Hey folks!

I’m writing this because funding for the Lemmy project has dropped to critical levels, which could seriously impact its future development.

Thanks to the generous support of our lemm.ee community, our server infrastructure costs are covered, and we even have a few months of runway. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed - lemm.ee wouldn’t exist without your help.

However, infrastructure alone isn’t enough. Our servers run Lemmy software, and without ongoing development, the platform cannot grow or even be maintained.

Lemmy is an open-source project with many contributors, but the vast majority of development work has been carried out by a small group of core maintainers. A few maintainers work full-time on the project, relying solely on donations and occasional grants to support themselves.

I’ve seen Lemmy development up close, and the maintainers have consistently gone above and beyond what I consider the standard for small open-source teams - they are constantly writing code, mentoring contributors, and keeping everything running. Their work is essential, and without continued support, it cannot be sustained.

If you value Lemmy, please consider supporting its maintainers directly. Every bit helps.

Please check out this post for more details about how to support the maintainers: https://lemm.ee/post/63034576

Thank you for reading, I hope you have a great weekend!

  • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    19 hours ago

    Noting that communists weren’t better than Nazis got me called an ungrateful shit for existing

    Calling communists as bad as a Nazis is a form of genocide denial. The Soviets certainly have a lot to criticize but Stalin and Hitler are not comparable historical figures except in the broadest “they both lead a country” level. You deserved your ban and you should learn more about history before you comment on it.

    • illi@lemm.ee
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      18 hours ago

      Afaik Stalin is resoposible for more deaths than Hitler. Hitler had concentration camps, Stalin had gulags. Neither was much better than the other.

      • 4n41y4no5@crazypeople.online
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        2 hours ago

        Congo had giant work camps.

        Pretty much every ideology have commited awful shit. Nazism is the only ideology where genocide is the end goal of the state.

        • illi@lemm.ee
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          1 hour ago

          Yes, I’m aware nazis and communists were not the only ones doing terrible stuff. That doesn’t make it right

          • 4n41y4no5@crazypeople.online
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            33 minutes ago

            Not the point. Nazis were the only ones putting people in ovens. Gulag’s endgoal never went to straight up kill them. Belgians endgoals wasn’t to kill Congolese, it was to make money. Hell even israelis hide their genocide behind security concerns or whatever.

            Nazi Germany’s endgoal was to eradicate non Aryans and they dedicated entire industrial complex to racial hygiene. As such, it’s a step beyond all the gulags, starvation, carpet bombing, terror, March to nowhere you want. They shoved people in fucking oven.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        15 hours ago

        The Nazis industrialized mass murder, and deliberately killed millions in the Holocaust. The Soviet prison system was in no way comparable to the Nazi concentration camps designed to murder and kill, this is Holocaust trivialization. Communism and fascism are entirely different, and conflating the two has roots in Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi Apologia. The Nazis industrialized murder and attempted to colonize the world, the Soviets uplifted the Proletariat and supported national liberation movements such as in Cuba, China, Algeria, and Palestine. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.

      • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        18 hours ago

        Gulag is the russian word for prison. It’s just really easy to make foreign words scary to racists.

        Afaik Stalin is resoposible for more deaths than Hitler.

        The literal uniform wearing german nazis that convinced you of this counted unborn children due to declining birthrates.

        • Gulag is the russian word for prison

          According to wikipedia, no, it comes from the abbreviation of “Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps”, in Russian: Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й (ГУЛАГ).

          If you would consult the chart

          You will find “Correctional Labor Camp” under the O.G.P.U (as wikipedia also says). Of course, libs can’t tell the difference between CLC under the O.G.P.U and Colonies under the PC of Justice and will call both gulag.

        • passenger@lemm.ee
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          16 hours ago

          Just wow at this whataboutism, defending Stalin of all people.

          Gulag is the Russian word for prison, where people die or get sent to the grinder.

          There was this opposing candidate to Putin, where did he end up? Gulag.

          Until Russia gets humane treatment for prisoners, the word gulag deserves the negative connotations it has.

          Ever heard of Holodomor?

          • Kieselguhr [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            14 hours ago

            Ever heard of Holodomor?

            Have you?

