Hey everyone, I’m new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says “Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.”).
The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the “lemmy.ml” server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”.
So I thought I try that one when it’s from Lemmy’s own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?
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.ml is actually Mali’s TLD. That it happens to also be an initialism for Marxism-Leninism is a coincidence.
That they picked it specifically is not a coincidence, though.
Right, but .ml doesn’t stand for Marxist-Leninist is the thrust of what I’m saying.
Except it does stand for that in this context. It’s like saying “the TV in twitch.tv doesn’t stand for television, it’s Tuvalu”, like, yes the ccTLD tv is Tuvalu’s, but twitch wouldn’t have chosen that TLD if it weren’t for the “coincidence”.
In general, no. In this context? It does
The ccTLD was free when lemmy started. And developers like to test out things on free resources. The ccTLD just became paid last year.
Repeating the same thing for the 1000th time doesn’t make it the truth.
Yes they’re tankies, have awful censorship and are thin skin snowflakes. but making out the whole .ml ccTLD a marxists-leninist agenda just makes them see you as conspiracy nuts.
For what? a couple domains you’ve noticed to fit your narrative? Holy fucking batman. LMAO!
… when did I say everything on .ml domain is marxist-leninist? It’s not any kind of conspiracy lol.
I said they picked this one because it was an obvious reference. Apparently some other people have spoken directly to them and said it was purely because it was free. Which I didn’t realize, and also makes sense.
They used that TLD because it had the same letters as Marxist-Leninist, not because they’re from Mali. They’re not from Mali.
Why do people keep repeating this? Every time they do someone corrects them but they seem to just assume that’s what .ml is without so much as a google search about it.
So .ml isn’t an intentional reference to communism?
The domain was initially managed by Sotelma, a Malian telecommunications company. After Sotelma was privatised in 2009, the .ml zone was redelegated by IANA to the Agence des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (AGETIC), a Malian government agency, and the process completed in 2013.[1] The agency then announced that it would give away .ml domains for free in partnership with Freenom with a view to improve the usage and the knowledge of the IT industry in Mali. It was the first African nation to start giving away domains for free.[2][3][4] The ten-year contract with Freenom expired on 17 July 2023. Since then the registry is operated by AGETIC itself and the free domain offer was discontinued. All paid Freenom .ml domains were migrated to the new system.
I understand that, but I’m asking whether a .ml domain was chosen as a quirky little reference to communism? Like, I can start selling contacts on contacts.contact. I’m curious about the intent
I’ve got no skin in this game, but i thought you could register a site on a TLD for a country other than the one you live in? That you can hunt around for one that matches whatever backronym your looking for now. From what other posters have said it sounds like the craters of lemmy .ml may have chosen the Mali domain because it was also a communist call.
It was free making .ml domains good for web development.
I’m sure @dessalines and @nutomic has a chuckle about it. Definitely a fitting TLD to use, especially for lemmygrad.
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Where do you get these insights?
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Is it a coincidence or did they pick the Mali domain space for that reason? That’s the story I heard
Wait? What’s the reason? Like, the tld is for Mali, but lemmy and lemmygrad use it as “marxist-leninist” as a joke. Or at least that’s what I thought the story was
They were free up until 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ml
This part is funny
Employees for the United States Armed Forces regularly misspell emails—suffixed with the .mil TLD—with .ml. In 2013, Dutch internet entrepreneur Johannes Zuurbier took on the .ml TLD. He attempted to contact the United States government about classified information being sent to army.ml and navy.ml in 2014 through Dutch diplomats.[citation needed] The contents of these emails include crew and staff lists, maps and photos of installations, naval inspection reports, and passwords. Emails that were sent to the .ml TLD include the travel itinerary of chief of staff James McConville on a trip to Indonesia in 2023, information about Kurdistan Workers’ Party efforts in the United States, and Australian Department of Defence documents detailing issues with Australian F-35s. On 17 July 2023, Zuurbier’s contract expired and control was reverted back to the Malian government.
It’s been speculated they paid for theirs because other sites and at least one instance had their free .ml domains revoked
??
Emphasis on speculation, but I found the instance that had its ml domain taken away
Maybe Lemmy.ml had a free domain but they got to keep it because they had it for a longer time. Who knows?
To be fair, it is a large coincidence. I get that it’s wrong, but it’s widespread because the dots are close enough the brain closes the gap by itself.
It’s not exactly wrong, though. It’s clearly intentionally chosen because people are gonna connect these dots.
I’ve been told directly by the admins that it was picked because it was free. I don’t doubt that the reference wasn’t thought of, but the driving factor was that the domain is free.
Fair enough, then.
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Seems like a simple task to help verify that you are not a bot. It might also help deter applicants who are anti-communist. I guess you solved the problem for yourself by choosing a different instance.
Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.").
