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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
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Haha yes. It's good to provide receipts I guess.
If you ever want a mindfuck, take a look at any kind of impassioned political discussion on some instance outside of lemmy.ml, and then the exact same comment thread as it appears hosted on Hexbear or lemmy.ml. A lot of times it will look dramatically different. It's really remarkable how distorted a view of reality they're able to create for their users. There looks like there's this universal consensus on the tankie viewpoint, with maybe a couple of shouty outliers who don't make any sense trying to disagree with it.
If you look from outside, they're just making a joke of their instance, but if you look from the POV of the users, the result is a perfectly seamless excising of certain parts of reality for about 95% of what they see. The visible results of someone getting banned and their comments removed fall in this incredibly rare 5% of times or less. The fucked-up thing is it works. That's why they will swear that all debate is allowed and they're perfectly open to challenge. I think a lot of the users who are living in the censored environment really believe that that is true.
I am not surprised at all lmao, of all the efforts davel et all put in to making their instance so censored I'm honestly shocked they haven't started fucking around with their side of the modlog or what it sends out for federation. I heard rumors they were a while back, but I wasn't able to confirm it
But yea, that's why I advocate not going off the handle like a certain other user around here because you don't know which tankies are just being manipulated and which ones are actually pulling the strings
It even impacts how they talk about non-political topics. Some people were talking on lemmy.ml about FOSS phone keyboards, and there were some people who didn't quite understand some weird little detail point, and then some other people were trying to talk to them and answer questions about it, and one of the lemmy.ml admins was running around locking threads and banning people who were in the "didn't understand" category, because they were wrong, and it's the mods' job to remove anyone who is wrong and stop discussion that might include something wrong.
Like "You are not adults who can read and understand. You are children who only believe whatever you're told, and so it is my job to make sure that the only thing that's ever presented to you is the 'right stuff' and not the 'wrong stuff.'" And if you don't already have the "right" viewpoint, you need to be banned, not talk to people and have them raise counterpoints and all of you figure it out. I, the mod, will tell you what's right and wrong, and I've done that, so the discussion needs to end now. End of discussion.
Maybe I'm doing a bad job of explaining it but it was super weird. It is for real a little bit surprising to me that a group of people with that fractured an understanding of human communication somehow managed to become the official representatives of a pretty significant FOSS project.
The whole "I stubbed my toe, fuck capitalism" shit is exhausting. Like capitalism is absolutely a complete and utter shit show, but MLs will unironically pretend like nobody had to dig ditches in the USSR.
Sadly being a good dev doesn't translate into being a competent admin and mod.
Also what he was removing in the keyboard post, was any mention of FUTO keyboard, even in cases, where it was stated, that it's source available.
Yeah. It's like the textbook of how people learn from each other.
Person A: "Hey I'm looking for a FOSS keyboard but I'm confused about FUTO, is it not open source? Are there problems with it, can someone help me understand?"
Person B: "Yeah I was wondering about that too"
Person C: "Oh sure, I'm happy to explain, here's what's going on with it. It's not really open source no."
Moderator D: BAN BAN BAN GET THE FUCK OUT WITH YOUR "FUTO IS OPEN SOURCE" PROPAGANDA
Atleast that didn't result in a ban for me, even after I called out his admin abuse.
Oh, I thought someone got banned at least temporarily. Maybe the admin was only deleting threads and being a cock to everyone.
Got dam they've gone full micromanager LMAO
I think it's actually very telling as to their model for how information is supposed to flow. You have authoritative sources of information, and information is supposed to flow from them into the community, and the authority is supposed to remove from the community anything that is wrong information. It is absolutely unallowed for something "wrong" to be present, mucking up the community and confusing people, because people will accept that uncritically, and that would be a catastrophe. It would be chaos.
One of my absolute favorite interactions of all time with lemmy.ml people was when, after a long time back and forth arguing on some topic, one of them tried to pull rank on me saying he taught seminars about this stuff and he was familiar with how pernicious it was when someone raised up inappropriate and incorrect statements like I was making, and how he would have to remove them from the class to keep everyone on the truthful page of information. As it happens I was a teacher of teachers for many years of professional life. I'm very familiar with the situation where a student is disagreeing with the teacher or questioning what's being presented. There's one very specific way that I would generally handle it and recommend that the teachers under me handle it, and I strongly disagree with his approach although I am familiar with that attitude. (And I do get it, in terms of pure class organization and not wanting a chaotic environment.) I talked to him about it from that perspective, how I would recommend to approach it if that kind of thing comes up, and why just removing all the "incorrect viewpoint" students from the class is about one of the worst things you can do. Assuming of course that they're raising their counterpoints in some kind of reasonable and not deliberately-destructive fashion. But usually, they are if anything a little overly cautious about disagreeing with the teacher. In my experience.
He stopped responding to me after that. 🙂 It was an absolute bedrock element of his "the world is divided into authorities and obedient listeners-to-authority" that he always got to be the authority, never the listener, I guess.
Ha yea I've felt some of that before, I despise that whole "I'm right, you're wrong and you're wrong for even trying to question it" mindset.
I'm of the mindset and teach my own children to respectfully question something you're being told, even if that means questioning someone in a teaching position because we're all human and we all make mistakes
Yeah. Respect is key to teaching as with many other things. Which means earned respect. There's not a thing wrong with people respecting whatever authority figure enough to listen and pay attention to what they have to say. In teaching as in many other domains, it's a necessary part of having a positive interaction on all sides. But whenever someone says it's the student's (or whoever's) role to respect the teacher (or whoever) unconditionally, and the teacher doesn't have to earn the respect or demonstrate that they're worthy of having it placed on them, the student just has to pretend to it and act accordingly, that's a huge red flag about how they look at the intended interaction.
Someone questioning what you're saying is -- most of the time -- showing that they take the whole endeavor seriously enough to ask questions openly and learn. You addressing the question effectively, even if the question is "wrong" or not on the same page as what you're teaching, is a chance to earn genuine respect and encourage your students to be genuine about their side of it. I love when that stuff happens. But, you have to actually be worthy of respect to welcome that interaction...
Going straight from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1 saves SO much time though
Ha ha tru tru, but then you get locked threads lolol
They absolutely fuck around with the mod log and have been caught doing it several times, and claim "federation glitches."
I have personally had a situation on my old .ml account where I was banned without any modlog entry, but my comments would still be visible to some users and not others. Definitely just "federation glitches" and not testing a secret shadowban function.
At this point not only do I assume .ml is running some custom version of the Lemmy back end, I consider them an active security threat to the broader fediverse. This is a big part of why I've gone to piefed.