Hey everyone, I’m new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says “Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.”).
The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the “lemmy.ml” server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”.
So I thought I try that one when it’s from Lemmy’s own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?
To their credit, I think the Principles of Communism thing is partially meant as a floodgate, since the devs really do believe in their project and want to avoid over-centralization from everyone defaulting to one instance. They know many people will go “What the hell? No!” and go somewhere else and that’s exactly the point. I’d be surprised if they really thought it would get almost anyone to engage with Marxism with the prompt, especially since you can copy the first sentence of the text and not read anything else (and even just reading it is not engaging with it). I think it’s more like a little joke.
Also, copying a sentence of your choice to a pamphlet is not a pledge and I think it’s silly to view it that way. If it helps, iirc, one of the sentences that appears is “No.” and they will accept that as an answer.
But assuming this was “promoting an ideology directly,” would you find it less sketchy for an instance to promote ideology indirectly? Because if you aren’t directly doing ideology, that just means you are indirectly doing it (sometimes very deliberately). Personally, I appreciate transparency.
most people have answered your questions so i want to chime in the information that i wish someone had told me when i first joined:
a lot of people came to lemmy from reddit like you and i both did and also mostly for the same reasons. most of them went to lemmy.world because it was the first search result on the big search engines like google & bing. those people have turned lemmy.world into a mini reddit and ended up recreating the same problems that reddit has plus more; hence the bot check that you ran into when you signed up.
the original instances of lemmy all have a strong leftist bent; i think of it like if r/politics; r/anarchy/; r/communism; r/socialism; etc. went off and created another social media platform and then started discussing everything like reddit does, but from this perspective. instances is the name given to individual servers and all those servers combined is nicknamed the lemmyverse, or lemmy, for short.
the fediverse is the nickname given to the pubg protocol that’s shared between all the platforms that use it like lemmy, mastadon, kbin, threads, bluesky, etc and that means that the conversations from all of those platforms are shared amongst each other so it’s possible to be on lemmy and have a conversation with someone on kbin, for example. i stick with lemmy because it’s doesn’t have any venture capital investors pushing the admins to enshitify it to maximize profits like has been happening to reddit and bluesky; i’ve been moving from one social media platform to another because of enshitification like reddit’s since the 1990s (before it was called social media) so this last part matters to me a lot.
i started off on lemmy.world like most ex-redditors did and discovered that they’ve duplicated the censorship thing that reddit likes to do with defederations so i switched to lemmy.ml since it doesn’t defederate with anybody due to fact they’re the primary instance where lemmy development takes place. the federation is what makes lemmy decentralized and when you defederate; you cut yourself off from the rest of the lemmyverse, but lemmy.world and some of the other instances that got most of the ex-redditors like the star trek instance use it to try cut off content and people from the instances that they don’t like and that’s their right since it’s their instance. lemmy is decentralized so trying to cut out people & content only serves to cut yourself off and that’s intention behind the fediverse; to make it so that no power tripping mod or ban happy admin can stop the conversation like they do on reddit.
everything is done by volunteers and donations and, if you don’t like one instance; you can move onto any other one and still get a similar experience. i don’t like letting other people decide what i can & can’t see and who i can & can’t talk to so i mostly stick to the instances that don’t defederate with anybody like lemmy.ml and i use the block-people and block-communities features when i feel like i need them for myself.
Open source is inherently political and you depend on software being developed by communists. We are here to evade corporate censorship, censor reactionaries, spread agitprop, and discuss raising the quality of life of all working people.
Not just tech workers. Everyone.
Lemmy’s main developers are communists, and lemmy.ml is one of the original Lemmy instances. “.ml” actually stands for Marxist-Leninist, and that instance has a very large number of political leftists.
Most likely it’s a combination of wanting to attract like minded people and deterring right-wingers & trolls. Of course, if you don’t like it, you can sign up to another instance. That’s the beauty of Lemmy, no single entity “owns” it.
.ml is actually Mali’s TLD. That it happens to also be an initialism for Marxism-Leninism is a coincidence.
That they picked it specifically is not a coincidence, though.
Right, but .ml doesn’t stand for Marxist-Leninist is the thrust of what I’m saying.
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They used that TLD because it had the same letters as Marxist-Leninist, not because they’re from Mali. They’re not from Mali.
Why do people keep repeating this? Every time they do someone corrects them but they seem to just assume that’s what .ml is without so much as a google search about it.
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Is it a coincidence or did they pick the Mali domain space for that reason? That’s the story I heard
To be fair, it is a large coincidence. I get that it’s wrong, but it’s widespread because the dots are close enough the brain closes the gap by itself.
It’s not exactly wrong, though. It’s clearly intentionally chosen because people are gonna connect these dots.