Yes, exactly, you can host your own or sign up at one someone’s already hosts. The resistance is in the ability to choose which admins you trust and align with your views while still interacting with the rest of us.
The devs run their own and have their own rules and censorship but you don’t have to sign up there. Does that help?
Helps a lot, thanks for your answer!
So um here’s the thing.
The fediverse is a network of interconnected servers/instances that are independently hosted.
Within the fediverse, there’s Lemmy
There are many different “servers” (I’m just gonna call it servers, instances is not a commonly used word) of Lemmy. Each have different owners. But they all run the Lemmy software of their servers.
The Lemmy software is an open source project, contributed by many different people who know how to code. The main developers believe in Marxism-Leninism, basically what countries like USSR and People’s Republic of China claim to also follow this ideology (or at least they used to).
lemmy.ml is one of the first servers, run by the main developers.
So there, if you disagree with their ideology, you should probably use a different server.
Thanks for that information!
The developers of Lemmy are Communists, they don’t hide this fact.
To answer your first question, there are no “free speech” instances in wide use, depending on your point of view an instance might be “censoring” or fighting “misinformation.” It’s up to you to pick an instance you want.
The original developers of Lemmy are communists who were seeking to create a social media space that would be free from corporate censorship and centralization. When they created ml, they decided to have it be geared towards communists and leftists as their specific flavor of the Lemmy community, because that is what interested them.
If you are looking for a less political and more general instance, I’d recommend:
lemmy.world
sh.itjust.works
lemmy.dbzero.comVery interesting, thanks for the reply. I signed-up on lemm.ee since that’s the 2nd biggest instance on their list. Is this a good server as well? (The description here says: “General-purpose Lemmy instance. New users and communities welcome!”)
Any instance whose rules you agree with is good. Picking a big one that’s not the biggest is a good call so good job.
Yeah, that’s a good one. Honestly, at the end of the day, it matters more what communities you follow than what instance you are on.
But what communities are available to you depends on which instance you picked. Right?
Yeah, because they are all part of their respective instances and those instances (de)federate with each other. ml and ee are both good for that purpose. My own instance is bad for that purpose, but after spending some time on a more mainstream instance, I decided this was better for my mental health.
Wrong. You can subscribe to any community from any instance that is federated with yours, and it will show up in your feed. Once one person has subscribed to an outside community, it will start to appear under All in your home instance as well. If you pick a home instance that is federated with most of the others, then you essentially can see everything you would feasibly want to see.
I am subscribed to communities all over the Fediverse.
Technically yes, but in practice for any of the big instances, not really.
I still see all the communities I want from SJW: local, dot world, dot ml, lemm.ee, etc
Exception is Beehaw because they defederated us but they also deferedated Lemmy.world too so they’ve already cut themselves from most users. I have an acct there anyway but don’t feel the need to check it much anymore.
Edit: another notable example is Lemmy.world won’t allow federating with any communities focusing on piracy.
Edit2: why downvote this? Am I incorrect?
I’ve been happy on lemme.ee for the fact that they didn’t get caught up in the defederation drama about a year ago, and that they’re mainly a neutral landing instance to go about interacting with other communities on other instances. Other instances will defederate with instances they disagree with, a form of censorship in itself, whereas the admins of lemm.ee leave it to you to block what you don’t want to see yourself.
Exactly why I like it here too. They really do let the user choose their own censorship limit.
Lemme.ee is fine. It wouldn’t hurt to have multiple accounts in different instances in case one goes down for maintenance so you can keep browsing. I recommend dbzero since they’re techy and don’t lean on politics as much as other instances.
Lemm.ee is less politically oriented than any of the 3 that were recommended, by the other user, but it’s lesd of an instance and more of a tool for interacting with other instances.
I understand lemmy.world, but I’m curious what makes you say that about the other two? Stricter defederation or something?
dbzer0 is an Anarchist-leaning instance, though it allows others. Sh.itjust.works has ncd and meanwhileongrad, which attracts pro-NATO and anti-Communist individuals, though the lean isn’t as strong as Lemmy.world and dbzer0 and as such there’s more variety there.
Thank you. I forgot about meanwhileongrad. That makes sense.
No problem!
lmfao dbzero terms of service is literally to follow the anarchist COC, hosts Lefty memes, and one of the largest anarchist communities.
World is peak neoliberal, has a stupid media bias bot calibrated for neoliberal positions as centrist, and is explicitly aligned with the USA in law and ethos.
Shitjustworks is similar to world but Canadian.
Life is political and people hosting online communities have ideologies. Shock horror I know. An ideology being invisible to you because you are raised in it does not make it any less explicit.
An ideology being invisible to you because you are raised in it does not make it any less explicit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemonyAnd invisible ideology in the imperial core today is zombie neoliberalism.
