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.
Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares.
It’s one of those things where the very tankies you’re talking about made it trivial for anyone not wanting to interact with them, their instance, or anyone in specific can just block whatever. And then there’s the instances that defederate from .ml and/or grad, which is a decent amount of them.
They may be assholes (though they tend not to be in interpersonal ways, only in their political views), but they’re assholes nobody has to interact with for very long.
You’re beating a dead horse with this one
That horse fucking deserves it though. He knows what he did.
Yeah honestly let’s make an example out of that horse
I mean, we should probably care at least enough to make sure they’re not smuggling in any backdoors that would allow them take over the entire Lemmyverse.
I know it’s open source so that’s somewhat difficult to accomplish but not impossible (see the recent stealth attack on SSH/OpenSSL). At the very least, it requires people from outside their echo chamber to regularly review commits being made made before admins begin rolling out new updates.
That’s a valid point, imo.
But there supposedly are people doing just that. Been too long since I ran across it here, but when the last big version change happened, some of the instance running folks looked over the code, and found nothing hinky. I know my asshole cousin has his own instance, and he said he scanned through it a little out of curiosity and “it ain’t the prettiest” was the worst he had to say about it. Which, second hand info like that is like toilet paper, but it serves okay for a casual conversation like this.
I would hope so, since it’s THEIR hardware it’s running on (or in case it’s rented, responsible for).
But as long as they don’t put anything iffy into the code and leave their political opinions separate from that, they can certainly run their own instance however they please. That’s the whole point of Lemmy after all.
Jesus christ.
I’m not sure if He knows Rust well enough to do that, and having some sort of background in infosec would likely also be helpful.
Oh come on downvoters, that was funny! Haha
Thank you, I tried.
Tough crowd, eh?
Well, things have turned around! Haha
Guess it was just a slow burner then
You probably got hit by a bunch of lemmy.ml brigade downvotes then real users showed up and upvoted you.
The 730 people who upvoted this post do care.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them. I understand that awareness of why people want alternatives is important for those alternatives to have a chance at attracting users, and being discovered in the first place. I just have yet to actually see these alternatives receive the care they (imo) require to justify switching to them.
The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody.
Maybe it’s too soon to make such a judgement call, we’ll see over the next few days as people get the chance to see this post.
Agreed. Maybe I should try creating and managing a community some day. (hopefully this didn’t come off as sarcastic)
This is a wildly misleading and unfair comparison. Let’s take the Trump verdict as an example. The most upvoted post about this had ~2700 upvotes. But that’s only 6% of the MAU! Is that “nobody”? Obviously not. 2k upvotes is a huge deal on a rather small community like Lemmy. How often do you see posts with more than 3k upvotes?
~500 upvotes is already a moderately large number of upvotes. You need to compare this number with how many upvotes a post typically gets.
Fwiw (our disagreement aside), moderating a community anywhere online can be a very rewarding, and very thankless job. And it really can be a thing that feels like a job if the community is active enough.
But I would still recommend at least trying it for a few months to see if whatever subject matter you make it around draws users. That’s when you get a real feel for moderation, and have the best chance at helping the overall fediverse work well.
I also think that moderating a big community would change your mind at least partially regarding vote numbers as a measure of anything significant. There’s behind the curtain stuff that usually gives a better indication of how a given post/subject is being received by the individual community. It depends on the tools available, and lemmy is a wee bit scant on tools to help moderators gain understanding of the population of their C/; but it’s still eye opening.
The biggest thing I think you’d notice in comparing people interacting with a given post is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that. And that’s the ones that bother to vote. A lot of people don’t. They’ll click a link, maybe open that post and read comments, but just not care enough to do anything else at all. Back on reddit, that was a majority of posts, and I know it was the case on other forums back in the day.
So, yeah, disagreement about the numbers in this case aside, if you’re this interested in how a vote using forum works, moderating your own would be a very cool experience on top of diversifying the instance/community balance.
Wow, now that I think of it, that is indeed how I vote most of the time.
Thanks, I will seriously consider opening a community.
I didn’t necessarily think you were being sarcastic, but I appreciate the clarification.
You’re correct, that was a rather shallow comparison for me to make.
I don’t think raw upvotes give the full story either. I’d be interested in seeing, for example, from which instances the voters are distributed.
That would be interesting indeed! I heard that if one hosts their own Lemmy instance, they can see who voted on every post. Don’t have that for now though.
Votes mean as much as the shit I just took.
No. The shit that you took is more meaningful than fake Internet points.