            Just between February and July 1933, [Stalin] signed or countenanced nearly three dozen small allocations of food aid to the countryside, primarily to the North Caucasus and Ukraine, as well as the Kazakh lands (which necessitated sharp reductions in the bread rations for city dwellers, many of whom were put on the brink of starvation). All of these actions were woefully insufficient for avoiding the mass starvation in the countryside caused by his policies, in the face of challenging natural conditions. Still, these actions do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians. In the Kazakh autonomous republic, probably between 35 and 40 percent of the titular nation—as compared with 8 to 9 percent of Slavs there—perished from starvation or disease, not because the regime targeted Kazakhs by ethnicity, but because regime policy there consisted of forced denomadization. Similarly, there was no “Ukrainian” famine; the famine was Soviet.

            • Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 by Stephen Kotkin published in October 2017 by Penguin Random House

            This is a very mainstream Stalin biography by a Princeton professor.

            Have you heard what the French did to Algerians?

            Atrocities committed against Algerians by the French army during the war included indiscriminate shootings into civilian crowds (such as during the Paris massacre of 1961), execution of civilians when rebel attacks occurred, bombings of villages suspected of helping the FLN,removed, disembowelment of pregnant women, imprisonment without food in small cells (some of which were small enough to impede lying down), throwing detainees from helicopters and into the sea with concrete on their feet, and burying people alive. Torture methods included beatings, mutilations, burning, hanging by the feet or hands, torture by electroshock, waterboarding, sleep deprivation and sexual assaults.

            Now you’ll say this is whataboutism, but if you always bring up an imaginary genocide like the Holodomor when someone talks about the USSR or Russia, but you never mention this actual mass murder when someone talks about France then you are a giant hypocrite.

            The West was worse by their own metrics of bodycount.

            • sudneo@lemm.ee
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              7 hours ago

              The intentionality of Holodomor is debated, but calling an event that killed millions of people and scarred generations “imaginary genocide” or “Nazi propaganda” like the other commenter did is deranged.

              The quote you posted is far from final. I won’t pretend to have the answer, but you presented one opinion as if it’s a mainstream and accepted view, when it’s not. Just Wikipedia shows multiple views, and I am sure that academic literature would present even more.

              So let’s be realistic and admit that if academic consensus can’t be reached by historians by now, you don’t have the truth in your pocket as nobody else does, and we won’t figure it out in a Lemmy conversation.

            • passenger@lemm.ee
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              7 hours ago

              The problem here is not that I don’t mention some unrelated atrocities by the western powers, it is you guys denying the ones by Russia and China among others. You just made my point.

          • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            14 hours ago

            Ever heard of Holodomor?

            There are enough links in this thread already showing that this is literally nazi propaganda that I think it’s fair to assume you’re a deliberate nazi instead of an idiot getting strung along

            e: lol one page long user history and you can already find nazi apologia in it https://hexbear.net/comment/6022384

            • passenger@lemm.ee
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              8 hours ago

              So this user thinks Ukraine are Nazis and Putin did right by attacking them.

              I am supposedly a nazi apologist by this logic (???).

              When in fact, it is you who denies Holodomor and perverts the facts about Ukraine war. You who turns a blind eye to Putin and… Stalin(???).

              Looks like troll factory to me so useless to argue.

              • sudneo@lemm.ee
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                7 hours ago

                Yeah, their cult’s position on Ukraine is simply atrocious. They cannot deal with the fact that Russia is an imperialistic nation and since Ukraine is supported by US (if we can say that) this makes it easy for them.

                This is why if you discuss that in Ukraine 15k civilians died since 2022 only they will tell you that they are all Nazis, or that it’s Ukraine fault, because they use them as shields (same claim Israel does, but guess where they stand on that), or something like this.

                This attitude is then completely reinforced by being in a echo chamber with extreme peer pressure and silly moderation, so one’s opinion keeps being constantly entrenched.

                As a communist myself, my diagnosis is that that population is mostly 20-something westerners who grew up in the political vacuum post-1991 and adopted uncritically views of the cold war. Most of them probably feel an inherent guilt by living in countries where they benefit from everything they swear against, and the online cosplay as a revolutionary is their way to cope and self-identify as a person living by their own morals.

                My suggestion is to block generously.

                • passenger@lemm.ee
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                  7 hours ago

                  Sure.

