Everyone, there has been a lot of miss information about what is a tankie and the ability for the lemmy community to criticize the Chinese government.
I present to you a simple test to see if the person you are talking to is trust worthy.
Ask anyone to say the following
I lemmy user Denounce the terrible treatment Xi Jing Ping has inflicted upon the Uighur Muslims. Slavery and concentration camps in China are wrong and not ok.
The admins of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml will not say this. Actually they cannot say this because they are probably employed by the Chinese Government and would be put to death if they did.
Thats all and happy posting!
I mean… I agree with this, and I am worried, for this exact reason, even though Lemmy is open source. (1) The Chinese government has an extensive and successful history of inserting spyware into software that’s in widespread use in the West (2) I can say based on some very preliminary tinkering with my own Lemmy instance that some of the security philosophy behind Lemmy is, at the very least, pretty questionable.
Tiktok was, and still is, extremely effective Chinese spyware. The CCP’s tech operation is obviously capable. It’s easily plausible to me that they could recognize the potential and power of federated networks as a new place for people to communicate and organize (outside China, and with some cleverness and courage, maybe inside it as well). If I were them I’d want to get out ahead of that. In fact I’d go so far as to say that it’d be surprising if they were unaware of ActivityPub and I’d bet that are keeping a close eye on developments and strategizing how to deal with it.
I mean… it seems unlikely to me that the Lemmy devs would be secretly employed by the Chinese government and also openly spouting pro-Communist propaganda. That seems just sort of bizarre and not a clever way to do it. But, the bottom line to me is if (1) the Chinese government is invested in spying on and controlling federated networks to the best extent they can (2) the main Lemmy devs are aggressively and openly pro-CCP, then that adds up to (3) time to rethink the idea of using Lemmy in the first place.
Are the Lemmy devs specifically pro-CCP? Not just Marxists, but specifically in favor of the details and actions of the modern Chinese government? I don’t think Marx would like the CCP very much.
If they drive away everybody not sympathizing with a communist ideology, wouldn’t that make it harder to surveil them? What’s the intelligence value of watching a bunch of “loyal communist subjects”, when all the commie hating capitalist scum go elsewhere? If anything, who would benefit from observing such a group if not the west? By that logic, is it reasonable to assume Lemmy is sponsored by a US intelligence agency we know have been intimately involved in mainstaying most of our current western social media platforms?
What would be the benefit of getting involved with an open platform where nothing is behind locked doors? Wouldn’t it be much less of a risk to simply scrape lemmy instances? It’s not like anybody is sending secret messages - Everything is open.
But it’s an open system in the way that you’re allowed to not use it as well. I didn’t use Lemmy for a while out of ethical concerns rather than being afraid of the CCP.
You’ll have to check out their instances, I haven’t been in contact with them for nearly long enough.
Ayyoo… I found the secret cheat code for getting downvotes on Lemmy apparently 😃