Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don’t find appealing (there’s even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).
We don’t want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
Because basically, everyone got scared from them being communists/socialists and just decided to defederate from them.
It’s nothing more than fear based on years of propaganda pushed by western countries, nothing more. They don’t defederate from anyone, yet everyone feels the need to defederate from them. Yes, they do have leftist views, they do think the world of many current and ex communist leaders, but if you don’t like that, you can just block their communities 🤷.
Other than that, their communites are mostly like everyone else’s, politics, memes, piracy, comics, etc. They even have a few LGBTQ+ dedicated communities and about 20% of them are LGBTQ+ acording to a recent demographic survey they had (you can find it in their main community), so… basically, they’re human, just like the rest of us.
Many of them are well informed, not to mention highly educated, so I can see why there is fear amongst other instances - a debate starts, most people will flop regarding info, facts, whatever, they’ll have the upper hand in the debate, so why actually try and listen to what they’ve got to say, they’re just tankies anyway - defederate 🤷.
If you don’t like their communities, just block them, no need to defederate from them… at least I can’t see a reason.
I don’t know why you’re insisting people who don’t like lemmygrad are anti-communists. Not all communists are pro-stalin tankies.
And not all liberals are pro war advocates… but some are.
Just because they like him, doesn’t mean they admire everything he did. The idea behind the USSR, yes, not the war crimes he commited. And there are war crimes on both sides of the fence, not just on Stalin’s side, yet they go unrecognized in history. If we villanize, let’s villanize both sides, not just one.
Sure! Fuck all war criminals, including the ones you seem to like defending. Listen, maybe people defederated lemmygrad because they “hate communists”, or maybe they fully understand their position, and find it objectionable on its own merits. I would, unambiguously, never say I liked a war criminal. If I found out somebody was a war criminal, I would stop liking them. I don’t want to be around people who like war criminals, either. To me, that either means they don’t know about the war crimes, or they’re kinda okay with the war crimes, and either option is bad.
The US took every rocket scientist from Nazi Germany after WWII and didn’t let any one of them get tried in Nimmberg for their war crimes, threatening with sanctions if anyone tried to portray them as criminals 😒.
I don’t like war crimes and criminals as well, but there are crimes on both sides, not just one. Just because one of them is pretty good at hiding, minimizing and justifying theirs, doesn’t mean they’re lesser crimes or that they didn’t happen.
Then you should probably stop liking half the US leadership, historically of course, cuz most of them have done things that can be catagorized as war crimes. They’re just really good at hiding or minimizing them.
If you don’t like them, that’s fine, block the communities. Defederating from them is not the answer IMO. And I will probably move to kbin because of this defederation BS.
Again. I DO hate all war criminals. I DON’T think US leadership is good. I am familiar with the numerous crimes of the American empire and find them objectionable on their own merits. I thought my comment above made it clear, but simping for any war criminal is icky, and if “both sides” have committed war crimes, then I want to be on NEITHER side. If genocide is part of your political strategy, you suck, and your politics sucks.
I don’t wanna be on neither side as well. I don’t agree with whatever attrocities one side or another did.
But let’s face it, the US does something, gets news coverage like “meeeh, it’s what they do, what can you do 🤷”, a communist country does the same and it’s “evil tankies! 😠”.
The inequality of how things are viewed is what bothers me. They all did unspeakable things, no doubt there and I don’t deny that they did. But just because someone is far left or far right, doesn’t necessarily make them evil. Not to mention that you can actually learn some really useful things and get some valuable info regarding certain subjects, as well as interpretations regarding certain events. I would rather have the option to view whatever I like with only 1 account, not have to have 3, 4, 5 because this instance or that instance decided to defderate from whatever.
That’s why I say that blocking works. You don’t like something? Block it. Defederation is stupid to say the least.
I mean, the people calling people tankies are usually anarchists. Not really the same people as cable news organizations lol. Most modern anarchists are highly critical of countries generally, and their own country specifically. At least from my experience, alot of mutual aid orgs and other explicitly anarchist movements in the US reject the premise that the land beneath their feet even BELONGS to the US government.
