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):

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    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

    • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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      7 months ago

      Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares

      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.

      • Jayjader@jlai.lu
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        7 months ago

        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. a screenshot of the first page of stats for lemmy on fedidb.org. The collective stats across all servers is 391,326 total users and 45,189 monthly users. The individual servers shown are (in order): lemmy.world, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, hexbear.net, lemmy.dbzer0.com, feddit.de, lemmygrad.ml, programming.dev, lemmyblahaj.zone, and lemmy.ca. The user and "status" counts approximately follow a pareto distribution.  lemmy.world has almost half of the total user count and monthly active user count on its own. The notable outlier is hexbear.net, which has 10% more statuses than lemmy.world made by 10% as many montly active users.

        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.

        • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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          7 months ago

          The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them.

          Agreed. Maybe I should try creating and managing a community some day. (hopefully this didn’t come off as sarcastic)

          The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody.

          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.

          • Jayjader@jlai.lu
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            7 months ago

            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.

            • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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              7 months ago

              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.

          • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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            7 months ago

            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.

            • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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              7 months ago

              […] is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that.

              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.

          • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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            7 months ago

            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.

            • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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              7 months ago

              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.

              • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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                7 months ago

                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.

    • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.today
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        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.

        • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.today
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          7 months ago

          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.

    • fuckingkangaroos@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      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

      • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        I have Lemmy.ml blocked and I still see them in other communities all the time.

        If that’s the case, then that may be a bug. I advise you to report that.

          • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works
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            6 months ago

            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.