In my own experience, it's less that they spew out politics and more that they are just so defensive and argumentative. A lot of good lemmy communities are based on discussion and sharing cool stuff, while the denizens of those instances and the like are more online to debate, nitpick, and criticize. Like there could be a post of a dog picture and their comment would be critisizing the owner or introducing some political argument that is distantly related. Like bro, just enjoy the dog picture

Hypocrisy largely. Heavy micro management and over moderation by admins broadly. Thankfully most are self aware enough outside hexbear to not leave their echo chamber. There are a few sub's documenting it.

Should discussion touch on certain trigger topics, and should your view deviate from dogma. You will often find yourself banned, either temporarily or permanently, without much discussion. Do you think imperialism and invasion of another country is wrong? Such as the United States current invasion of Iran or past invasions of Afghanistan? Well, if you happen to feel the same way about the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan or modern day Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You would be classified as a mush-brained, imperialist turbo-lib.

Do you think genocide and cultural erasure such as what the United States and Canada did to First Nations people is wrong? Don't make a mistake of applying that unbiased to the plight of cultural minorities in China. Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Uhygers, all of course are glad to sacrifice their cultural and ethnic heritage. Under the penalty of imprisonment or death for glorious left unity with the party and President Xi. Any discussion of these groups dissatisfaction with it is CIA propaganda. And not well tolerated.

If you skirt around in only the most niche of communities with hyper-focused specific topics. Who have almost no capability ever touching or involving current events. You might avoid it. Otherwise you will run afoul of it at some point as many have.

They are fake leftists working for fascists, and they will troll you if you argue with them, following you around on alt accounts with non tankie instances.

They are tankie instances, where they think and then push narratives such as China is the greatest country in the world and does no wrong and that Ukraine is full of Nazis and Russia is the good guy They love their authoritarianism, but only as long as it's "communist" or generally antagonistic towards anything "western."

Anything that contradicts their narrow worldview is met with hostility, comment removals, bans, etc.

Supposedly a lot of the first people on lemmy were leftists and or tankies. My thing is though is that advocating for defederation weakens Lemmy, less communities to interact with, less content or posts to engage with, less people to interact with which cause echo chambers and hugboxes. Nor would I agree with defederating people just because they have views that I don't like or vehemently disagree with. As bad as some tankies are, they sometimes do make a few good points here and there.

no you're not missing out on anything

these servers were some of the first which is why they appear to have a lot of communities

all the communities have moved on or been replaced on other servers so these servers are now a tiny fraction (faction? hoho) of the fediverse, exactly for the reason you experienced

Much of the “left” communities here veer towards the auth right with a light “left rebranding”

Is there any way of sharing blocklists? That would be a killer feature!

Thers always piefed :)

"indirectly"? He fucking wrote it

go back to Reddit then

Pro western propaganda is often not just about promoting western countries. It also includes lying about enemies of the west. Pro western media also has a disproportionate focus on the faults of its enemies. It totality that kind of bias suggests there is an imbalance between the harms caused by the west and other countries leaning in the west’s favor.

I think plenty of westerners can identify the lies western media tells about the west. Thats easy enough to do given westerners have first hand experience living in western countries. Unfortunately, even well intentioned westerners are much worse at identifying those other forms of propaganda. As such, they have a hard time understanding geopolitical conflict between western nationals and other countries.

Personaly, I find the “argument by hypocrisy” isn’t really what critics of the west are doing. Instead, bringing up the harms caused by the west is meant to undermine the credibility of a western source and/or criticize it for its lack of focus on harms caused by the west. If you avoid jumping to accusations of “whataboutism” and engage in good faith, I’m confident many of the people you claim are “tankies” will give you a much more nuanced critique of the countries you think they’re reflexively defending.

Well articulated, great description of how Lemmy discourse ends up getting warped by its developers' politics.

The signal protocol is solid, so people argue there isn't a known fault with the protocol which is true.

SVR prevents signal from having access to the keys directly, you still need to compromise SGX (which happened two years ago) or access to intel signing keys.

So the signal foundation doesn't have a trivial way to access keys, but the TLAs do.

I don't know if borders on tinfoil to call Lemmy.ml a honeypot. I think if you're China, and your goal was to destabilize American/Western politics by poisoning the well of discussion amongst it's citizens, it seems natural to just... let Lemmy.ml continue doing its thing. A honeypot is for baiting and trapping a target, it's what you would do to catch CSAM predators. You eventually capture and prosecute them.

But for long-term destabilization of a generation of people, you just stand up a bunch of bad faith actors and let them post their heart out for a couple years. Eventually, your posse will have brainwashed actual citizens into repeating your (and coming with their own) propaganda.

So Dess and his ilk may not even have to be Chinese intelligence agents, they could just be extremely railroaded Westerners. But I don't care enough about them to get even close to doxxing territory.

Edit: And for the record, Russia pulled the same stunt back in 2014-15 with the Alt Right. Both nations could very well be standing up bad faith actors pretending to be Fascists and Marxists at the same time, and that would be an efficient strategy.

down vote shaping

Downvotes are publicly available. If you can identify unlabeled downvote bots, admins will probably ban them.

For real. I can go "Hey does this piece of software/hardware have any connections to China and should I be concerned?" and someone will hop out and be like "BuT iT'S oKaY wHeN tHe uS gOvErNMeNt StAlKs YoU?!?!?!"

Like no dumbass, that's the reason I'm trying to move away from surveillance of any kind. Both countries can suck in major ways.