I guess I understand the backlash, but defederation IS blocking, its just community wide blocking. Some people don’t want to have to manage whether they’re exposed to certain content, they’d rather have their community do it for them. At least for me, beehaw has been pretty open about the conditions of why they defederated from certain instances (and why they are organizing development of more granular moderation tools, so they don’t feel like they have to). Maybe you can argue they are motivated by a sinister desire to restrict access, but at least from my perspective that isn’t a convincing argument. Certain communities want certain things, some may want unfettered access to everything the internet has to offer, but honestly? That ain’t me. I have other accounts on other platforms for that. Sometimes I don’t want to hear why the North Korean state is actually just responding to western aggression, or that trans people should die, or whatever else. Sometimes I do, I consume lots of media from people who I fundamentally disagree with, but that shit stresses me out sometimes. Do I think that lemmygrad is even primarily composed of people who think that way? No. But the admins of beehaw have been pretty clear about what they want out of their community, and as of right now, they don’t have the tools to moderate the influx of people coming over from other instances and being trolls, or not behaving according to the standards they have in place.
Just as a last note, though, I think that alot of the discourse about why defederation is bad is kinda philosophically at odds with the goals of the Fediverse to begin with. Remember, defederation is part of the structure of the Fediverse for a reason, and its partly because it gives autonomy to communities to decide what it is they want to do. Centralized platforms where one authority dictates what is and isn’t appropriate have been going through controversies about that for a WHILE now, and the solutions they come up with are often dogshit. The Fediverse makes these sorts of disagreements fundamentally MORE solvable than any preexisting platform, and with outcomes that mean the people affected have alternatives if they disagree with a decision. Honestly, I think this is a holdover from platforms like reddit, where admin decisions affect EVERYBODY and nobody really has a different place to go.
I think that you can think that YOU want to only block people and never defederate and also respect that other folks don’t necessarily want the same thing. That’s your choice. But if you join an instance that doesn’t moderate its users and that instance can post without limitation on instances like beehaw, which do have moderation standards, defederation is like… the only way that we currently have to stop assholes from brigading or being weirdos. Lemmy isn’t a public square, it isn’t the “front page of the internet”. Its like a community hall, or a political rally, or a convention center. Different instances have different standards, and some instances don’t necessarily want to have an open hallway connecting their Pride Parade to a KKK rally. Or, in a more nuanced example, if you’re hanging out with your friends somewhere, maybe you find someplace quiet and out of the way so you can chat privately. I just think giving people and communities more power in how they live their online lives, allowing them to do whatever they want, whenever they want? That’s just objectively BETTER than some corporation forcing you to stay in the same room as everybody else.
I dunno. You can do what you want. But I just really don’t think you need to be getting mad at other people somewhere else doing something you don’t like. Like… too bad lol. It ain’t your business. You can’t do anything about it, and nobody should be able to do anything about it. Embrace the chaos. Find where you want to be.
To be honest, the whole reddit thing didn’t affect me one bit, I never modded anything, never used 3rd party apps, always used the official app. I just thought that, yes, this does seem like a good idea, I don’t do any of those things, but apparently, a lot of people do and they like using those apps/tools, so, yeah, I’ll try this new thing, it’s opens source, it’s federated, no big brother hanging over your sholder… turns out, for my needs, it’s worse than what reddit was. For starters, I don’t need to have 3 main accounts just so that I can see all of the content of all of the communities I’d like to subscribe to. Second, I don’t have to open up new communities and moderate them and upload content, like I had to do now. And last, reddit actually tracks what I do. I know, that sounds bad, but I actually like it. Why? Because it remembers if I was active in a certain sub the last 2, 3, 4 days and the first feeds it gives me is from that sub, which I like, apparently I stayed over there for quite a while the last time I was active, which means I find it’s content interesting. Lemmy doesn’t have that. Call it evil, I call it a feature.
