And, as a cherry on top, they’ll turn around and criticize other instances like .world or SJW as the ones who censor “wrong think” or censor criticism of the instance lol

I think one of the most powerful elements on any propaganda framework is redefining words and concepts, and then slotting them with so much emotional weight into a bigger framework that you can’t undefine the concepts anymore, because it’ll be painful and tear down something you’ve become attached to.

You have to unfocus your eyes a little bit. Don’t look at the facts. Looked at as a logical construct, it’s just pure nonsense. Everything changes all the time, evidence that gets presented is always flimsy and half-baked and somehow that overrides solid evidence or something that’s just pure logic or whatever. Just take a step back, look at the whole construct and worldview, and then how certain definitions fit within it and make it function.

lemmy.world is “censoring” when they disagree with the lemmy.ml groupthink, or they’re “dogpiling,” or “brigading.” There’s always some kind of framing where it’s an attack. Think with your emotions, how you would feel if everyone’s gathered around yelling at you, overtalking you, making you feel bad, making you feel wrong. Now, look at all your friends. You’re all comrades, you all see it the same way. You support each other, you can count on each other. Your instance is the one that makes sense. It makes it really hard to undo that definition that lemmy.world is “dogpiling” or just deluded robot-propaganda-thinking when they raise counterpoints, because you feel like you’re siding with the enemy if you ever start to question those definitions or look critically. If someone shows you evidence of Russian war crimes, it’s not them just talking, or presenting something that can either be credible or not, it’s an attack you have to raise a defense against. And they’re bad for doing it. They’re the worse. You engage with them with some hostility, and then retreat to friends, there’s not a lot of open exchange of ideas. That’s why “sealioning” is such a terrible thing to do in their definitions. That’s why they so often change the subject or do random hostility. They don’t care if it’s true. That’s not the function, that’s not the interaction they’re having.

There are words like “liberal” and “wrong think” that are used to categorize concepts, and because the concepts fit in in the right way into the bigger structure, the constructs they get made into can work in their functions even though factually it’s flimsy as hell. Actually, presenting things completely backwards (.world is the censorship instance, .ml is the only place “we” can think and speak freely, and we hope something we can break “them” out of the propaganda bubble) is for some reason very often a part of it. I don’t know what’s going on with that.

And then there’s the demonization of the other. You see all your allies make these wild attacks and insults all the time against people who think certain things. If you ever get a hint of thinking those things, then you’re definitely not going to say it. You’ll feel bad, like a traitor to these good friends who make perfect sense, if you even think it.

And so on.

Surely they could just disprove the bits that were untrue, rather than enforcing groupthink.

As soon as you do this, you enter into a landscape where facts matter more than an authority telling you what is and isn’t true (and enforcing it on the conversation).

It’s a line they don’t want to cross. Even the ordinary users on .ml have no problem with the mods coming in and enforcing “the truth” on the conversation. Ordinary users just aren’t supposed to involve themselves with discussing or proving what is or isn’t true, it would fuck up the whole system.

Yeah, probably. The other side of “this is so badly needed why haven’t you done it for us” is “if this is so badly needed why haven’t any of the server admins or mods implemented it yet.”

I feel like this is an example of how the core dev team running on an instance that basically just has 3 of the admins do more or less all the moderation for the entire site is not ideal. This type of feature is probably one of the most-requested pain points for most people who run most servers, but my guess is that it’s basically completely invisible to the .ml team why it would even be needed, because their model works fine for them, so why would they.

Of course they’ve got a right to work or not work on whatever they want, but if their goal is success and good moderation for most servers this type of scalability and teamwork enabling thing is super important.

• Tiny pop-up tent, easier to carry if you can fit inside
• Headlamps
• Sleeping pad or something to separate you from the cold ass ground
• Don’t interact with the cute little bear cubs

Google bought Waze, so at this point you’re probably not making any Israeli spies money if you make use of it. On the other hand, you’re making Google money, which is almost as bad.

You’re betting that they would be unwilling to block .world in a way that they would be willing to block lemvotes… hm, you might be right. IDK, I’m just not sure it is all worth that much bothering about. That kind of tit for tat of blocking/defederating and then making new stuff to get around the blocking, to try to force somebody to share information they’re trying not to, is just kind of silly I think. Better to just address it by talking it out and being reasonable as opposed to having dueling software systems trying to enforce one person’s will on another person’s system. But, IDK, good luck getting a reasonable and productive response out of either lemmy.ml or lemmy.world admin teams…

It’s not really necessary; 100% of what you need gets federated out to anyone who asks for it, so it’s pretty easy to just set up a little instance for yourself and then do whatever data mining you want to do.

