Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
As a fellow communist, I was always bewildered by this urge of many tankies to prove by all means, against any evidence, that China is socialist and ultimately good.
It’s neither. China turned to markets, privatized many industries, and really did commit atrocities on Tiannamen square and in Xinjiang.
Doesn’t mean socialism as a system is dysfunctional. United States are directly responsible for insane atrocities all over the world, and we don’t need to deny that either.
We need to learn from the experience and strive for it not to happen again. Not close our eyes, scream “blah-blah-blah” and pretend it never happened.
China and the Soviet Union were responsible for acts of genocide, mass murdering/starving people, etc.
Doesn’t mean this didn’t happen in a capitalist world, and doesn’t mean we should close our eyes on that to defend the good look of the system. If anything, this does the opposite. Problems need to be solved, not ignored.
prove by all means, against any evidence, that China is socialist and ultimately good
Taps life expectancy, infant mortality, and education statics
That’s it. That’s the nefarious methodology of the villainous Wumao.
Wait what? A communism advocate who also develops Free and Open Source Software, which is literally communist philosphy applied to computers?
I’m blown away
Yes, but also they’re tankies. That’s basically Putler’s Russia if it were a Lemmy instance.
Well this is news to me. The whole thing; created by Marxists, etc, etc.
Wtf?
This gets posted here on a near daily basis, I’m not sure how you missed it.
.world and .ml have been feuding practically since Lemmy went live. The .world folks insist .ml are full of fascist tankies who hate freedom. The .ml folks deride .world as a cesspool of white nationalism and hatred of the third world.
But the “problem” appears to be that one instance can’t shut down the other. So we get these endless struggle sessions with the same angry sets of links and vows to defederate at all costs.
So is it … the “whole thing”? I.e., Lemmy was invented / created / etc. by a bunch of authoritarian weirdos?
I’m guessing that the question itself reveals that I don’t even understand what Lemmy is, but hey. Any help appreciated.
Lemmy was invented / created / etc. by a bunch of authoritarian weirdos?
Lemmy was created explicitly to get away from the Reddit brand of authoritarian weirdos. Then it was made to be fungible and mutable and interconnectable in order to prevent any single mod or admin from exerting Reddit-like control over the communities at-large.
I don’t even understand what Lemmy is
It’s a place to post. You don’t have to get much deeper than that. So much of this drama is one group of people angry at another group of people for posting wrong.
Which is very classic “old Reddit” before the mods decided dissent was bad for monetization.
It’s funny Lemmy was created as a way to get away from “Reddit brand authotarian weirdos” yet Lemmy’s creator is a “Reddit brand authotarian weirdo” and so is most of the main moderation team on ml and elsewhere you’ll think that with there combined experience on Reddit that they’lld learnt by now that censorship is bad. But then again what am I saying with my experience with tankies and socialists I’ve learnt a lot of them aren’t that bright
It’s funny and ironic that the creator of this platform has become the very thing he apparently despises although I’m not surprised to be brutally honest commies do love their censorship
Except the Lemmy design isn’t authoritarian and it isn’t being ruthlessly monetized.
Also, you don’t seem to understand the difference between being censored publicly and being uninvited privately.
I had my first ever comment, in decades of forums/reddit usage, get mod deleted because I was critical of China and the USSR. It was a fairly mild criticism. That action turned me off the whole instance.
They learn from who they are worshipping. Exactly how the CCP control the narratives.
They learn from who
they are worshippingpays them and might disappear them if they say the wrong thing.
This whole lemmy tankie dev thing has been discussed ad nauseam here for the past year or so. Not sure what solutions you suggest, but if I were to filter my software by who’s an asshole dev and who’s not, that list will end up really short.
As far as the ml instance goes, I don’t agree that we should start defederating left and right with any and all undesirables, but to each their own. At least people now will be in the know, and it might take some weight off lemmy.world
OP has been here two months, and they were shocked to find out an instance literally named after Karl Marx and John Lennin would pretend to be on the left but support authoritarian governments…
And they assume since they just “discovered” it, no one else knows.
I’ve only been on Lemmy a month, and this shit is already exhausting. Isn’t a main point of this whole fediverse thing that you can just block entire instances as well as users? Why is this even an ongoing topic that spans multiple communities?
OP wants to feel like a saviour of us all from tankies.
Isn’t a main point of this whole fediverse thing that you can just block entire instances as well as users?
You can do exactly that. OP wants everyone to do it.
It’s the Vampire Castle phenomenon of online leftist spaces. One dev and instance admin of Lemmy has problematic personal beliefs, so now we aren’t allowed to be on Lemmy anymore because it’s failed an ideological purity test that OP decided for the rest of us. In other news, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is a hardcore Ayn Rand style freemarket libertarian, so I guess we should all ditch wikipedia and each buy a 400 pound Encyclopedia Britannica set. Because that’ll show him to believe things I think are terrible.
It’s all so melodramatic. I’ll take a jaunt into the comments sections of these posts once in awhile to see what the libs are clutching their pearls over now. Today we have:
Oh nooooo, a dev is a ban happy shithead! How unusual and extreme! Better raise the banner and gather the troops, the tankies are coming for us all! We must defederate and/or fork a parallel Lemmy because only tankies have weird ban happy power trips! This will solve all the issues!
On the bright side, block op and the surprisingly small number of the other more vocal tankie drama lords and it gets a lot quieter.
I got a 14 day instance ban for calling a tankie a tankie on ML. Their authoritarian ideology is dangerous and it needs to be quarantined.
You are more than welcome to block any and all content from that instance. You can do this by going under your user settings and clicking on the “Blocks” tab and searching for lemmy.ml in the Block Instance section. That’s the thing about Federated content. You have the power to selectively engage with the content of your choosing. You don’t get to quarantine others because there is no centralized authority that gets to say “your instance gets stuck in an internet ghetto where it isn’t allowed to interact with other users.” You have to quarantine yourself by excluding content. If that doesn’t work for you, then maybe it’s less that you dislike their authoritarian ideology and more that it isn’t the same flavor as your own.
I blocked ML months ago. I’m still going to keep calling for large instances to defederate, because sticking my fingers in my ears doesn’t make the problem go away.
Yes, that will happen when the “problem” lives solely between your ears.
Yeah, I honestly give very few shits about the political opinions of the lemmy devs as long as it doesn’t taint the project itself -and if it did at some point in the future, forking an open-source project is stupidly easy.
I even donate a smidge of money to the development effort via librepay - man does need it to live after all.
Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.
Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.
I’ll add that they’re also generally quite pleasant when I see them on Lemmy. And I haven’t seen either of them involved in being ban-happy. Some will argue otherwise based upon misconstruing the relationship between FLOSS devs and FLOSS consumers as a business/customer relationship (expecting customer service and product manager input on software that’s donated free of charge). But, I think that those folks are just not yet familiar with how FLOSS development works.
