2025-22-08: Due to a (suspected .ml) troll spamming the comment section, you’ll now need to sort the comments by “Top” to see the actual comments from users on this post.
Good job everyone blocking and boycotting .ml! It’s having an effect, users are noticing and MAUs on their comms are falling!
And for anyone asking “Why are we boycotting/blocking lemmy.ml?” Here’s a quick recap:
Lemmy.ml is an instance run by admins who are hardcore tankies and will enforce their ideology on their instance through various means from allowing (and pushing it themselves) propaganda (Such as Russia being justified in some way to invade Ukraine) and known propaganda outlets (Like RT) to removing content on their instance critical of their favored authoritarian regimes such as Russia or China and even banning users for such speech or speech critical of them if it’s off their instance (Just like the Reddit mods of ol!).
If it was just some random instance it would have been defederated from long ago like the rest of the “Tankie Triad” (Hexbear and Lemmygrad), but they’ve positioned lemmy.ml as the “flagship” instance and abused that position and influence to become large enough to keep other instances from defederating from them.
Which I believe is harmful to the Lemmy-verse’s overall growth and outside reputation. I have seen it come up before on Reddit threads (and other testimonials from people who came back and tried it again) that “They tried Lemmy but it was a bunch of tankies and went back to Reddit”
I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer Lemmy to not end up with the reputation for being "Tankie Central " or even worse “Voat 2.0”.
So if you haven’t joined the boycott yet, join today and help us foster a better healthier Lemmy-verse!
You can take a look around here on !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for documentation of it or checkout this list of curated documentation
Noteworthy Selection
Full collection list at the end
Dessalines - Head .ml admin - Head Lemmy Dev
“Slava Ukraini” is considered a “Fascist slogan” - https://lemmy.world/post/36065538
“NK is actually good, and anything counter to that is Western LIES” - https://lemmy.world/post/31595035
“The BBC is not a credible news source” - https://lemmy.world/post/35824465
Showing support for Ukraine on .ml is worthy of a site ban - https://lemmy.world/post/32775563
Open declaration of support for Russia - https://lemmy.world/post/27352415
"Don’t worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! - https://lemmy.world/post/30580167
Censoring criticism of China while allowing fellow “in-crowd” user “concentration camps were just reeducation camps and weren’t that bad” misinfo to remain - https://lemmy.world/post/26985447
Censoring when users call out propaganda - https://lemmy.world/post/32776038 | https://lemmy.world/post/33416433 | https://lemmy.world/post/34051329 | https://lemmy.world/post/35919522
Discussing winnie the pooh and/or the negatives of china is a 30 day ban - https://lemmy.world/post/35374967
Davel - .ml admin
Spreading anti-ukraine Russian propaganda - https://lemmy.world/post/34655572
General negative sentiment to other instances who haven’t “seen the way” yet - https://lemmy.world/post/27426510
“See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn’t count!!” - https://lemmy.world/post/30673342
Response to a valid report of “NK is actually good” as propaganda/misinfo https://lemmy.world/post/32627834
Removal of a credible article that was on the Uyghur genocide - https://lemmy.world/post/33205310
It’s totally fine when Russia kills woman and children, war is war after all - https://lemmy.world/post/33224299
Nutomic - 2nd in command Lemmy Dev
Their continued transphobia - https://lemmy.world/post/29222558
General Tankie user behaviour
“Propaganda is good actually” - https://lemmy.world/post/36162233
“The China censorship tool isnt actually censorship! And if it is, it’s actually a good thing a state has that much power!” https://lemmy.world/post/30010789
Rooting for Russia in the Russia-Ukraine war https://lemmy.world/post/29274763
Spreading Russia talking points like the Ukraine invasion just being a “negotiating tactic” https://lemmy.world/post/27012640
Biden is worse than Trump - https://lemmy.world/post/33631617
Uyghur Genocide denialism - https://lemmy.world/post/33873969
Full Collection
Evidence of bans, censorship and bias to push their 'ideology'
https://lemmy.world/post/34395059
https://lemmy.world/post/32720369
https://lemmy.world/post/32298242
https://lemmy.world/post/32471440
https://lemmy.world/post/35919522
https://lemmy.world/post/32292143
https://lemmy.world/post/35254858
https://lemmy.world/post/32222856
https://lemmy.world/post/32426343
https://lemmy.world/post/32058315
https://lemmy.world/post/35919814
https://lemmy.world/post/32775892
https://lemmy.world/post/33554899
https://lemmy.world/post/33194656
https://lemmy.world/post/34502019
https://lemmy.world/post/34502777
https://lemmy.world/post/34503244