Also, if you really want to view everything, the best option is to just host an instance yourself! Then nobody can decide what you see but you. And because lemmy is cool and good, you can still post on and interact with all the instances you desire! That’s sort of the beauty of open source software, if you don’t like how the people who run things are running things? DIY!
Half of them being war criminals is maybe undershooting it. Probably depends how broadly you apply the term “leadership”.
But also can we talk about defederating from lemmy.ca. you wanna talk about historical and ongoing crimes, take a look at the canadian state. Genocide 150 years and going strong. No free acess to govt documents; most stuff done in secret; now they are moving to control the press via funding. Canadian mining companiee devestate communities around the world.
I assume all these totally not red-baiting people all worried about china are also just as worried about any .ca instance? Riiiggt??
(Jk about lemmy.ca to highlight how standards are applied to some but not to all.)
The difference is almost nobody supports the presidents or officials that intiated said war crimes like president Bush. Tons of people hate Nixon too. Wheras these guys support Stalin despite his war crimes. If they supported USSR ideals without Stalin maybe that would be acceptable, but they don’t.
This is like if I tried to defend Hitler because of how he improved the economy, or his anti-smoking campaign.
Yes, but both presidents are still legit presidents in the history books. No history book ever mentions these things, you find them out through published papers or articles on the subject.
They support the ideas behind what Stalin did, as in how he ran the state. In general, I do agree with some of it as well. None of them agree with the extermination of 20M USSR citizens during his reign. Ask them, you’ll always get the same answer. I have, and I got the exact same answer I gave you now.
Plus, they mostly praise Lennin and Marx, the ideologies, not the people that implemented them. Not to mention that societies like that have been implemented anywhere for the 1st time ever in history, a completely different way of looking on things, mistakes are bound to happen. Not to the exempt what Stalin did (he did most of the attrocities on purpose, no doubt there, he just wanted more centralized power).
And what is wrong with how Hitler revitalized the economy? Please explain how that is bad 🤨. The idea is 100% good. If he was a dictator and did horrible things, that doesn’t mean all of the things he did were bad, most of them, yes, but why not take what is good from the things he did and just learn from that. Praise him, no, but praise that idea that is his, most definitely yes. After all, ask any doctor when were most advances in medical knowledge about the human body done, it was right after WWII, right after the allies snatched Mengele’s thousands of drawings, pictures, analysis, etc. Were the things Dr. Mengele did good? Of course not. Did they help greatly to progress medicine in the next 10 years or so? Most definitely yes. Should he be praised? No. Should he be mentioned as the one directly responsible for that progress. Yes.
I thought that one of the main ways hitler imprved the economy of Germany was through the war effort. Though I could ne wrong.
Much like what the US is doing today, wouldn’t you say so 🤷?
That was your experience. Not everyone else’s. My country had a dictatorship not too long ago, and believe me when I say this: We didn’t flood the streets with our cries of peace for no reason.
Lemmygrad is specifically problematic for being predominantly Marxist Leninist (as the .ml suggests). I think you’re probably right that people just reject them outright because of AH THE COMMUNISTS WANT TO END CAPITALISM red scare type stuff present in Western countries, but where I specifically find Lemmygrad (and other tankies) being way too negative to interact with is when they get into defending Communist regimes.
If you asked the average Lemmygrad user, they too would be enveloped in propaganda, though this time coming from communist regimes and praxis they’ve read. They have been deluded into believing Stalin and Mao were good leaders, that authoritarianism is okay if it advances their favorite political agenda (though for some reason also claim that these countries aren’t authoritarian), and that these regimes should be implemented everywhere.
The worst of it all is their constant genocide denial. Yes, the USA and other Western countries have done a similar amount (maybe even more?) of really bad stuff in this area (e.g. natives, apartheids, roma, etc. 💀), but I think broadly a well educated Western citizen, especially a leftist one, should be able to understand and admit that what their country did was wrong and should never be done again. A Lemmygrad user instead defends things like the Uighur genocide and Holodomor, saying both that they don’t exist and are “western propaganda” while at the same time entertaining the counterfactual and saying if they did happen it was justified because the West did it too and they were being very mean to communism 😡.
