"Tanky" and the perception of Lemmy.
I've been trying to make people aware of Lemmy on discord and Mastodon, but it's always met with resistance citing "the devs are pro authoritarianism tankies." Kbin seems to be picking up steam because of the developer baggage.
Do you feel like this negative perception will hamstring Lemmy's growth?
im just shooting that down outright, what about the devs or the server they run matters? as far as I can tell the software works fine, we can fork and run what we like, its a protocol not a proprietary system.
why are people saying the culture must match the devs? do you adopt the culture of all the devs that make the software you use?
do we all need to list the OS's and software stacks we use so politics are clear?
this is silly.
im just shooting that down outright, what about the devs or the server they run matters?
It matterd because the servers those devs run with their heavy pro authoritarian red fascist moderation and cultural bias were the two largest instances, the flagships, both by virtue of their size and their official nature. That size means they influence users' overall experience of the lemmy network's culture and atmosphere via posts and comments and votes, so yeah, you can sign up for a different instance and that local community won't have that atmosphere and those moderation problems but you're still connected in the network to the tankies and the tankies have the largest and most dominant instances so they have the most effect on the content of the network, and you can't completely avoid them except by deferating and basically hamstringing yourself by separating from the two largest instances.
Thanks to Beehaw and especially lemmy.world though, I think this is rapidly changing and won't be a significant problem for much longer, although there is the remaining concern that the developers' biases will show through in how they develop the underlying lemmy server software. For instance, unlike Mastodon, right now there is no way for you as an individual to block an entire instance, and I foresee it possibly being difficult to convince the lemmy developers to allow that, since one of the hallmarks of Marxist-Leninist ideology is a focus on mass movement building where everyone is forced to interact and join this one giant movement, even with people they don't like or can't get a long with, which could make them hostile to allowing more freedom of association in the fediverse. I'm already seeing tankies from lemmygrad accusing instances that defederate from them of sectarianism and endangering the "movement", in fact.
The problem is just that the lemmygrad and lemmy.ml admins and mods are giving Lemmy as a whole a bad name. The same thing has happened to Mastodon.
I think it's become an issue because the type of person to actively leave and protest Reddit will be sensitive, even if overly so, to issues like this.
I think it might for a little while but not for much longer.
When the influx started, the two oldest and biggest Lemmy instances, the ones maintained by the developers, and thus presumably the flagship instances, were lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml. Tankies are definitely overrepresented in those two instances, and since the devs themselves are tankies, there's a lot of moderation bias in favor of red fascist authoritarian regimes even in the nominally "neutral" lemmy.ml — such as them refusing to remove genocide denial or outright genocide justification, while also removing posts critical of China and so on.
You might argue that this doesn't affect you if you just pick a different instance, because the culture of that instance will be different and so will the moderation, but the problem with that is that if the vast majority of users on a network are tankies and are moderated by tankies then that's going to influence your experience of the network as a whole pretty much unavoidably unless you defederate with the largest instances and thereby intentionally hamstring yourself.
So even if you joined another instance, your experience of the site as a whole would be dominated by a tankie leaning culture via comments and posts, and that's where the reputation (deservedly) came from. And it probably did and maybe still does hamper the growth a little bit. It definitely made me, a trans anarchist, think twice about joining.
However, with the more neutral and professionally-run lemmy.world taking over as the second largest and flagship instance, and beehaw as the third (iirc), as well as the overall influx of a variety of users from Reddit, I think over time the dominance of tankies in how the network is experienced by users, even from other instances, will drastically decrease, especially as many instances defederate from lemmmygrad, and so the reputation will also fade.
Kbin is new, the distinctions between Magazine and micro-blogging creates an extra barrier to understand the system, the few instances are straining under the load, and it's very much in beta.
New users won't be terribly forgiving, so I feel like Lemmy's the better option.
I never understood why questionable views from software devs might be a problem.
It's not like I can only use software made by people who don't eat meat, and everyone's doctors are partially informed by science performed by the Nazis.
I have no idea what kind of world these people think they're living in, as if everything were developed with shared values, and a pure conscience, until Lemmy came along.
