Please don’t put any hate comments against the developers of lemmy or against the person who posted this.

I am also unhappy about what the main lemmy instance is doing.

What are your thoughts?

  • marmulak@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    I’m sorry to see people somewhere on the Internet coming out against Lemmy. First of all, let me say that I sympathize with the China issue. I’m a Muslim and I have been concerned about the Uyghurs for a very long time. This is not some bandwagon that I am jumping on, and I have ties to the region as well. I moderate the Uyghur sub on Reddit, created #uyghur on matrix.org, and on lemmy.ml I have registered communities like c/uyghur and c/xinjiang. I did that mainly to promote the welfare of Uyghurs and guard against whitewashing of the situation in Xinjiang. Obviously I am pro-Uyghur, and I feel that the admins of lemmy.ml have been gracious enough to respect me as a user and a mod. I have also not seen them engage in censorship of opposing viewpoints on this issue, and we have at least once that I can remember disagreed on China’s Uyghur policy here on the site. This did not result in any problem.

    Please don’t cancel Lemmy, because the software is amazing and the creators really are nice. I don’t have to agree with them on politics in China. As long as they’re not crazy about it, the situation is manageable. So far they’ve always been fair.

    Even suppose that one day they implement a policy on lemmy.ml that says they won’t allow anyone to post pro-Uyghur things. So what? It’s their Lemmy instance, they can decide what’s on it. I can go start my own instance. I really don’t think lemmy.ml has any obligation to do what the community wants. They’ve already done enough by creating the software and making it FOSS.

    Besides, you know how many people posted pro-Uyghur content on c/uyghur since I created it? None. So if you’re concerned about how the issue is being represented on this site, maybe you could come post something sometime, or argue in the comments.

    Anyway, at present I’m not recommending any other Reddit alternative and probably won’t.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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      3 years ago

      This kind of drama happens on Mastodon all the time, and within a few days everyone forgets about it. Apparently thats just how the platform works, so no need to get worried.

      • AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml
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        3 years ago

        I suspect it’s by design. It’s surprisingly hard to discover past conversations on Mastodon, and the single depth comment/reply system makes it a pain to actually follow a serious discussion between multiple people.

        • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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          3 years ago

          I’m 100% sure you’re right… I don’t know why but the twitter style seems like someone’s yelling into the void, trying to start arguments, while the tree format feels like you can have principled discussions and learn from each other.

    • Travis Skaalgard@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      Exactly. The fact that most of the community here leans “tankier” is not the same thing as censorship. Plenty of people disagree on the main Lemmy instance and simple disagreements hardly ever result in things like bans.

      • lorabe@lemmy.ml
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        3 years ago

        I am among those people who think stalin wasn’t a hero, mao a genocide, and modern russia and china are oligarchies and dictatorships.

        Some community members might disagree with me, but so far it’s been in a respectful way.

    • Sandra@idiomdrottning.org
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      1 year ago

      I believe it is a mistake selecting that particular instance for those communities.

      The risk isn’t just that they shut it down, there’s a much worse thing that could happen: pinpoint elision (or even editing) of reporting on the genocide.