When you get to that level of malevolent stupidity, you start to look more and more like a fascist that supports genocide and absolute power of the state and that uses strategic ambiguity to express your toxic beliefs, than you do a leftist. I don’t think anyone suggests we stay federated with a fascist instance because fascists are misunderstood after “years of propaganda pushed by western countries” to discredit Hitler and Mussolini, but here you are doing the moral equivalent.
Of course, that is how you spread ideas, through propaganda. That is how western countries did it as well. That is how we got here, to Lemmy, lol.
I have seen people judge, but have never experienced what it would be like living under the ruling of a benevolent dictator. I’m not saying Stalin or Mao were like that, I’m saying that I live in a country that used to be socialist and had a dictator like that… trust me when I say this, we were better of with what we had previously.
So, please first experiece first had what it is to live in both types of societies before you judge. Every story has 2 sides, so does this one.
I don’t think any of them actually deny that. They usually just compare those acts with what western countries have done. Go on and have a talk with them, none of them deny that. They know that they did terrible things, but try and debunk the western theories “russia bad, usa good”… thay all have sceletons in their closets, there is no denying that. You can’t keep an empire as large as the US or USSR afloat and not have done any bad deed to anyone, that’s just nuts. There will always be collateral damage.
George Washington was pro slavery, yet he’s still praised and printed on bills, right? So that’s normal, but this isn’t, lol.
Denying it is not OK. But, I get their stand point - the US denies doing soooo many things, why should we be any different 🤷. They’re cutting slack, why not us.
I still haven’t seen anyone deny those tjings, but if I do, even though I am a socialist by beliefs, I will most definitely confront them. Their beliefs are not mine and I would rather have the truth out than hide it under the carpet. BUT, the whole truth, not just one side of it. Let’s take everyone’s dirty laundry out, not just the USSRs or USes, both of them. Because people usually think that bodies are piled up on only side of the lawn, which is a lie of course.
Expressing absolute power in a state can sometimes be a good thing. Depends on a lot of things, but in certain countries/federations, it just works. I could state examples here, my own country being one of them, but it’ll just be too long of a post.
And you percieve them as toxic, I don’t. Why? IDK, I just don’t 🤷. Maybe it’s because my own beliefs allign in 90% of theirs.
Defederating is the issue here, not the content of that instance. You don’t like something, fine, block it. Lemmy has that option. I block communies I don’t like all the time, I have about 20 blocked ao far, why is that so hard, I really have bo idea.
I couldn’t care less if anyone stays federated with a faschist instance or not. It doesn’t make 1 single bit of difference. I don’t like it? I block it. It really is THAT simple 🤦.
In fact, I would even like to be federated with a faschist instance. Why? Meeh, might unblock it from time to time, just to troll them and get on their nerves.
I guess since personally i practically never looked to reddit for analysis of china i do not feel like it is a big deal in a replacement for reddit.
Actually i never looked to reddit for politics at all. I felt it was the weakest part. No matter if soneone was saying something i agreed or disagreed with they always were saying dumb shit.
I see. I like the kbin philosophy of just federating with everyone. lemmygrad stuff doesn’t pop up that often here and from a quick look it didn’t really look like an issue. But yeah I guess you’re right that it’s just fear? or people just wanting to curate/block certain things…
It’s like my need to see less cat posts. I searched for every cat community there is on Lemmy and just blocked all of them. Problem solved 👍. Some people are just snowflakes and don’t even wanna do that out of fear they might see some tankie posts or something, so the admins just did their dirty work for them 😒.
I might open up a kbin account as well, this whole defederation thing sucks. I already have like 5 accounts cuz this instance is defederated from that instance and so on 😒.
yeah so far on kbin I think we’re federated with everyone and I think that’s kinda the default going forward. So unless other instances block us, we’re probably fine.