                  Many of them seem to be kids, judging by their posts and tasteless meme / emoji usage.

                  But don’t forget that Putin’s troll factories are a proven fact and the employees are spread throughout the internet. I would not be surprised if this is just what some of these guys do for a living.

                  • sudneo@lemm.ee
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                    6 hours ago

                    If they do, they are really bad at it. They are basically a close community and they got isolated even in a tiny community like (the wider) Lemmy.

                    I do remember a fun anecdote where a post was shared from a propaganda website, one of those that would appear here. The article was clearly faked, the alleged “Ukrainian Nazi profile” on Instagram didn’t exist, the same news couldn’t be found in Russian (only in English) and the text was the same across 3-4 random websites. They were discussing it seriously of course, but between them, which again, to me suggest more an echo chamber rather than a deliberate effort to push propaganda.

                    Either way, I did block generously :)

                    Edit: it was easy to find from my modlog, since I was banned for “Nazi apologia” of course. https://lemm.ee/post/37342752

            • sudneo@lemm.ee
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              7 hours ago

              There are enough links in this thread already showing that this is literally nazi propaganda

              Maybe you should practice a big dose of humility, considering that one comment up you were making stuff up about what words mean, and now you are misinterpreting a single quote about a single opinion about the holodomor that focuses purely on whether it was intentional or not.

              Calling it “Nazi propaganda” is just complete nonsense.

              To reiterate, “enough links in this thread” refers to one out of 16 views listed in a Wikipedia page, which for sure is not an exhaustive list of all scholars’ views. Nowhere is to be found that holodomor is “basically Nazi propaganda” and the fact you think anybody questioning your uninformed opinion is a Nazi apologist is just a mental shortcut you are taking to protect your views from any level of scrutiny.

              Maybe deal with the fact that you simply are not equipped to discuss this topic.

      • Kieselguhr [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        17 hours ago

        Afaik

        Afaik: written abbreviation for as far as I know: used when you believe that something is true, but you are not completely certain. Internet, email and texting conventions.

        See the thing is, you don’t know shit

      • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        18 hours ago
        a bunch of off-topic yakking related to your comment but detracts from the overall post.

        1, how the West treats the word gulag - as seen by your application equivocating them to nazi death camps - is not reflective of reality of it being applied as a catch-all term for prisons.

        2, the highest deaths that occured in the Soviet penal system occured during ww2 with source of deaths primarily stemming from nazi POWs

        3, the commonly cited numbers of deaths that occured in the Soviet penal system comes from an openly flawed and biased methodology chosen exclusively to fabricate a false reality that equivocates nazi fascism with Soviet communism, which was further boosted by the CIA during the cold war to smear their ideological opposition’s image. The real numbers have been revealed with the opening of the Soviet archives after the fall of the Soviet Union, allowing actual historians to access primary sources to clear up the cold war era historical revisionism that obscured our understanding of the truth for the past 80 years.

        4, this is not to say the system ran in that era is flawless. It in fact had blemishes and flaws that stemmed from the monstrously brutal tsarist regimn that the Soviets overthrew. That said even at its worst during the second world War its own brutality is dwarfed by the American penal system from back then to this very moment.

        Here’s an article that discusses “double genocide theory”, which dissects the fact that equivocating the worst excesses that occured under the Soviet Union as being anything remotely near the monstrous crimes against humanity perpetrated by the German Nazi regimn is to commit and engage in Holocaust denialism

        https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory

        Here’s an excerpt from a book that lightly delves into the numbers, but there’s plenty of other information floating around as well.

        https://hexbear.net/post/136521?scrollToComments=false

        • illi@lemm.ee
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          16 hours ago

          the fact that equivocating the worst excesses that occured under the Soviet Union as being anything remotely near the monstrous crimes against humanity perpetrated by the German Nazi regimn is to commit and engage in Holocaust denialism

          Now let’s be clear. I was talking death counts. And I do believe that the Nazis were worse. I saw Auschwitz and Birkenau camps and those are sights that I will never forget. I get chills just remembering it. So please do be cautions who you call holocaust denier.

          But we are still comparing two evils here. One is greater, one is lesser. But “lesser” evil doesn’t necessarily mean the evil was small.

          • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            12 hours ago

            optimistically prison reform and eventually abolishment would be the best course of action altogether. There’s really no shades of grey in stating that the penal system as we’ve known it through out history has been and currently is a barbaric institution of vindictive cruelty by man against their fellow man. That said, i’ll return to the comparison you’re making and emphasize again you’re making a false equivocation between the two. It would be more accurate to compare the former Soviet penal system to the American penal system than it would be to compare the former Soviet penal system to the former Nazi German genocide camps. There were no Soviet Auschwitz Concentration Camp, no Soviet Birkenau Concentration Camp, no Soviet Sisak Concentration Camp, no Soviet Salaspils Concentration Camp, no Soviet Vyritsa Children’s Concentration Camp, etcetera and so forth down the list of monstrous acts perpetrated by the nazi regimn. That is what I mean by saying you’re perpetuating the double genocide theory an thusly perpetuating holocaust denialism. When you make a throwaway sentence such as ‘Afaik Stalin is resoposible for more deaths than Hitler. Hitler had concentration camps, Stalin had gulags. Neither was much better than the other.’ you do the footwork of the neo-nazis on their behalf while you yourself may think and believe otherwise. I think you’re an intelligent and a kind person. I just want to ask you to think twice before making such throw-away comments in our increasingly reactionary rightist world that we’re unfortunately existing in.

          • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            14 hours ago

            Now let’s be clear. I was talking death counts. And I do believe that the Nazis were worse. I saw Auschwitz and Birkenau camps and those are sights that I will never forget. I get chills just remembering it. So please do be cautions who you call holocaust denier.

            You’re repeating nazi propaganda deliberately created to be holocaust denial so honestly fuck how you feel about yourself. If someone has a robust and well supported reason to call you a holocaust denier why the fuck would you respond with a hollow ‘how dare you’

            Do self crit

          • Kieselguhr [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            13 hours ago

            But “lesser” evil doesn’t necessarily mean the evil was small.

            You are right, the USA and the UK were the lesser evil compared to the Nazis, but we should never forget their crimes against humanity, just as we should never forget the flaws of the Soviets, still, the USSR was the lesser evil in the Cold War.

            Glad we are clear on that, not sure why you brought up Nazi apologist talking points before like:

            Neither [Nazi Germany or the USSR] was much better than the other.

            It’s important that you visit memorials erected to in the memory of the Victims of Communism, sometimes there are hundreds of names there. I once checked a near one, and decided to google some of the names of the people the evil russkies took to the Gulags. It’s so weird how often they were Axis soldiers accused of heinous war crimes! But Axis soldiers could never! Must have been fabricated!

            edit:

            These real people are on actual Victims of Communism (VoC) websites, and after just 5 minutes of searching, I found the crimes they were tried and found guilty of.

            Case 1

            In 1942, he was appointed district leader in the Budapest District XII organization of the Arrow Cross Party, and from October 15, 1944, he served in the armed party service. Between November 28, 1944, and January 14, 1945, he participated in the apprehension, robbery, assault, and unlawful execution of several hundred people considered Jewish in District XII of Budapest and on the Buda bank of the Danube.

            Case 2

            From June 1942 to January 1943, he served as the deputy commander of the 101/5 forced labor company. On the Eastern Front, he treated forced laborers cruelly and ordered his subordinates to do the same. Through his intervention, the so-called “leper section” was created, to which only sick forced laborers were assigned. He was dissatisfied with their work performance, so he denied them food and medical care. As a result of his actions, only 22 out of the company’s 260 personnel survived.

            Case 3

            Following the Arrow Cross takeover, he became a party serviceman and then deputy to Géza Horváth, the IX district party leader. However, Illés exercised the actual power in the district. He decided the fate of the people brought into the district Arrow Cross house. He interrogated the persecuted under severe abuse and then, under the pretext of transporting them to the ghetto, gave the order for their execution. On December 19, 1944, he conducted a raid on St. Stephen’s Hospital with several party servicemen, from where they abducted 40 people and handed them over to the party servicemen of District II, who executed them on the banks of the Danube. All valuables were taken from the people brought into the Arrow Cross house, of which Illés kept a record. On one occasion, he had a cartload of stolen goods transported from the house at 39 Lónyai Street.