https://lemmy.world/post/35919218
https://lemmy.world/post/36120253
https://lemmy.world/post/36120386
https://lemmy.world/post/32825174
https://lemmy.world/post/32426884
https://lemmy.world/post/32191006
https://lemmy.world/post/32720652
https://lemmy.world/post/32676095
https://lemmy.world/post/32298242
https://lemmy.world/post/32292143
https://lemmy.world/post/32221990
https://lemmy.world/post/32222278
https://lemmy.world/post/32222991
https://lemmy.world/post/32223697
https://lemmy.world/post/32224698
https://lemmy.world/post/32425984
https://lemmy.world/post/31569892
https://lemmy.world/post/31368129
https://lemmy.world/post/31329952
https://lemmy.world/post/31596159
https://lemmy.world/post/30665418
https://lemmy.world/post/30876228
https://lemmy.world/post/31090903
https://lemmy.world/post/31329952
https://lemmy.world/post/31368129
https://lemmy.world/post/29490804
https://lemmy.world/post/29507466
https://lemmy.world/post/29878102
https://lemmy.world/post/29980157
https://lemmy.world/post/28480760
https://lemmy.world/post/28481615
https://lemmy.world/post/28482147
https://lemmy.world/post/28480936
https://lemmy.world/post/28482273
https://lemmy.world/post/28481272
https://lemmy.world/post/28481064
https://lemmy.world/post/27674360
https://lemmy.world/post/27674117
https://lemmy.world/post/27673934
https://lemmy.world/post/27673724
https://lemmy.world/post/27577337
https://lemmy.world/post/27378634
https://lemmy.world/post/27346630
https://lemmy.world/post/27341283
https://lemmy.world/post/27288224
https://lemmy.world/post/27156418
Allowing known propaganda outlets, altered headlines and general misinfo tactics
https://lemmy.world/post/32764202
https://lemmy.world/post/32323822
https://lemmy.world/post/32283425
https://lemmy.world/post/32289824
https://lemmy.world/post/32337368
https://lemmy.world/post/30843744
https://lemmy.world/post/28275465
https://lemmy.world/post/27428838
https://lemmy.world/post/27416097
Update 6/1/2025 - adding additional links since original post
Update 6/14/2025 - adding additional links since last edit
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Update 6/30/2025 - adding additional links since last edit
Update 7/03/2025 - adding additional links since last edit/formatting changes
Update 7/09/2025 - adding additional links since last edit
Update 8/13/2025 - adding additional links since last edit/formatting changes
Update 9/20/2025 - adding additional links since last edit
Server owners using lemmy as a platform need to realise that this shit is self-harm and they should work towards eliminating it in the culture of their communities. Attacks on the developers of Lemmy are ultimately harmful to the growth of your own server if you use Lemmy as a platform, they have the added danger of potential to completely demoralise the devs into giving up, which would completely end your platform entirely because this project is never going to be picked up and continued by liberals or conservatives as it is ideologically at odds with them.
If you want a decentralised reddit platform you need to deal with the fact it’s communists developing it and get over it. Communists are the only people that would develop it this way. If you want liberal or conservative platform design, that exists, it’s called Reddit.
Server owners should be playing down or eliminating this behaviour in their communities if they want to see the platform (and by extension their own community) succeed.
I think that’s the whole point. Basic divide and conquer strategy. The world has seen what genocide looks like. When I first joined lemmy, I noticed the fracturing of it plain as day. While I can’t say that I ever considered myself a “tankie”, I see the appeal, and it’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I’ve been told it was.
Yeah exactly why server owners should push back against this. They’re only harming themselves by allowing it to be constantly pushed by groups on the platform. The groups doing this are doing so specifically to harm the platform and by extension to harm the very communities that they constantly push this shit on. They are not good faith actors. They’re wreckers and they’re actively bringing as much harm to the liberal communities as they are to the socialist ones.
I realize that I’m in the minority here, that’s my main gripe with “tankies” so far. It’s a very wall’d off group. I know it may not even be possible, but I do think it’s a pigsty that has be dove head into first. I realize it’s highly likely they’re not even good faith actors. And just seeing some of the characters in my little instance, I imagine it’s full of thick-skinned motherfuckers, at least they better be if they made it this far with the hand they’re dealt. I get what you mean though, to an untrained eye, it does seem very fractured, and lemmy.world puts themselves on a pedestal. I went there first by default, just as a reddit alternative, and the barrage of “everyone else is the problem” is heavy.