I am well aware that you’re “just asking questions,” ho ho, but this question actually does have a specific and interesting answer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svoboda_(political_party)

The TL;DR is this: The closest thing Ukraine has to a neo-Nazi party, which is honestly pretty close to one, had some pretty strong legitimate support before the 2014 revolution. Basically, “anyone but Russia” was the thinking of a lot of people, and Svoboda showed a willingness to do things like get in fistfights with pro-Russian politicians which got them some credibility and support. Basically, the same type of faux-populist “back to greatness, we’ll fight for you” appeal that Trump was able to ride in the US, and it did legitimately work. They got 10% of the vote in 2012, and they won majorities in some places.

In the aftermath of 2014, once there were populist candidates who were not eager Putin’s-knob-slobberers available (and, also, when their Nazi tendencies were starting to become a lot more obvious), their support cratered like a poorly designed submersible. In the 2019 elections, they Voltroned up with all the other fascist parties, hoping to merge support and at least meet the 5% threshold to keep some kind of representation in government, the aggregated blob still just got 2%, surely only that high because it really wasn’t that long ago when they were seen as a legitimate and helpful party.

TL;DRTL;DR: If Russian wanted to denazify Ukraine, they could have just done another Euromaidan, that was by far the most effective denazification event that has happened for decades in Ukraine.

Authoritarians gonna authoritarian

I don’t mean to make much out of little, especially when there are real-world enemies that are endangering us all that we could be focusing on. But it is interesting to me how little regard most of the Lemmy communists have, for anyone’s right to exist in their space who expresses any kind of dissent or disagreement, and how unapologetic they are about wielding power without regard for anyone except their own faction.

My mental stability or lack thereof has nothing to do with you offering up made-up nonsense to try to prove your points

Yeah. And, also, it is clear when you look at votes that they make organized efforts to “brigade” threads sometimes, all come in and vote to influence the totals, which is something that they constantly accuse others of doing whenever their unpopular views get noticed and dogpiled on.

Yeah. Maybe.

lemmy.ml and friends have a really weird habit that I still haven’t completely figured out. They will swear something that isn’t factually true, and then if asked to justify it, they’ll switch to something the vibes of which more or less line up with the claim, but the facts of which have nothing to do with it.

Here, watch, I’ll prove it: Who are the two people itt who were hard-core Palestinian genocide deniers? What did they say that was denying the genocide?

I can guarantee that the statement they made will not be denying the genocide. Absolutely 100% guarantee. Instead, it will be “well they said Hamas shouldn’t have raped a bunch of people and that’s basically the same thing” or something along those lines. But, the shoot-from-the-hip confident assertion of “hardcore genocide deniers” will turn out to be poppycock. I think it is sort of self-selecting that only people who are comfortable with that kind of shifty vibe-y MAGA-adjacent logic stick around on lemmy.ml, because it is so endemic there that you can’t really tolerate the place unless you are fully on board with it.

Prove me wrong. Who are the genocide deniers and when did they deny the genocide? Like I say, in my view there is a 100% chance that it turns out that what they said will turn out to be something different than “there is no genocide in Palestine” but you will make the effort to pretend that it’s all the same and so who cares. But who knows, maybe I’m just running my mouth and they are here in all their Zionist glory, in the room with us right now.

So when did you see the lemmy.world downvotes with your own eyes? Here or there?

Lol I’m just messing with you, honestly. I don’t think there is all that much productive exchange to be had here.

How did you come to conclusion that the downvotes were probably .world brigaders?

.ml has a persistent myth that it’s all lemmy.world that is “against them” and dislikes the Russian government. It’s part of their attempt to pretend they are the majority. By implication, every other Lemmy instance is neutral, apparently, except “the liberal instances” (which turns out to be basically all of them).

I’m sure the downvotes are from off-instance brigaders, if you want to call it that. I have no idea why they would be centralized to lemmy.world, and I doubt they are.

I gib 0

100% are from .ml, Hexbear, or Lemmygrad.

I got curious about one Hexbear user, and looked at their profile, and I learned that no one can name any specific human rights abuses China has ever done, and also nobody “here” talks about Israel’s human rights abuses.

Clearly

I think lemmy.ml defederated from them.

Every other site more or less doesn’t care. Your Lemmy votes are not private. But, lemmy.ml as always cares deeply about controlling the narrative, and talking about who is voting and how and how often particular .ml users feature in the voting patterns, disrupts their ability to pretend that they’re standing up for normalcy and a handful of isolated “liberal” instances are the weird ones who love censorship.

Nice try Steve Bannon

The story at present has 9 upvotes, 12 downvotes. The OP posted:

If any salty Nazi cheerleaders want to complain that this isn’t a news source, you’re wrong. This is an active military correspondent’s blog giving a timeline for events which are not debatable. Better luck next time.

… which has 4 upvotes and 1 downvote.

I would bet money that one or two of the upvotes on it are from the .ml moderation/admin team.