I’ve been told directly by the admins that it was picked because it was free. I don’t doubt that the reference wasn’t thought of, but the driving factor was that the domain is free.
Wait? What’s the reason? Like, the tld is for Mali, but lemmy and lemmygrad use it as “marxist-leninist” as a joke. Or at least that’s what I thought the story was
They were free up until 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ml
This part is funny
Employees for the United States Armed Forces regularly misspell emails—suffixed with the .mil TLD—with .ml. In 2013, Dutch internet entrepreneur Johannes Zuurbier took on the .ml TLD. He attempted to contact the United States government about classified information being sent to army.ml and navy.ml in 2014 through Dutch diplomats.[citation needed] The contents of these emails include crew and staff lists, maps and photos of installations, naval inspection reports, and passwords. Emails that were sent to the .ml TLD include the travel itinerary of chief of staff James McConville on a trip to Indonesia in 2023, information about Kurdistan Workers’ Party efforts in the United States, and Australian Department of Defence documents detailing issues with Australian F-35s. On 17 July 2023, Zuurbier’s contract expired and control was reverted back to the Malian government.
It’s been speculated they paid for theirs because other sites and at least one instance had their free .ml domains revoked
??
Emphasis on speculation, but I found the instance that had its ml domain taken away
Maybe Lemmy.ml had a free domain but they got to keep it because they had it for a longer time. Who knows?
So .ml isn’t an intentional reference to communism?
Inherently, no. That they picked it specifically is almost definitely an intentional reference.
Where do you get these insights?
The domain was initially managed by Sotelma, a Malian telecommunications company. After Sotelma was privatised in 2009, the .ml zone was redelegated by IANA to the Agence des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (AGETIC), a Malian government agency, and the process completed in 2013.[1] The agency then announced that it would give away .ml domains for free in partnership with Freenom with a view to improve the usage and the knowledge of the IT industry in Mali. It was the first African nation to start giving away domains for free.[2][3][4] The ten-year contract with Freenom expired on 17 July 2023. Since then the registry is operated by AGETIC itself and the free domain offer was discontinued. All paid Freenom .ml domains were migrated to the new system.
I understand that, but I’m asking whether a .ml domain was chosen as a quirky little reference to communism? Like, I can start selling contacts on contacts.contact. I’m curious about the intent
I’ve got no skin in this game, but i thought you could register a site on a TLD for a country other than the one you live in? That you can hunt around for one that matches whatever backronym your looking for now. From what other posters have said it sounds like the craters of lemmy .ml may have chosen the Mali domain because it was also a communist call.
It was free making .ml domains good for web development.
I’m sure @dessalines and @nutomic has a chuckle about it. Definitely a fitting TLD to use, especially for lemmygrad.
LOL. It does not stand for Marxist-Leninist. That’s some grade A trolling if I saw it.
Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.").
Yes, exactly, you can host your own or sign up at one someone’s already hosts. The resistance is in the ability to choose which admins you trust and align with your views while still interacting with the rest of us.
The devs run their own and have their own rules and censorship but you don’t have to sign up there. Does that help?
Helps a lot, thanks for your answer!
Seems like a simple task to help verify that you are not a bot. It might also help deter applicants who are anti-communist. I guess you solved the problem for yourself by choosing a different instance.
The developers of Lemmy are Communists, they don’t hide this fact.
To answer your first question, there are no “free speech” instances in wide use, depending on your point of view an instance might be “censoring” or fighting “misinformation.” It’s up to you to pick an instance you want.
So um here’s the thing.
The fediverse is a network of interconnected servers/instances that are independently hosted.
Within the fediverse, there’s Lemmy
There are many different “servers” (I’m just gonna call it servers, instances is not a commonly used word) of Lemmy. Each have different owners. But they all run the Lemmy software of their servers.
The Lemmy software is an open source project, contributed by many different people who know how to code. The main developers believe in Marxism-Leninism, basically what countries like USSR and People’s Republic of China claim to also follow this ideology (or at least they used to).
lemmy.ml is one of the first servers, run by the main developers.
So there, if you disagree with their ideology, you should probably use a different server.
Thanks for that information!
There’s plenty of censorship on Lemmy, but unlike Reddit, the censorship is orchestrated by the individual server, not by a corporation in control of the whole ecosystem. Go post something pro-capitalist on lemmy.ml, or something claiming climate change is a hoax on slrpnk.net, or something anti-trans on lemmy.blahaj.zone and see how fast it gets taken down - you could consider that censorship, but the reason Lemmy is better than Reddit in this regard is that you can go post that same thing on another instance, in a community that supports those views, and it’ll stay up. It’s all up to the administration of the individual instance.
Even if you can’t find an instance / community that will espouse your unique views, you can create your own, and post whatever you like, and everyone who federates with you will be able to see it. That’s how Lemmy is resistant to censorship.
