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.
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.
Who is “they”? The entire instance? Every single user in every single community on that instance You don’t think people around here spread lies too?
Hexbear and lemmygrad were instance-wide operations. They existed for the purpose of disruption. Lemmy.ml is not that and has never been. It holds a large body of individuals who share the same beliefs, but that’s not the whole instance.
And are we establishing a dedicated, impartial, fact checking body to evaluate everything? If not, then defederating the entire instance based on “lies”, determined by people with their own biases, is about as slippery a slope as you can possibly get.
Besides, you keep talking about “lies” but what I see in the evidence you linked is mostly about admin actions. So let’s not punish the users of either instance for their admin, let’s open some dialogue about it.
But the greater issue here is that the whole concept of this federated platform is basically moot the more fractured the federation becomes. If admins can’t put aside biases and commit to the idea of federation, then it isn’t going to work, and this would create the most evidence of that. I agree the admin actions over there are eyebrow raising, but the biggest instance defederating from one of the other biggest and oldest instances is cutting off our arm, their arm, while making this whole thing less useful and even more confusing for new users.
I don’t know if there’s a good answer, here. Rogue admins in charge of massive instances is not something that can be dealt with easily. But defederating is going to cause more issues than it solves.
It’s not defederating on the basis of political opinion. It’s defederating on the basis of extreme intolerance towards and censorship of people who have different, non-fringe opinions that aren’t even controversial in most parts of the world.
Right now, the instance hosts a lot of let’s say mainstream, non-political communities, purely because lemmy.ml was the first instance and so “popular” by default. The way the mods over there behave, it’s clear that they’re not suited to be a mainstream instance for these communities. Unfortunately due to network effect, people won’t just move.
The only way to dislodge these communities and move them to more neutral instances is if larger instances like lemmy.world start defederating lemmy.ml.
Defederation is a tool of last resort. Before taking that step as a community we should attempt to engage the admins to align them towards more acceptable behavior. Migrating communities away from instances with petty and abusive admins is always a good idea, and this absolutely qualifies.