this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
(caution of biased source)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism, Islamic Terrorism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.
Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users as it handwaves their extremism.
Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.
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You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.
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...my dude, same team, but ffs they are not "looking the other way," this is how they want it, they fully support this, this is why they made lemmy, they got censored on reddit and came here so they can ~~be the censors themselves~~ have freedom of speech. Dessalines and Nutomic designed .ml like this and it will 100% never change, I'm just glad they were dumb enough to make it decentralized so they can't control more than their bubble as much as they want to.
Sorry, slight misunderstanding, I was referencing other instance admins looking the other way and not wanting to defederate from .ml. But yea the admins of .ml are absolutely hard core Tankies and use their influence as main Lemmy devs to push that agenda
Sorry lol, my mistake!
Theoretically they can’t but I think them being main developers may have some unforeseen ramifications in the future. Not sure how exactly but if there is a way they will find it to further their agenda.
I don’t know if the code is good right now but if it is shit for example no one else will want to fork and maintain it. If only they know how entirety of it works due to spaghetti and quirks then it would be possible to smuggle in some rewards for average commie user behaviour (brigading, yelling) or other subtly malicious functionality.
Also, tankies aren’t equal to nazis in the eyes of the most netizens. Nazis will be swiftly banned and eradicated by decisive defederation but tankies are treated slightly differently. You could easily harness that with the very design of a social media platform. Lemmy actually allows just enough dissenting voices and brigading (more than Reddit) for them to still echo through the instances.
Tankies existing there and thriving as neighbours will be always affecting everyone on Lemmy. It is designed that way that if you really want to be annoying and spread your agenda and brigade then no amount of blocks and bans and defederations can really stop you and certainly it is much easier than on Reddit. Even the default sorting by hot and lack of hiding downvoted comments supports this.
Meanwhile nazis at the same time would be swiftly silenced. the Lemmy demographics just treat tankies more naively. enough for them to blend in with the normal left and try to move main instances Overton window day by day.
It’s a fundamental flaw of this platform (their creators) that will always hold it back. The question isn’t just "Can they sneak in malicious code?" but also "Does the platform’s structure inherently reward certain behaviors?" The answer to the latter seems to be yes.
Forks for idealogical reasons never work, take redot as an example. When a developers beliefs begin to affect the code itself, then a fork is warranted. For now, lemmy is safe.
Kbin and Piefed are good alternatives to Lemmy already and are on the same federated network.
I agree, but lemmy as a project is still fine, for now.
I am excited for piefed though, there is a lot it does right. I'm sure sublinks will be ready any day now.
True.
I edited it sorry, always write comments heavily editing lol adhd
"Still true" lol.