Cool, thanks for the info 👍.
Any app for kbin?
no mobile app just yet I think? I saw someone working on one but it’s not available yet. The website itself works with mobile browsers though, and it has a PWA that you can pin to your phone’s home menu.
They support North Korea for goodness sake. Being communists isn’t the problem, it’s that they support fascist dictatorships pretending to be communist.
Do you support president Washington? Did you know he was pro slavery? Far worse than having a dictatorship if you ask me.
Honestly I had to google who he was, because I fogot. I am British, not American, so he isn’t a big deal over hear. Technically he was an enemy of my country not that really matters.
I don’t particularly support him if that’s what you’re asking, as I have no reason to. He wasn’t the first person to implement a democracy, and the democracy he implemented wasn’t a true democracy to begin with. The ancient greeks did it thousands of years before him and fyi also had slaves.
Likewise, the communism Stalin implemented wasn’t true communism. Nobody gets it perfect the first time. But Washington is still praised as the founder of the USA, but Stalin is frowned upon 🤔. These are the double standards I’m talking about.
I don’t prasie Washington though. He just took what the Greeks did and made it worse.
Stalin should rightly be criticized. He took a great revolution and ruined it making people hate communism to this day.
Lenin and Trotsky weren’t that much better either before you start talking about them. Anyone remember Kronstadt?
You may not do that, but most of the US does… and everyone just hates Stalin for the things he did. Like no good could come out of that person. Maybe not good, but a good idea, sure, everyone has one from time to time.
No doubt there, he did a lot of things wrong, not to mention eliminating Lenin, but that’s beside the point. My point was, you’re obviously not stating the same about Washington or other western polititians that may have done even worse things.
And people don’t hate communism because of what Stalin did, they hate it because of a well thought of propaganda campaign made by the US. Sure, the USSR had one against capitalism as well, but it wasn’t as aggressive.
Good thing you mention Kronstadt. What you’re comparing is like the confederates having a rebellion (revolution) after the civil war, because they lost, and then wining about the unions kicking their buts. A certain social order/policy prevailed, deal with it… you wanna pick a fight with the bear again, don’t be surprised if it comes back to bite you… again.
Actually I do state these things. America bullies other nations all the time, and makes a pigs ear or it all the time too. See my comment about the Taliban, or how theg handled Vietnam. The US is almost as bad as the USSR, with the exception that they don’t kill their own people, only other people.
What you’re saying about Kronstadt dosen’t match what I have heard at all. They fought alongside each other in the revolution and then the Bolsheviks decided to bring in horrible undemocratic policies. The other groups protested this and where slaughtered at Kronstadt.
Have to give it to you there, that is absolutely true.
I could explain why these things were done in the USSR… that doesn’t exempt them, of course, from it, but there is logic behind some of these actions. I can’t speak for the USSR in particular, because I haven’t lived there and in that time, but I can speak for Yugoslavia, since I have lived there (and still do).
The USSR had Gulag, we had Goli Otok. Basically the same thing, except not as nearly as many people were sent to Goli Otok (percentage of population I mean). See, back when Yugoslavia was formed, it was supposed to be a federation. And it was, but some people thought that having a federation is not good, especially from a nationalist/religious perspective (the Balkans is a clusterfuck of nationalities and religions, mainly christians and muslims), so they were “tactically silenced” (sometimes executed, mostly sent to Goli Otok or relocated abroad). The idea behind the federation (or as Tito saw it, at least how I interpret it) was having one single nation - Yugoslavs. The idea was more than good, especially since almost every single war that was fought on these grounds was either a war between nations or a religious war (this was the de facto standard for centuries). So, his idea was to eradicate this (once again, my interpretation). The easiest way to do this is to, one, distance the masses from religion, two, do tactical reprogramming about how the concept of nationalism and national treasures is viewed. The simplest way to achieve this - impose a new social order - socialism (integrated through the communist party, of course). And, I can confirm that the idea was more than good. The time during Tito’s reign was probably the most peaceful time this piece of land has ever seen. And there were also preventive measures taken, to ensure that the blood of the masses get’s mixed, so that no religious or national war was ever fought again. Soldiers on mandatory service (it was mandatory back then) were sent from one part of the federation to another. The idea was - horny soldiers will probably find some girl there and marry her. People were encouraged to move and travel all across the country, as well as out of the state (view things from a different perspective, learn, maybe meet a partner in another part of the country, or abroad, doesn’t matter, as long as there is gene mixing, it was fine).