All 3 of those are highly political instances, though. Lemmy.world is overwhelmingly liberal and enforces that bias, and dbzer0 is mostly Anarchists. Sh.itjust.works is the least overtly political but leans liberal.
And leans towards eating lots of glitter. At least in my experience.
😂
Lemmy.ml is explicitly a Marxist Leninist instance of the Lemmy software. It’s why it’s called .ml. You can use a different instance if you aren’t a Marxist Leninist. Lemmy.world is a Hitlerite instance.
Federation is censorship resistant, but each instance is still going to remove gross content for the sake of their users and instance culture. You can see removed content in the modlog, it’s public for every instance running unmodified Lemmy.
As for why you need to copy/paste the sentence – It sounds a lot like an anti-spam measure. Captchas and the like are extremely common, I’m surprised you find them novel. Are you asking this because you’re planning a spam-attack and need to make sure the spam isn’t removed? Your spam will be removed. While it’s technically possible to go find, no one will care enough to do so.
To clarify, Hitler and Marx are not in any way related. Hitler was a fascist, racist dictator (like Trump and Putin). True Marxism would be if the government of the USA was formed by, and responsive to the working class. A Marxist government (true communism) has an obligation to take care of it’s workers, not let them die because they can’t afford health care.
It’s a short explanation, but it’s pretty much correct. Join any server, and change later if you’re not comfortable.
Hitler and Marx are related if you’re a believer in horsesh
itoe theory or in Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism. You’ll never guess who funded and promoted Arendt (who unsurprisingly came from a wealthy family) and her theory.One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front. Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world. Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” She pretty much nailed it, didn’t she? Fuck up education has been the Republican playbook since Reagan, and clearly successful.
As an aside, I was impressed by the Marxist kibbutz started in Israel when it was formed by the Brits (legally or not). They were wildly successful. I don’t know of any other true Marxist orgs.
There’s plenty of censorship on Lemmy, but unlike Reddit, the censorship is orchestrated by the individual server, not by a corporation in control of the whole ecosystem. Go post something pro-capitalist on lemmy.ml, or something claiming climate change is a hoax on slrpnk.net, or something anti-trans on lemmy.blahaj.zone and see how fast it gets taken down - you could consider that censorship, but the reason Lemmy is better than Reddit in this regard is that you can go post that same thing on another instance, in a community that supports those views, and it’ll stay up. It’s all up to the administration of the individual instance.
Even if you can’t find an instance / community that will espouse your unique views, you can create your own, and post whatever you like, and everyone who federates with you will be able to see it. That’s how Lemmy is resistant to censorship.
I’m not touching the lemmy.ml question with a ten foot pole, someone else can field that one.
This seemed very sketchy to me.
👻 A spectre is haunting @Social_Discussion@lemm.ee ☭
Some of Ayn Rand’s earliest works are out of copyright now. Would that have made you more comfortable?
Censorship still exists in lemmy. I got banned from an instance just because I said some things that weren’t aligning with far left ideas. I was one of the active members of that instance (we were very few) on non political communities.
I made a political post and one of the administrators wasn’t OK with it and started insulting me and then banned me from the whole instance.
sounds like someone’s a nazi~
Because dessalines is legit in competition for the most cringe person on the internet.
The fact that each instance can have its own rules and culture is f a b. I love that’s one of the criteria. Mander.xyz should have a ‘identify all the creatures from the Triassic’ image captcha.
It seems like most have this covered, but it is my limited understanding that which instance you pick can defederate from others of their own choosing. This means you can’t see their content AFAIK.
Open source is inherently political and you depend on software being developed by communists. We are here to evade corporate censorship, censor reactionaries, spread agitprop, and discuss raising the quality of life of all working people.
Not just tech workers. Everyone.
Welcome to the Fediverse! Somebody has probably told you this, but I just realized that I forgot to hit “Post” before I went to dinner. Here it is anyways.
When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
The applications and copying of a particular line is a simple form of spam prevention. The fact that the line is from “The Principles of Communism" is probably because the owners of that particular instance (who are also the main developers) are communist. I believe they also run Lemmygrad, which is full on Marxist, and one of the more commonly blocked instances. Lemmy.ml is intended to be a more mainstream instance but like much of the Fedi leans hard left.
I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here
Lemmy is censorship resistant, but not censorship free. There is a difference. Censorship (or moderation, depending on your view point) happens at 3 levels, user, community, and instance. You can’t do much if other users find you obnoxious and decide to block you, but if you find the moderation of a community to be over bearing and if your current instance allows, you can create your own community from your current instance and mod it how you see fit within the guidelines of your instance. If you find your instance’s moderation to be overbearing, you can create your own instance and moderate it however you see fit. However, you will still be subject to the moderation policies of the communities (and their home instances) that you subscribe to.
In the Fedi you have absolute freedom of speech, but nobody is required to give you a soapbox or megaphone and nobody is required to listen to you.
