I’ve been aware of Lemmy for a long time, but I’ve always been somewhat wary of it because it’s developed by tankies, and its flagship server (lemmy.ml) has a history of tolerating/encouraging tankie politics.... There’s just no way I could feel comfortable in a community that supports the right-wing nationalist Putin’s war on Ukraine, or outright denies the harsh repression meted out against Muslims in China. I’m far from the only one leery of Lemmy for this reason – the FediTips Mastodon account doesn’t recommend it , either.
– Jessica Smith, On Reddit and Its Federated Alternatives
And I agree. My position is very clear since Russia started its invasion in Ukraine. Not last year, but since 2014. Everywhere I hanged out, like the bird site, the zuck site or the snoo site, I didn't have any trouble defending and stating my position, besides the typical lonely tankie who often appeared.
And when I joined the fediverse for the first time... tankies, tankies everywhere. Obviously that was in one single Mastodon instance, but that experience was not positive for me. And luckily, the instance I'm in is more supportive and doesn't tolerate tankies. Same thing with sopuli, a Lemmy instance, where I can see posts about Ukrainian advances and success, or posts against Chinese government.
The more users, the more balanced the fediverse will be, but as that post says, there is still a lot to do against Muslim discrimination, etc.
Tbf, Western media presents a Western narrative, Eastern media presents an Eastern narrative. I am unaware of an unbiased narrative. Imo, perhaps drawing on all perspectives would give a more nuanced view.
I disagree, while obviously somehow biased, the western "narrative" is certainly more nuanced, and dissent is not punished.
You can regularly see opposing opinions like "let's help Ukraine" as well as "aw Russia invaded because NATO was expanding" or "let's stop the war by stopping aid and weapons".
The Eastern media is consistently government propaganda.
Come on, let's not even hint at the fact that they're the same thing.
One other thing that I appreciate is that news are REGULARLY presented with the disclaimer "this thing seems to have happened but we haven't had the chance to verify it yet", which is a very healthy way to report.
And yet, major Western outlets such as BBC, NYT have, per leaks and own admission, have planted psyop articles at the behest of their governments, Ava refused to publish even that that doesn’t pose any threat but embarrassment.
It occurs to me to seek news from a variety of sources (infotainment sources excluded). How many times have our own governments and media lied to us, about say, the global South, and Middle East?
Quite a few. So too, I’d wager, every other government, with rare exception. 20 years ago, I may have been as adamant about the opposing perspective.
As the guy above said, I don't think it's comparable how Eastern and Western outlets portray things. Yeah, there will obviously be bias towards Western narratives, but for example US actually recognizes its war crimes and punishes (although maybe not harsh enough) them. Or at least can admit they've done a mistake in X situation. This would be unheard of by China/Russia under current regimes.
The fact that almost no one can even entertain the idea beyond a speck of dust on the Western reputation suggests to me perhaps we Westerners are as deeply entrenched in our own governmental propaganda as others are in theirs.
After all, to entertain an idea does not imply the acceptance of it, and information about our own crimes, and lack of accountability (until hard evidence is leaked, at great personal expense of the whistleblowers) is freely available. I’ll add that for several decades, I was as deeply entrenched and “certain” that we were nigh blameless, as well. I had the experience of trying to prove others were wrong, and to my surprise, proved them correct.
Certainly there are problems in how we Westerners portray ourselves, but we are doing far better than Russia/China. I by no means mean we are blameless, just that putting equal between how we portray ourselves and how Russia/China portray themselves is, in my opinion, not fair.
You still can go to an instance like Lemmy.world (linked in the OP, actually). Those aren't controlled by Lemmy's devs.
The link is just a little confusing because it's a Lemmy.world link looking at a discussion on Lemmy.ml, but it's not something on Lemmy.world itself.
Lemmy.world is run by the Mastodon.world guys, who are on the level. Lemmy.world is a separate instance with no ties to the maintainers of Lemmy proper. If the Lemmy devs ever do anything off-the-rails, then Lemmy itself can be forked into its own project.
A great example - you know Truth Social, yeah? It's actually part of Mastodon. They took Mastodon's code, forked it, and put a new skin on top of it. Obviously Truth Social and Mastodon despise each other, but because it's all open-source there's nothing Mastodon can do about Truth Social existing.
(But yes, those associations is one reason why I'm here on Kbin and not on Lemmy.)
I saw this too. However, 3 of the receipts show that those comments were removed by moderators at Beehaw. I understand the sentiment against tankies, don't get me wrong. I just don't like seeing misguided information. I think as we spread out from Reddit, it's important to be part of communities you align with but also be careful of bashing communities too.
@WXFanatic the threadstarter talks about making the moderation stuff more clear. But the devs are defending their 'orientalism' in the comments and other places. There is also a low bar for things being western propaganda. Even implying Reddit is western propaganda.
People love to shit on western civilization, in the same sentence advocate for "Free speech" (the irony is killing me) and for some reason refuse to just pack up and go to the countries they seem to "love" so much and experience what it is to have no voice at all and just fall in line with what you are being told 24/7.
I say we settle here on Kbin, soon we will have way enough content for everyone. We report the bugs, adjust the interface and we prepare a sane moderation so we have a nice settlement to present to the inevitable waves of redditors who will join us in the coming months.
I see that there is someone already publishing a Kbin extension for firefox, more is probably coming.
Perfectly fine. In the end, I think the original devs of Lemmy are going to be swamped by the ecosystem that's developing around them; they don't get to decide what the community's overall opinions are going to be and if Lemmy.ml becomes hostile to that people will just go to other instances. Like Beehaw.
I believe one cannot separate politics from code, as the very philosophy of FOSS is political, and based on that opinion I don't really believe beehaw can separate itself morally from the Lemmy devs. Secondly, as long as Lemmy software is used, it supports the developers, in the same way as we're supporting Ernest through donations. In my mind, in order to truthfully be independent, Beehaw should fork the software and make it theirs, which they discuss in this post. These are just my thoughts.
I've looked at Lemmy for a while but never got into it because it lacked diversity. Not that it is impossible. The infrastructure is there to build something interesting but the type of content they attract was just boring because it was so biased and from such a narrow viewpoint. If I created my own Lemmy and people similar to me populated it, I do not doubt that they'd de-federate from my instance. Not because I am extreme in any way, just because they would find me unlike them. Discovering kbin has been a breath of fresh air.
I've been using a combo of lemmy.world, kbin.social, and squabbles.io to get my reddit fix. They're all slightly different variations on the reddit flavor. Squabbles is by far the easiest to use, so I'd recommend checking it out for users who are new/want an easy transition.
It is the same as r/Conservative which is ran/moderated by well probably conservatives and like minded but that doesn't mean that the whole of Reddit is pushing Conservative propaganda.
I hope people understand the difference.
If there are enough instances within a federation with different may I say progressive views than those will drown out the noise of others.
People only have "power" over their own instance.
As an instance you can even block instances that you don't want to communicate with (as far as I know).
The issue is also that the Lemmy developers likely run both lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, which have prior shady moderation history. This Mastodon thread from 29th August 2021 sets out some pretty good reasons not to use Lemmy: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379
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