• TheDude@sh.itjust.worksMEnglish
    67·
    1 year ago

    Any government or governing body should be open to criticism. They are suppose to be working for the people they serve. How is anyone going to know better if no one tells them what they are doing wrong? @wriggly3171@sh.itjust.works you have my support

    • this@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      15·
      1 year ago

      Right on! So I have a question, if I posted something that got me banned from lemmy.ml (such as an article criticizing the CCP for example) I would just not have access to the communities on that instance right? Like it won’t affect my experience in other instances right?

    • speck@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      114·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, it’s not about levying criticism. It’s about having an outsized agenda, arguing in bad faith, spamming the critiques where they don’t below, trying to co-op a shared space to create an echo chamber, etc…

    • Chef Rat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      395·
      1 year ago

      Also lemmygrad is blocked here. As a person born in eastern block, fuck communism and tankies.

      • passport@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        just came over here after poking around some of the other instances and the quality increase from not having tankies brigading shit is truly amazing

        • Chef Rat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          111·
          1 year ago

          We’ll it’s all true but there are some smaller differences, I live in ex Yugoslav country which was in eastern block but more liberal than Soviet puppet states.

          Most people aren’t racist or xenophobic (except Balkan rule: hate thy neighbor). We are just an extremely introverted and paranoid society, that’s why many empires fell around our people. We never had any colonies because our people were used as labour for other empires, so we never developed a superiority complex to other races.

          We’re just anarchy that’s preserved through community.

          • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4·
            1 year ago

            That’s interesting. Thank you for sharing your perspective. As a paranoid and anxious person I can empathize with a whole society with this issues.

        • Chef Rat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Never actually met an immigrant who actually stays here in Eastern Europe but yeah communist shouldn’t come back. But I don’t want capitalism either, this shits wack for our people and workers. Guess there isn’t a place to create new economic structures that could surpass both of them.

    • Tree6024@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      Technically correct, much like you can’t do anything about what your neighbour does in their own home.

      However, what sh.itjust.works and lemmy.ml can do is block ‘bad server’ communication.

      They can also enforce rules on their own ‘home’ as it were.

        • PirateSaysAye@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          If a server becomes blocked by some other server(s), then neither can communicate or access the resources of the other, but they can still access resources from the other parts of the fediverse. If a server is unfederated from every other, then they operate as their own separate little island by themselves.

        • Mstraa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Users from the banned instance would not see the communities or content from the instance that blocked them. (As I understand this all thing ^^)

    • Alkalyon@lemmy.mlEnglish
      152·
      1 year ago

      Yeah. This is kinda gaslighting:

      We’ve also seen a rise in anti-China posts that have hit Reddit lately, and along with that comes anti-chinese racism,

      No. Anti-china posts are not racist. We all hate Hitler Germany. Does that mean we are racist against Germans?

      This sentence is fundamentaly flawed and shouldn’t exist in the documentation.

      • jasondotjson@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        To push back on this a little: there’s definitely historical precedent for anti-regime sentiment bleeding over into anti-populace sentiment. To use your example of WWII, a lot of the anti-Japan sentiment bled over to anti-Japanese sentiment in the US in the form of internment camps.

        Of course this was in the 1940s and I like to think that we’ve become a little bit less racist now. But I’ve noticed a lot more racist “jokes” on Reddit as anti-China sentiment has risen. Don’t get me wrong, we should still criticize China for its many human rights abuses and imperialistic practices as well as their violations of personal freedoms in their citizens etc. etc. but we should also be aware that these criticisms will be used by racists to justify their views and their actions, and call it out when it starts becoming more about the people than the government.

        • Ergonomic_Keyboard@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          I think it’s because people nowadays are brought up to to ***follow ***what they read.

          There is so much importance of memorising facts one is informed like a computer, then alongside this, are informed by media and abrihamic based religions repeatedly, that life is binary good and bad.

          And as such, when an average reader attempts to criticise China, or Israel, UK or US present governmental practices for instance, they struggle to not generalise and lump government, people, race, and more all into one.

          To educate massess of people into being able to criticise policy is a surefire way to get the masses to be critical of the practices of a present government, and get you out of power.

          Binary identity politics however, will keep you there, in power, forever.

      • planish@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        41·
        1 year ago

        Anti-China posts can be racist. If someone is yelling about the Chinese government oppressing people, great.

        But it sure does seem like people are out there fomenting FUD about China as China, not really in reference to particular policies or practices that need to change.

        For example, in The New York Times’s coverage of that time the US decided to try and ban people anywhere selling good GPUs and semiconductor stuff to people in China, it’s all about “how effective will this be at preventing China from having things” and “how much will this cost Americans”. Not “is this the right thing to do to best stop people in China from being oppressed” or “why should the US be in charge of who can make microchips”.

