Following the news that Lemmy world has decided to defederate from hexbear without consulting their community and before hexbear even federated with anyone, I’d like to make this announcement to settle things once and for all about us “scary tankies” who apparently don’t tolerate free expression or whatever.

Lemmygrad has been around since the very beginning of Lemmy as a project, we are one of the oldest instance with lemmy.ml.

In that time, we have never defederated from anyone except in three cases:

  • troll instances (usually inactive and unmoderated, with free account requests, that trolls used back in the day to bypass their bans). We usually refederate if they start being moderated again.
  • outright fascist instances such as exploding heads or powerballs or whatever before the admin deleted it (which you’re welcome, it’s because there’s communists on Lemmy that there’s so few fascists)
  • and, the fringe case, the couple specifically NSFW instances that we instantly defederated from because we don’t want to host porn on our database and our rule 5 prohibits porn anywhere on Lemmygrad.

Otherwise, we have no reason to defederate from anyone. Holier-than-thou liberals can be difficult and irritating, I’m not denying that or implying we’re somehow above it all, but to defederate would imply we are scared of what they have to say. We’re not, because what they have to say is stuff we’ve all seen for ourselves and used to believe too.

You can see our blocklist here for yourself: https://lemmygrad.ml/instances, we only block around 40 instances, which might seem like a lot, but then compare to lemmy world which blocks 141 instances, or beehaw which blocks 765 instances.

Nobody is born a communist. Nobody is born a liberal either, but we become one through the self-reproduction of culture. From our earliest age we’re exposed to liberalism (the ideology of capitalism) to the point that we integrate it. Did you have a model UN in school and vote for class presidents?

So really we can’t be scared of anti-communist arguments because we’ve heard them all before. It’s especially weird when people say we “buy into old propaganda” around Stalin or whatever, when anywhere you look, Soviet historiography in academia amounts to little more than “Stalin was paranoid and acted like the Tsar but called himself a communist”. Like we went to public school too lol, we had a unit on the USSR lol.

Anyway, all defederations that happened on Lemmygrad come from other instances themselves, most of them pre-emptively defederating us before they even saw a single post from us. If beehaw, or shitjustworks, or lemmy dot whatever wanted to refederate, they could do it instantly and we’d be federated again.

And on that topic, let’s talk about bans. We don’t ban people who ask questions in good faith. But we will instantly ban anyone who comes to Lemmygrad solely to troll, as all online forums have done since time immemorial.

Likewise on blocklist issues, we poll our community very often for their input and allow them to propose changes. You can look at our !lemmygrad_court@lemmygrad.ml to see some things we’ve included the community on. We try to practice democratic centralism where applicable.

It goes even further; we allow communities and posts that some both on Lemmygrad or outside might disagree with, on the principle that we see ourselves as a more generalistic ML instance. We allow users to have their own community and moderate it however they want (respecting sitewide rules), and generally the removal of a community goes through an admin chat and might even go to a community feedback session. We have meme communities, we have religious communities, we have shitposting communities, and we also have serious discussion communities. And a plethora of personal communities for users who want to post in their own space like a blog.

We also have exactly 6 rules and no lengthy code of conduct or other documents one needs to read to participate here. This is helped by the fact that as we’re all communists and more specifically mainly marxist-leninists, most of us already behave the expected way around comrades and don’t need to be told how to conduct themselves.

So let me ask this; who is really censoring who here?

  • comradePuffin@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    This is extremely frustrating because there are real conspiracies that the “conspiracy theories” distract from. Just like you were saying, most of it is well documented, probably because the US built its intelligence agencies using Nazi intelligence officers.

    • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      Bear with me now, this is going to get meta-conspiratorial: I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the people doing the real conspiracies spread the fake conspiracies to distract people and to make it seem that ‘conspiracy theorists’ are always wrong. Makes it very easy for people to dismiss claims about ‘hidden’ atrocities (even if they’re not even hidden).

      • comradePuffin@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        I hate to break it to you but those ‘older’ conspiracy theories were all based on racism, usually antisemitism. Dig enough into them and it is just rehashing Theosophy. Check out DeCamp’s Lost Continents for an accessable history. I don’t have my home library right now but there was a collection of academic essays published around 2012 that lamented the crackpots who show up to lectures and also included the POV of someone who was drawn into it. My working theory is that conspiracy theories are so popular because we don’t teach a real explaination of the world, we teach a myth and an easily falsified model about liberal democracy and capitalism/“free markets”, because teaching historical materialism in ‘the West’ is verboten.