Karu 🐲

“ML philosophy”, as in the somehow monolithical ideological orientation of the .ml instance, is not a thing. Regardless of what this extremely loud minority keeps crying about, the truth is that .ml admins either don’t care or are not very good at keeping “dissent” at bay. If anything, .ml is more tolerating of a wider variety of ideologies, including neoliberalism but not limited to that, which is in reality the pain point that y’all keep complaining about. .world is, by comparison, a lot more relentless at silencing dissent and maintaining a homogeneous ideology, just one that a lot of westerners are comfortable with. Lemmygrad and Hexbear are also a lot more dedicated to maintaining ideological homogeneity, but no amount of you (generic, not you in particular) pretending that .ml operates in the same exact way is going to make it true.

“ML philosophy”, as in marxism-leninism, is a branch of a wide family of marxist ideologies that has laid out the groundwork for a lot of the modern framework on how we understand society and labor. I’d believe you if you told me you haven’t seen it because it’s not mainstream; doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist or that it isn’t a fruitful field of study for sociologists. Notably, it is also not widely discredited outside of the US, a country that has a history of propagandizing exactly against this kind of thing.

I don’t understand your point about Dessalines’s place of residence? Even if you live in the US, you can be critical of the hegemonic narrative, you know. But my experience seems to be the converse to yours: This weird obsession with being concerned about tankies coming and eating you is genuinely not that strong of a thing except for extremely online edgelords. I hardly even see this kind of behavior outside of specifically westerners on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Lemmy. And even then, there are more sane westerners on all these platforms who know that, in real life, the ones out to eat us all are most likely not coming exactly from that side of the spectrum.

Whenever I see comments like these, and their posters are asked to ellaborate, they usually always end up with something along the lines of “Well I wanted to be transphobic in peace and they wouldn’t let me”.

I won’t ask you to elaborate. Don’t know if it’s your case, don’t care either. At this point if you are seriously attempting to conflate .ml with the other two instances you are undoubtedly engaging in bad faith. But if this wasn’t already a red flag in its own right, you went out of your way to confirm it by saying that “.ml is legitimately worse than reddit in basically every way”.

You are not “thousands of users” and it’s quite pretentious of you to project your experience onto so many people. However, by adding fuel to the constant fire of the never-ending tankie discourse on Lemmy, you are helping making this place hostile to everyone except for a very thin fraction of the political spectrum (the one that is allowed to thrive in the West), therefore making it suck on Lemmy for, you know, actual thousands of users of many different backgrounds and creeds that don’t share the rabid anti-tankie brainrot.

Not willing to start an argument, since this whole topic about “tankies” on Lemmy is exactly as toxic, disingenuous and unproductive as it was back on Reddit, so I might not reply further than this.

But elsewhere in this thread I have seen you post “evidence” that was actually just some ridiculous meanwhileongrad thread. If we are going by those standards then I might as well pull out all the exaggerated out of context circlejerking about liberals that is common on Hexbear. If we are to drop our collective IQ to zero, we may well be playing this game in both directions. But oh wait, turns out it’s only bad when Hexbear does it to own the libs, but it’s fully solid compelling evidence when another certain instance does it about “tankies”.

The claim that .ml is censoring comments “for nothing else other than being against Russia/China/NK”, at the very least, does not match my experience of browsing .ml at all. But if you do have evidence as you say, I invite you to actually post it and let people discuss. It shouldn’t be hard; the modlog is public.

That said, I’m personally not interested in starting the 95474214th Lemmy argument about tankies this week on this website so don’t expect me to reply.

Jesus fucking christ dude, the insane obsession you guys over at lemmy.world have with tankies is unreal. Maybe go outside and touch some grass.

It’s always the same two instances complaining about the rest of the Fediverse not bending over to bootlick the US overworlds, and accusing the rest of somehow simping for other regimes just on the basis of opposing that. It is seriously getting tedious and insufferable.

