Lemmy

I'm sorry to see people somewhere on the Internet coming out against Lemmy. First of all, let me say that I sympathize with the China issue. I'm a Muslim and I have been concerned about the Uyghurs for a very long time. This is not some bandwagon that I am jumping on, and I have ties to the region as well. I moderate the Uyghur sub on Reddit, created #uyghur on matrix.org, and on lemmy.ml I have registered communities like c/uyghur and c/xinjiang. I did that mainly to promote the welfare of Uyghurs and guard against whitewashing of the situation in Xinjiang. Obviously I am pro-Uyghur, and I feel that the admins of lemmy.ml have been gracious enough to respect me as a user and a mod. I have also not seen them engage in censorship of opposing viewpoints on this issue, and we have at least once that I can remember disagreed on China's Uyghur policy here on the site. This did not result in any problem.

Please don't cancel Lemmy, because the software is amazing and the creators really are nice. I don't have to agree with them on politics in China. As long as they're not crazy about it, the situation is manageable. So far they've always been fair.

Even suppose that one day they implement a policy on lemmy.ml that says they won't allow anyone to post pro-Uyghur things. So what? It's their Lemmy instance, they can decide what's on it. I can go start my own instance. I really don't think lemmy.ml has any obligation to do what the community wants. They've already done enough by creating the software and making it FOSS.

Besides, you know how many people posted pro-Uyghur content on c/uyghur since I created it? None. So if you're concerned about how the issue is being represented on this site, maybe you could come post something sometime, or argue in the comments.

Anyway, at present I'm not recommending any other Reddit alternative and probably won't.

There is a difference between people advocating for human rights abuses and people saying that some actor does in fact not engage in human rights abuses. The difference is stark and even there, if the actor would in fact in engage in human right abuses.

An open society must tolerate the later. I.e. we must tolerate that people dispute that human right abuses occur or occurred. This is because you cannot judge someone purely due to getting the facts wrong or not knowing them.

If we wouldn't allow this, we would de-facto argue for a totalitarian state, since we wouldn't allow people disputing facts (which can be proven or disproven). We would have to nominate some entity that judges what is fact and what isn't, which is the opposite to gathering evidence and engaging in an open, society wide discussion.

To be clear: Allowing discussions around whether abuses occur is notably different to letting people get away with advocating for abuses. The latter is what needs strong responses. The former is what requires engagement.

I don't see anything on lemmy or in the mastodon thread that shows that human rights abuses are advocated for. What I do see is that there are some fractions that show sympathies to China which you would otherwise only see for the USA. I think its useful to compare these sympathies because they seem to express themselves in similar ways.

With all that said, I think the opinion expressed in the mastodon thread is not particularly useful. It, in many ways, minimises real human rights abuses that occur world wide, day to day, in China, USA, and many other countries in East and West.

Let's call out the abuses, let's discuss and present the evidence for them, let's not alienate people and create polarity that looks like us-vs-them.

If people have beef with the devs of lemmy.ml, they should just use another lemmy instance

I don't agree with presenting the Chinese or Korean goverment in a good light and manipulating facts to reach that, but I do firmly believe that everyone deserves a space to say it.

Lemmy is a good thing, albeit I may not agree with developers/admins on many point. That thread on Mastodon come off pretty obtuse in most of those comments.

Keep up the good work!

haters.. Everywhere

if we were talking about lemmygrad, I would agree, but personally lemmy.ml is a place for me that I enjoy browsing and posting to. anyway I think it's the best opportunity for anyone interested in making a centrist or apolitical instance and get the label of "flagship instance" on joinlemmy to help it grow and become as big as lemmy.ml, it will also make it easier for people who don't like the politics of lemmy.ml to choose an instance knowing that it has no strong political affiliation.

but I agree the folks on lemmygrad can be a little bit ... let's say annoying.

also interesting that their only problem seems to be about the "genocide".

They have problems with the word filter? The word filter keeps the bigoted reactionaries away, did they not notice that? If they would rather talk to bigots than to us, then they shouldn't join us.

If someone doesn't want to use this software because they disagree with the developers' politics, it's their loss. I wish them luck in finding ideologically pure projects in the future.

I have found it concerning for a while, but most of what I've seen seems to have come from the lemmygrad instance, not lemmy.ml . I know the devs are active on lemmygrad though, and that concerns me.

Maybe I should migrate to an instance that federates with lemmy.ml but not lemmygrad.

I've been struggling the whole day about how to respond to this.

My first reaction was disgust, as the thing going on with Uyghurs in China pretty much looks like a genocide, regardless of semantics. "If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is a duck".

When it comes to discussion about the subject, I however have to agree with @[email protected].

To be clear: Allowing discussions around whether abuses occur is notably different to letting people get away with advocating for abuses. The latter is what needs strong responses. The former is what requires engagement.

No promotion of oppression or bigotry has in this case happened. I'd rather allow people have these discussions as long as they can behave like in a furnished space.

I'm fine with the developers' political views, as the Lemmy software is more important.

Of course Lemmy has now a certain kind of PR problem as this FediTips fella is making big accusations and wanting people to stop using Lemmy altogether.

Hmm, I didn't noticed any of this behaviour. But Lemmy is still a "great" software. We need to be mature enough to separate the "pice/product" from the author. So if the instance gets toxic or what ever, we could easily move to another and just that

Yeah, okay, I'll just say it: the admins can't care less if a bunch of reactionaries don't use this platform. None of us are getting ad revenue or any sort of money from more users, and we have no incentive to, nor want to, cater to a bunch of US propaganda spewing haters.

As for the devs being communists, yes. Dessalines and Nutomic are ML. I'm at least Marxist myself. We have not, and are not going to hide this fact to placate the haters and we honestly don't care if that makes people leave or boycott this project.

Me personally, I've realized how much my perception of socialist countries has been warped by capitalist propaganda and I'm reluctant about believing anything that western media says about these countries.

FediTips and the commenters in that thread make some good points. The fact that this Lemmy instance federates with Lemmygrad (which, if you look at the front page, is full of denialism about the Uyghur genocide) is an atrocity.

And yes, https://lemmy.ml/modlog does indeed have some questionable entries, such as:

• Removed Community conservatives reason: No conservative communities
• Removed Community Libertarian, in the pursuit of a free society reason: No conservative communities allowed
• Removed Community Conservatism reason: No conservative subs allowed

I created the Conservatism community, not knowing that Lemmy (lemmy.ml) became a leftist instance. (Lemmy was not explicitly leftist when I made my account in July 2020. Look at this archive of the front page from November 2020, which does not include the word leftist in the sidebar.) Fine, whatever. But, removing the Libertarian community with the rationale "No conservative communities allowed"? I don't understand that. That's not even politically accurate.

Everyone should get a platform to spread their views/propaganda :)