        You could say “we think China’s government is going to use GPUs to abuse human rights” or “we think if China ever develops a halfway decent semiconductor industry they will immediately invade Taiwan”, but often that kind of context seems to have been deemed irrelevant. People are just taking it as read that it is right and proper for the US to decide what industries Chinese people may or may not do, and how good at them they are allowed to be.

        And I don’t think they’d do that in the absence of racism.

      • Album@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        41·
        1 year ago

        It’s an absolute gaslight. He doesn’t mention that the subs closed down supported authoritarian regimes and were a safe space for violence and extremism where members regularly advocated for it.

        But yeah it’s typical authoritarian/fascist gaslighting.

    • Confused Llama@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      It’s from the people developing Lemmy the software, not the creators of independent instances like this one or lemmy.world and many others. I think there’s not much to worry about since the software is open source and if they start to “leak” their ideologies/politics into the software (no idea how 😆), people will fork it quickly.

      However I worry that this is so off-putting to some people that they stop doing anything to help Lemmy grow when they learn about the developers’ politics. A good example is Lemmur, an Android app for Lemmy, whose author stopped further development on it, due to “lack of interest and political differences”, which is sad.

  • jnj@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    142·
    1 year ago

    The Lemmy project openly describes itself in its public documentation as anti-US, and was apparently founded around the idea that Reddit is fundamentally anti-China and pro-US: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html

    The doc starts off talking about open source, but it quickly becomes clear that the Lemmy project is primarily political in nature.

    To me this is concerning – what happens when largely pro-US Reddit refugees swarm a community (community in the general sense, not the Lemmy sense) which was intended by the founders to combat those peoples views? Sure, instances and people can choose to ignore the lemmy.ml instance, but the founders control the project at a much deeper level than that.

    Personally I hope that alternative implementations that are compatible with Lemmy arise, totally outside of the influence of the original founders. Yes there is kbin, but I actually prefer the Lemmy model (from what I’ve seen so far), and I think there would only be benefits of having another high quality implementation which is totally separate yet totally compatible with the original Lemmy. It would make the whole thing more resilient, and could be fertile ground for future improvements to flourish.

    • b_n@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      81·
      1 year ago

      Is that post really anti us and pro china though? To me it looks like anti pro us, and anti anti china.

      Also, how do you see the founders controlling the project more? Especially at the “much deeper level”?

      I’m a New Zealander living in The Netherlands, whether you choose to believe that or not.

      • jnj@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Is that post really anti us and pro china though? To me it looks like anti pro us, and anti anti china.

        I had already formed conclusions after reading through one of the founder’s comment histories (which I’d encourage), so my reading of it may have been biased. Either way it’s clear that the motivation driving them is, or at least was, largely political in nature.

        Also, how do you see the founders controlling the project more? Especially at the “much deeper level”?

        They own the github repo, they control what code gets committed, they control whether the project lives or dies really. They have the power to lose interest or decide to abandon the project, at which point the best hope the community has is that others pick it up. It’s not normally something I worry too much about with open source projects but again, strong geopolitical associations makes it feel precarious to me – if they don’t like where things are going, maybe they’d feel motivated to actively shut it down and discourage any peaceful transition of (code) ownership. Obviously this is all conjecture.

        I’m a New Zealander living in The Netherlands, whether you choose to believe that or not.

        I’m not sure why you think I’d have trouble believing that!

        • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          31·
          1 year ago

          Couldn’t someone just fork it and update current servers with that fork and still keep all of the data though? It should still just work the same but just not be from a codebase controlled by the founders

          • Cows Look Like Maps@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            That’s right. It’s a legitimate solution if the lead dev drives it into the ground. I don’t think lack of developers to fork or maintain it would be an issue. The only barrier I see is adoption of yet another platform. So in my mind, there’s always an option to just separate if Lemmy turns into one big tankie brigade. But forking is still a PITA and not ideal.

            • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              I don’t think using a fork would separate it into another platform. It would still be Lemmy. They would only need to separate of their code bases change so drastically between the two that going to other instances from the forked one starts breaking things. And even then workarounds could then be put in the former version so everything still plays nice.

          • carbon_based@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I’d think if they would resist a “global citizen” approach in favour of the now de-facto “hegemonic nations” approach, that would be a good reason for offering such a fork. … It could quickly supersede the “old Lemmy” when people start to realise that the new system allows migration and resilience against domain-takedowns. :-)
            @CowsLookLikeMaps@sh.itjust.works

    • ronaldtemp1@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Criticising pro-US doesn’t necessarily mean anti-US, you can be in the middle. Similarly, criticising anti-China doesn’t necessarily mean pro-China. Praising when something good was really done and criticising when something bad was really done, you can achieve at least some level of unbiased, rational and reasonable opinion.