What would you suggest for making it less walled off? Even if you don’t have suggestions, could you explain more about the problem itself so that others can consider solutions?
Just isn’t federated with many communities. Unless I have weird settings. I even see posts from certain communities, just not comments. Again, not a fault of hexbear, I’m the issue here. As much as I sometimes hate it, I thrive off toxicity. I’m still finding my home on lemmy. Someone in this post said, that people adjust their personality based on whatever gets most upvotes in each reddit community. And it’s hard to find the right one here. Hexbear is a community, and unless you find a home in any of the sticky posts, you’re outta luck. Those get 100s of comments, other posts are lucky to get 5.
You’re right that HB isn’t widely federated, but that’s mostly not HB’s choice. There are a handful of instances that HB defedded from because inter-instance conflict got really bad, but for the most part it’s actually that they blocked us, sometimes pre-emptively, and now HB is on most of the blocklists that get passed around as a recommendation for new instances.
Granted, there are several instances that we definitely would have blocked eventually had they not blocked us immediately, but I don’t think that’s true of the vast majority of instances.
I don’t look at the megas almost ever, for what it’s worth. I just look at the front page, where tbf I think the norm is more like 10 - 20 comments usually.
Yeah, I keep hearing that there was some conflict struggle session. I do think people here have a good corner of the internet for themselves, I just require disagreement I guess.
The only ones who still give a shit about this and haven’t migrated to piefed yet is shit.just.works and goat is 100% that troll. Hence it being posted there and not Lemmy.world. Even the anticommunist brigade learned that .world mods were a lost cause.
piefed
I must have missed this. Python? Sounds like a bad idea. It’s been a while since I was in the SEO game but Python sites underperformed in google serps because performance underperforms compared to sites in other languages. Performance is a key metric google likes, you have to be an absolute giant of a company to get away with poor performance and still get search results outside of niche search phrases
Yeah and in their rush to roll out new features to outcompete lemmy they’re accruing a lot of technical debt. I didn’t look into it too much but apparently they’re messing with activitypub in a way that makes most of their features only work on other piefed servers or forces devs of other platforms to implement them themselves, when supposedly there is a better way
Features won’t “outcompete” lemmy.
For server owners: Nobody is joining lemmy to create a new lemmy server based on feature completeness, they’re choosing based on ease of use and setup. The easier and more brainless the setup can be made, the more likely new servers will be created.
For content consumers: They’re choosing based on what content exists or because propaganda said x is better because reasons and they believed it. Sometimes that’s ideological, sometimes that’s preference for a specific UI, often it’s just emotion and vibes.
Lemmy dev focused on growing server owners should focus on making the setup as painless as possible, and making the backend as easy to use and customisable as possible. Lemmy dev focused on content consumers should focus on content first, then achieving good vibes, then ideology. Arguably the latter 2 of these Lemmy has been fairly poor at achieving, which is where alternatives found success filling.
I would say Python can be a better choice just because you can get more contributors than Rust and develop faster, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. What’s going on is Lemmy has some very strict design patterns and somehow manages to use 10x more resources than PieFed.
Maybe Lemmy more capable of handling larger server loads than Piefed but idles really heavy like a java server would. But to a self-hosted fediverse server, the low idle seems ideal.
Reddit is implemented in Python too. It’s fine.
This is why there has been a shift to other federated platforms like Piefed and Kbin.
Reddit2 and reddit3
MoreTankieReddit
Wait…
Hasn’t kbin been dead for like 2 years?
Mbin is still a thing though, at least last I checked (which has been awhile).
I see this a lot of FOSS user communities. There often is the idea that they are doing the developers a service by using their software rather than the other way around. Bullying open source developers is pretty common, especially volunteer open source developers.
There is the idea that someone else will just pick up the project when you push the current devs out.
There is the idea that someone else will just pick up the project when you push the current devs out.
They’ve been trained to believe supply will appear to meet demand because of capitalism but fail to see that the incentive structure in FOSS is different and many devs are doing it because they want to, not because there’s anything to gain from it.
Push the people out who want to do it and you’ll have nobody that wants to do it. The reasons they want to do it may well be exactly the reasons that these people are pushing them out in such a self-defeating way.
There is the idea that someone else will just pick up the project when you push the current devs out.
lol, lmao.
The difference between a FOSS “fan” and a FOSS contributor.
The same 5 fuckwitted firebrands posting again and again with no hint of irony about how they’re being censored by evil communists.