I’m not touching the lemmy.ml question with a ten foot pole, someone else can field that one.
The original developers of Lemmy are communists who were seeking to create a social media space that would be free from corporate censorship and centralization. When they created ml, they decided to have it be geared towards communists and leftists as their specific flavor of the Lemmy community, because that is what interested them.
If you are looking for a less political and more general instance, I’d recommend:
lemmy.world
sh.itjust.works
lemmy.dbzero.comlmfao dbzero terms of service is literally to follow the anarchist COC, hosts Lefty memes, and one of the largest anarchist communities.
World is peak neoliberal, has a stupid media bias bot calibrated for neoliberal positions as centrist, and is explicitly aligned with the USA in law and ethos.
Shitjustworks is similar to world but Canadian.
Life is political and people hosting online communities have ideologies. Shock horror I know. An ideology being invisible to you because you are raised in it does not make it any less explicit.
All 3 of those are highly political instances, though. Lemmy.world is overwhelmingly liberal and enforces that bias, and dbzer0 is mostly Anarchists. Sh.itjust.works is the least overtly political but leans liberal.
And leans towards eating lots of glitter. At least in my experience.
😂
Very interesting, thanks for the reply. I signed-up on lemm.ee since that’s the 2nd biggest instance on their list. Is this a good server as well? (The description here says: “General-purpose Lemmy instance. New users and communities welcome!”)
I’ve been happy on lemme.ee for the fact that they didn’t get caught up in the defederation drama about a year ago, and that they’re mainly a neutral landing instance to go about interacting with other communities on other instances. Other instances will defederate with instances they disagree with, a form of censorship in itself, whereas the admins of lemm.ee leave it to you to block what you don’t want to see yourself.
Any instance whose rules you agree with is good. Picking a big one that’s not the biggest is a good call so good job.
Yeah, that’s a good one. Honestly, at the end of the day, it matters more what communities you follow than what instance you are on.
But what communities are available to you depends on which instance you picked. Right?
Yeah, because they are all part of their respective instances and those instances (de)federate with each other. ml and ee are both good for that purpose. My own instance is bad for that purpose, but after spending some time on a more mainstream instance, I decided this was better for my mental health.
Technically yes, but in practice for any of the big instances, not really.
I still see all the communities I want from SJW: local, dot world, dot ml, lemm.ee, etc
Exception is Beehaw because they defederated us but they also deferedated Lemmy.world too they’ve already cut themselves from most users. I have an acct there anyway but don’t feel the need to check it much anymore.
Edit: another notable example is Lemmy.world won’t allow federating with any communities focusing on piracy.
Lemm.ee is less politically oriented than any of the 3 that were recommended, by the other user, but it’s lesd of an instance and more of a tool for interacting with other instances.
I understand lemmy.world, but I’m curious what makes you say that about the other two? Stricter defederation or something?
dbzer0 is an Anarchist-leaning instance, though it allows others. Sh.itjust.works has ncd and meanwhileongrad, which attracts pro-NATO and anti-Communist individuals, though the lean isn’t as strong as Lemmy.world and dbzer0 and as such there’s more variety there.
Thank you. I forgot about meanwhileongrad. That makes sense.
No problem!
Lemme.ee is fine. It wouldn’t hurt to have multiple accounts in different instances in case one goes down for maintenance so you can keep browsing. I recommend dbzero since they’re techy and don’t lean on politics as much as other instances.
It seems like most have this covered, but it is my limited understanding that which instance you pick can defederate from others of their own choosing. This means you can’t see their content AFAIK.
This seemed very sketchy to me.
👻 A spectre is haunting @Social_Discussion@lemm.ee ☭
Some of Ayn Rand’s earliest works are out of copyright now. Would that have made you more comfortable?
The .ml admins are, to put it mildly, far left. That’s why it’s great to have other instances like lemmy.world, feddit.org etc. If you don’t agree with how the admins run an instance you can make an account somewhere else without missing out on content.
The issue you’ve faced varies instance to instance. If you want complete freedom and censorship resistance, you have to run your own server.
The level of censorship is going to be different depending on your instance and where you are posting to. A lot of instances are managed by individuals or small teams out of passion. They can do as they please and don’t have to pander to everyone for commercial appeal like Reddit or Tumblr. If someone doesn’t like what they’re doing they can join a different instance or create their own.
Instances can defederate from each other over these differences. A lot are defederated from the instance Exploding Heads because of their alt right content for example. From what I understand you can also report content to the administrators of your instance if it goes against their rules and I think they can remove it from appearing on your instance (or block the user that posted it). This isn’t going to stop it from appearing elsewhere.
I also wouldn’t say it’s sketchy. It’s just the overall political leaning of a lot of Lemmy is relatively left leaning and having those measures in place kind of demonstrates the vibe the instance is trying to create.