Is "Magazine" just a community/subreddit/forum? I took a quick look at Kbin and found the terminology odd. I would have expected something called a "magazine" to combine communities or something, but I couldn't otherwise find any communities on Kbin.
Yes, a magazine is just a community or subreddit. I prefer the UI of Kbin but the terminology takes some getting used to. There's also regular posts and microblogs.
I'm still checking it out, though the services are all up and down, so I don't have a full handle on it yet.
No, this is over blown. Whenever visited before the large influx, lemmygrad was so big it made clear who this was for. But not on the technical level. Now it just is a reddit alternative, which also has some questionable communities here and there to be dealt with.
It's not just lemmygrad, but lemmy.ml as well that are tarnishing Lemmy's reputation.
Kbin and Lemmy operate on the same network, so if somebody has a problem with that they are better off on the first platform. Or they can just host their own instance like Behaw mods do. I just wish people would finally shut up about Lemmy's developer views, it's a circlejerk at this point
They are better off picking another instance anyway, enough people are joining lemmy.ml at the moment. I hope that the way things have taken off during the last few days show people that Lemmy is a diverse community, just like Reddit was.
Tech geeks, political nerds, sex pests, sports fanatics, and gamers all in one room.
It's just normal Reddit behavior. You're not going to escape it by going to another version of Reddit.
No, it's not a circljerk. Developer views turn into "we've surpassed benevolent dictatorship views". It's the same reason Twitter and Reddit are turning into crap - the absurd views of those in change absolutely impact the community whether we believe they don't and it's high time we stop shrugging it off and hold people accountable.
I hope the dev changes his views... but i'm not holding my breathe.
I'd argue that if the code is open source and the instances are independent, then the dev doesn't matter beyond merely the marketing, and the marketing will be affected by the rise of larger instances, like Lemmy.world.
I never encountered the term "Tanky/Tankie" until yesterday, here, on Lemmy. I'm just trying out a bunch or Reddit alternatives and some fediverse stuff. I mean, some of the founders of Reddit aren't my kind of people, and I've been over there since it was founded. If they're not doing something extremely horrible, then meh.
It's niche political drama, and it doesn't really affect the development of Lemmy.
It's a silly meaningless word
I don't think it matters. If people want to use Kbin instead, then great! It's still a fediverse platform (even though they had to temporarily turn off federation), so we'll still all be in the same pond.
Sadly, it will. People are too used of the whole "administratives of the product I consume represent me".
Federated applications (and open source for that matter), don't really have an "owner", nor a CEO. Yeah the devs may have some questionable opinions, but at the end of the day the software is free as in freedom for everyone to use as they please, the only thing they can control is their own instance. Just join another and block theirs if you like.
I've suddenly started seeing the word "Tankie" around. WTF does it mean?
It originally was used to describe Leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist. It was used originally to describe Marxist-Leninist members of the Communist Great Party in Britain who supported the use of tanks by Soviets to quell a couple of uprisings in the late 50s and late 70s. It has since evolved as a term since then to include Leftists (or maybe not even leftists anymore, it's getting thrown around a lot now) who support similar actions in China and Russia. Usually they have an obsession with Mao and/or Stalin and China can do no wrong in their mind while claiming the western world is evil.
The term has an interesting history (to me as I'd describe myself as leftist, but I look at is as we all suck and can all improve) and Wikipedia has a decent article on it that I pulled most of this info from to double check my memory. Unfortunately they tend to be the most vocal part of leftist communities so I just tend to ignore any of them...
AFAIK It's people who are pro-russia/china and vocal about it.
Gotta wonder how people like you describe White Nationalism....
A tankie is a leftist who doesn't agree with mainstream geopolitical opinions or shows any interest in nuance
Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
It doesn't help, but i don't see it as a massive problem. the project is decentralised, free and open source, so as long as that codebase is open and you can choose to join a server instance that doesn't federate with the more extreme groups it's fine.
The influx has led to a big increase in contributors to the codebase, more moderators, and there are no central admins to worry about due to the way the network works, so it would be effectively impossible for them to censor unrelated communities.
I'm pretty auth-left on a lot of topics but those guys are crazy, they're the far-left equivalent of far-right conspiracists and cant be reasoned with.