While the evil communists allow them to use their platform and take refuge from corporate media.
how they’re being censored by evil communists
Fucking wish it worked
Absolute loser energy
For real
As much as they like to squeal about ‘what-aboutism’ l, they sure do looooovvvvee to use it
These are, I would assume, grown-ass adults. And this is how they choose to spend their limited free time lmfao
Which I believe is harmful to the Lemmy-verse’s overall growth and outside reputation.
JFC I don’t want growth to be the point of Lemmy. Reddit didn’t become cancer jut because of a few bad mods or admins or users, it became cancer because the entire model of “everyone on the internet is all on the same 5 sites/apps” is cancer. It naturally produces a shitty environment where no one sees the other users as people but rather faceless text and so everyone is inherently suspicious and sees everyone as bots and trolls. I like Lemmy because it reminds me of the old internet where forums were places for group chat, not throwing the most high-engagement bait into the void.
I go on Hexbear, I see the regulars, I have a little understanding of what’s going on with them, so interacting with them feels like it’s actual interaction and not “which hivemind based on what subreddit I’m in at the moment am I dealing with?” Like let Reddit die, but have a million niches bloom forth in its death rather than “well if we just tweak a few things and make it feel decentralized that’ll be good” while trying to keep the rotten core intact.
go on Hexbear, I see the regulars, I have a little understanding of what’s going on with them, so interacting with them feels like it’s actual interaction and not “which hivemind based on what subreddit I’m in at the moment am I dealing with?
39·1 month agoThere’s been a slightly similar post in the back of my mind. Hexbear is not without its faults, but its a lot better than many other sites. I’d never do my signature bit on Lemmy.world or reddit, probably not even lemmy.ml
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
Yeah, I’ve been here long enough to where like…Hexbear is a community I genuinely care about, for better or worse. I know a ton of you, plenty of you have even met me, and some of you are good IRL friends.
“I dont like that this website is built and run by tankies”
“Leave? No, why would I do that?”
A lot of them are trying to, it’s one of the main draws of Piefed.
Mark my words, it’ll turn from a liberal haven into a Nazi bar if they kick out all “the tankies”.
Meanwhile I switched from .world to .ml earlier this year and I’m having a way better time here and it’s helped me learn so much.
So commendable of them to compile a list of our based posts.
(Except for Nutomic’s borderline transphobic comments)
that song from sesame street about one thing not being like the others was in my head when i saw that
When I meet people online who have disagreeable political opinions compared to mine, I’ll try discussing with them in good faith for a bit. If they’re an outright vocal fascist or bigot I simply tell them to suck my ass and die, then I go about my day. I would never in a million years make a huge screed of a thread full of complaints. Why do libs do this to themselves
Literal Orwell behaviour.
Why do libs do this to themselves
Cognitive dissonance. They know there is a big hole in their worldview, and that something is wrong, but can’t articulate why, all they can do is point to people with more incoherent worldviews than their own so they can feel a little better about it. Though this only works on conservatives. When they come up against a leftist, they can’t attack the ideas anymore, because they either don’t or refuse to understand them. So they can only attack the person, which is why they go on these long screeds about how “wrong” tankies are because they are in an echo chamber, they are secret conservatives, they are mean, they are rude, etc. because they need to prove to themselves that the person they are talking to is invalid and doesn’t count somehow. And of course libs tend to follow the idea that the more verbose an argument, the more correct it must be.
Anticommunists who are otherwise normal would just assume the entire project is biased towards communism because of the commie devs and just find another social media site to use. It takes a real pathetic crank to simultaneously cry about real and alleged bias in Lemmy while continuing to use Lemmy.
General Tankie user behaviour
General Tankie reporting for duty!
“2025-22-08” this is your mind on liberalism
seriously, who would do this?
Americans.
I love how the megathread for the Dessalines DPRK meme not only lacks any kind of statement of the DPRK being this great place to live or the best country on planet earth as the liberal strawman claims (I wonder if being the most sanctioned place on planet earth has something to do with it), but in that very picture has some guy espousing true European values by calling Russians “orcs” (“Asiatic hordes” in Old English)
Biden is worse than Trump
If someone being allowed to say this is “extremism” to an intolerable degree to you, that means you will join us in our struggle to destroy the US, right?
Or is that the kind of thing that you’re only meant to be outraged about when it happens in a leftist online space and you can tolerate it when it’s actual fascists, the literal government and a vast amount of the population saying that?
Liberals yet again being a bunch of babies incapable of not gobbling the empire’s propaganda as irrevocable truth, therefore all leftists are doodoo wrong
Shit man the FBI oughtta hire this guy.
Why would they do that when he’s already doing the work for free?
Maybe they were already CIA.