On top of that, including lemmy.ml in there is just disingenuous. Grad and hexbear sure, they are spaces openly and deliberately created to discuss leftist politics. But there is literally nothing making lemmy.ml any less generalist than any instance, maybe other than a certain instance that is happy to ban and defederate anyone who dares question the US hegemony. You cannot bind lemmy.ml to “tankism” on any basis other than the Lemmy devs being socialist themselves despite letting anyone of any political creed use their software, unless you are dumb enough to take decontextualized meanwhileongrad-level bullshit seriously.

I moved over from .world to .ml to flee away from this American exceptionalism brainroot and, guess what? It didn’t work. I keep seeing the same constant complaints about this fictional group of Lemmy users that really like Putin and Xi or something and weaponizing those complaints to support and enact hostile actions against people and instances discussing anti-capitalist, anti-establishment policy. The only thing that changed is that now, besides that, I can also see leftists users engage in posts from my own account. So, funnily enough, the echo chamber effect became weaker after I moved to .ml.

It was a rather funny timing that this whole discussion about lemmy.ml being a hardcore tankie instance that should be widely defederated etc came to be about at the time that lemmy.world defederated lemmygrad and consequently ran out of red-flavored scapegoats to claim that they are being oppressed by some nebulous left-wing echo chamber.

Say you hire a company to build a house. You don’t have the skills or the know-to, but at some point, you’ll have to deal with some inevitable aspects of building a house, if only to discuss them with the workers. Say they “force” you to deal with plumbing, for example by including it in the budget. Imagine if you not only don’t know how plumbing works, but also what plumbing is. Maybe you’ve never had to think about it before. What would you do? Would you go to another company that doesn’t force you to deal with it, perhaps by not even providing it in the first place?

Say for the sake of argument that this becomes a generalized problem, and companies use it as an excuse to no longer provide plumbing in new houses, as a cost-saving measure. Most people don’t seem to care. Over 10 years pass by, and people have gotten used to expect not having running water at home. “It sucks, but that’s the way it is I guess”.

Now, a community-driven initiative arises to build cheaper houses, complete with running water. Can you imagine most people refusing participating, because building a house with running water implies having to know that plumbing supplies water? That the mere thought of it is already too complicated, and that maybe having fresh water at home is only for people whose special interest is plumbing?

You need some elementary knowledge on things, if only to exist in the world. The Fediverse, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is not that complicated once you grasp the most basic concepts of the internet.

While I won’t deny outright that open-source devs most of the time don’t think about making their software accessible to the wider public, and that some aspects of decentralized social media still have to be ironed out (duplicated communities on Lemmy are a pet-peeve of mine); these issues are often heavily blown out of proportion. Besides people honestly not understanding some concepts, I think there is also some deliberate anti-intellectualism going on with this topic in particular. People who spend their afternoons troubleshooting Windows just so that their computer games run at 60 FPS suddenly don’t know what a website is when Mastodon is mentioned.

I’m pretty certain that this “Fediverse is too complicated” mantra would not have worked at all before 2010.

While I understand and largely agree with your point, I think it’s worthwhile to question whether it’s reasonable that this is the way people expect the Internet to work.

Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack, so that unless you’re somewhat tech-savvy, you can’t tell the concept of app apart from the concept of server. Not unlike how Android and iOS have been obscuring many basics of the system to the point that some people don’t even know what a filesystem is.

Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved, rather than just “the way things work” and that we need to cather to it. Mostly because FOSS services will always, invariably, struggle to adapt to a conception of the internet optimized for consumption and nothing else.

I agree that people nowadays might struggle to understand what, for instance, a third-party app is, but I also think it’s too an unreasonably low bar to just let it be, and have FOSS forever playing acrobatics to somehow adapt to it.

Whether Lemmy should be the one leading this struggle is a whole another argument lol. Somehow forcing people to understand this with Lemmy in particular, without changing anything of the larger culture, will just cause people to not use Lemmy outright.

But this cannot be the way it works. Everyone using the internet needs some bare minimum tech literacy.