie and mislead.
If you demand prove I will unblock ml again and will try to find it. I would have thought that you would have seen this yourself since you seem to be more on ml than I was.