See, all of these were very delicately picked tactics that would actually bring people closer to each other and mix the gene pool, which would of course eventually lead to less fighting and bigotry (you’re certainly not gonna kill your wife if she was muslim and you were christian, just because an incident happened somewhere in the federation that involved muslims and christians, which, to be honest, it never did, at least not while Tito was at the head of the communist party). But there will always be some bad apples, wanting to defederate from the federation because they felt that their nation, country or religion is not getting enough independence or rights from the federation. This wasn’t true in most cases, they were just die hard nationalists and were just clinging on to this ancient idea that was about to be eradicated for the greater good of all of the nations. Sure, that means loosing some of their national identity, but the risk of keeping it was even greater (my opinion as well). So, what did Tito and the communist party do with those individuals? They either dislocated them to other parts of the world (told never to come back), sent to Goli Otok, or in rare cases, executed (usually when the 1st or 2nd one didn’t work with this particular individual). Since this was done all for the greater good of the people, I am totally behind this. Mind you, I’ve got a grandfather that was sent to Goli Otok for publicly expressing his ideas about how his country should be defederated from Yugoslavia, talking smack about Tito in public, etc. (this was going on for way too long I might add, years, people weren’t just sent there like that, like if you curse at the state or Tito in a bar during happy hour, you had to really be in on it for months or years to get the desired attention and effect that might get you sent there), and to be honest, even if it was me doing the shots, yes, I’d sent him there as well. There is a bigger picture behind this whole thing, but some people just failed to see it. Even though there was nothing wrong with the way the lived (everyone was pretty much equal, you had an apartment, a car, enough money to go on a vacation once a year and spend on some luxuries, like owning a color TV, which was expensive back then), they still needed to express their opinion publicly regarding those ideas, and, of course, if shout long and hard enough, eventually someone will hear you. This was the fear that communist party and Tito had, not to spread ideas like this amongst the population, cuz that’ll just bring this whole thing down. I certainly don’t think it was for Tito to establish himself as a ruthless dictator (if anything, he was known as the benevolent dictator, the majority of people loved him, can tell you from what I’ve seen, there were framed pictures of him in people’s homes even 20 years+ after his death) since he already had the sympathy from most of the people in the federation. But, yes, he did some bad things, no doubt there. On the other hand, you can’t make an omelette if you don’t break some eggs… there will be collateral damage, no matter how many ways you slice this thing.
Yes, they were hoping for a more democratic approach to communism from Stalin, he was against it (yes, he really did want to rule with an iron fist, I most definitely can agree on that), so he decided to, basically execute all of them. That was a way more drastic way to deal with people that don’t agree with your ideology, but hey, what do you expect from a person that would send his own son to jail…
He was a man with many character flaws, like Hitler. And yes, he’s not that different in the way he ruled, compared to Hitler… heck, Hitler didn’t kill as many Germans as he did Russians, just because they didn’t agree with him or even whispered one word against him (the walls had ears back then, as far as I know), so yeah, that puts him even higher on the evil scale if you ask me. The only question (if you ask me) is, did he do at least one good deed that we can learn from? Yes, he did. So did Hitler… and many other rulers/dictators across history. Does that make them good? Of course not. Should they be mentioned in the history books as the inventors/promotors of a certain idea? Yes, most definitely. Should they be praised for that idea? No, but mentioned, most definitely yes.