Doesn't really help with the reputation among non-users, but I found myself much more comfortable with the platform and seeing dramatically less of the "Mao did nothing wrong" kind of extreme views once the instance I joined decided to defederate lemmygrad, maybe recommend an instance that does that? Lemmy.ml is also kinda concerning but at least there the typical user isn't really much of a problem, it's just the moderation policy there, so I just try to avoid the politics and news communities from that instance.
In the long run, I imagine that some instances will just end up setting up their own forked versions, I know the owner of my instance has been talking about doing that although i don't really know how that's going or how likely such a thing is to work out.
Probably but it's a non issue for me. Don't interact with it and move on. There's shitty people in every facet of life.
I think I was having a quality discussion with some "tankies" last night about politics and philosophy. Not really sure what their thoughts on ccp were exactly as it was more a broad discussion.
I don't condone authoritarianism. Hell I don't condone most govt systems lol.
Post trump memes to change the perception?
Wish I could just block all politics, especially Americans' politics.
I mean, Mastodon face similar stigma despite huge right wing Mastodon instances existing, and Mastodon the devs don't seem to be nearly as bad as the admins and mods on lemmy.ml
as opposed to what? pro authoritarianistic capitalists?
fuck big money and reddit/twitter/etc is the bigger money
I'm totally cool with a social network where a variety of political opinions are allowed to be voiced, but the problem comes when criticism of some politics is censored. For example, I'm pretty pro-left/socialist but I also think it's important to point out human rights atrocities like Tiannenmen Square and the Holodomor
I’m pretty pro-left/socialist but
The Lib-Leftist Caveat. AES States never survive the Western smell test, for some crazy reason. You can only do Leftism my way.
Another user, holygon, posted from an instance that lemmy.ca blocks and someone else requested a lemmy.ml account repost it. If you want my own opinions, ask and I'll discuss it, but on this comment everything forward is from that user:
Alright since there is a claim here that you are cool with political opinions being voiced, I’m gonna assume that you mean this, and you’re not just saying so.
Now since you say that you are pro-left/socialist, I’m gonna assume that you are aware that the west/The US has lied in the past about other countries, and their atrocities? (Iraq, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.) Please follow me here, read, and then judge afterwards. I’m not asking you to believe me fully after a single post, I’m just gonna give you some articles from providers that you probably trust, and I’m going to let you form your own opinion afterward.
Tiananmen Square:
Now these are just the sources that explain this. If you look far enough you will also find pictures of dead Chinese soldiers burned to a crisp, strung up by the neck. These pictures are hard to look at. But maybe you think that the protest was just. Okay. But please understand that even western media does not actually think there was a massacre in the Square.
Well, if the people around you are more interested into left-shaming for supporting an open to everyone technology (You should remember them that Truth Social is a shameless fork of mastodon code) than trying to understand the true « free speech » potential of Lemmy / Mastodon, maybe you should move on and find some more suitable friends.
Since the pandemic I kicked off those « I’m not political but » people of my life and I’m way happier now.
Yes, it'll hamstring the growth of lemmy. I'm currently using kbin instead and as soon as it has an app to use I probably won't interact directly with lemmy. All simply because of the tankie baggage and I'm not the only one.
no because no normie knows what a tankie is
To be fair, while they might not know the term, encountering someone unironically defending North Korea or such probably would still make one uneasy.
I literally just found out what that word means because of Lemmy
The term "tanky" is actually new to me, and something I had to read up on. If anything, I find the way Lemmy is structured to be very appealing to anarchists, libertarians, communists, and conservatives alike.
It's just my opinion, but the perception of Lemmy is not universal, and seems to be from whatever vantage point people want to take. Rexxitors are valuing the "not run by Spez" and elements of community driven oversight free of investors, people banned from popular subreddits/Reddit itself seem to value the diverse moderators running different nodes, anarchists love being free from any corporate control and the "wild west" mentality of some instances, and conservatives will value any instance with free speech norms.
It's going to really amount to the instances as people learn more about it, rather than the framework itself.
Yes, it will.
Join us on kbin - it's friendly ;) https://readit.buzz