True, it was a very healthy bm ;)
Usually I’d agree with this, but on this post, the upvote count is a direct representation of how many people care about this issue (out of the number of users who saw this post). That is meaningful.
In my view, upvotes are too easy to manipulate to take them seriously or expect authenticity. And I’m ok with that. I think Reddit and the like showed that karma and the like are not great measures of authentic engagement.
I don’t have access to traffic data to make a good argument on this specific post. Without the ability to compare total interactions vs votes, as well as the ratio of up vs down, it’s a matter of general principle in my opinion.
It is also my opinion, having moderated off and on since the nineties on various types of forums that pretty much any post is ignored by a majority of users that come across it. Voting really only shows which people are willing to use the effort to hit a button. If a majority of users don’t engage, I think that it is indeed a direct representation of how many people care. Again, I can’t see those numbers, so it’s kind of a moot point to make at all, but I suspect this post is like most posts anywhere.
But I still maintain that votes are meaningless across the board because they’re a horrible metric for anything at all, especially when they’re the only metric available.
Edit: again, fwiw, in the time it took me to type that up, the number of positive votes went down by 3. And, iirc, at the point where this tangent about the value of votes started, or was over 400, which is still meaningless, but taken in isolation would point to a general trend where there’s significant disagreement with whatever it is about the post drawing votes.
I kind of see your point. The information we have is not sufficient, and we cannot really know how much of the Lemmy userbase cares about this issue.
I have Lemmy.ml blocked and I still see them in other communities all the time. Defederation is the best solution for dealing with an instance that’s designed to spread propaganda.
And no this isn’t a dead horse, there’s are other discussions ongoing about defederating Lemmy.ml
Your last sentence is contradictory with the meaning of “beating a dead horse” with the usage of the phrase I’m aware of.
To beat a dead horse isn to waste effort at an impossible or pointless goal.
When I used the phrase, it was with the second meaning in mind, but the first partially applies if op wanted anyone to do anything about the situation because the dev team isn’t exactly open to some kind of takeover. The most that could realistically happen is that everyone leave lemmy entirely. Except for the tankies, obviously, why would they leave?
Since anyone that has spent enough time on lemmy to be called a regular user has run across the whole issue at least once, that means that if OP was wanting to raise awareness, the post was also pointless in that regard because it’s kinda impossible to raise awareness past common knowledge and achieve anything useful.
Now, maybe our usage of the phrase “beating a dead horse” isn’t the same. Language is funny like that. Maybe you just disagree that the post has no point, or that the point it does have might achieve something useful. That’s cool, no worries, disagreements like that are healthy and fun.
I will say that in the first part of your comment, you actually echoed the point that I made; it is trivial to minimize/block instances in one way or another, including defederation. Defederation is an instance decision, not a personal one. But it is also a personal decision which instance/s we use to interact with the fediverse. There are instances that do not federate with lemmy.ml, and there’s a ton that don’t with lemmygrad.
So, based on that, I would even argue that, since we have the freedom to choose our instance (with the consent of the host of the instance of course), trying to get an instance that doesn’t already defederate from lemmy.ml to do so approaches pointless since all of the major instances have been around for a while now, and have already taken part in that debate. Maybe you could change someone’s mind with yet another rehash of the same debate, it does happen. But, again, all the major instances have had this debate multiple times, and the hosts don’t seem open to changing just because someone brings it up again.
New instances? Absolutely have to decide if they want to federate with any of the “iffy” instances. And every user has to decide if they’d rather stick with a given instance that doesn’t match their preferences regarding federation. But, uh, the instance this was posted on isn’t new. The user that posted it isn’t exactly new either. So the fact that they haven’t already made a choice, but instead decided to beat a dead horse (again, using the “pointless” rather than “impossible” usage of the phrase) seems a bit meh.
If that’s the case, then that may be a bug. I advise you to report that.
It’s standard, unfortunately, I’m not the only one
What do you mean by “it’s standard”? As in that is the intended functionality? It shouldn’t be — the whole point of blocking instances is for the user to be able to, well, block an instance, ie content originating from it no longer shows up.
Yeah, the software is set up so that even if you block an instance you still see comments from their accounts on other instances.
Is that stated in the documentation?
I don’t know
It’s a non-problem. No one forces anyone to interact with lemmy.ml
Malicious propaganda isn’t a non-problem. I’d like a social media platform that doesn’t have any governments openly pumping their lies into the conversation.
There is always a bias.
There’s always murder, but we still try to stop it.