Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.

I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don't find appealing (there's even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).

We don't want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.

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[–] Otome-chan@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

as a kbinaut, may I ask why everyone feels it's important to block lemmygrad? here on kbin we're still federated with them and things seem fine?

[–] 0x4E4F@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Because basically, everyone got scared from them being communists/socialists and just decided to defederate from them.

It's nothing more than fear based on years of propaganda pushed by western countries, nothing more. They don't defederate from anyone, yet everyone feels the need to defederate from them. Yes, they do have leftist views, they do think the world of many current and ex communist leaders, but if you don't like that, you can just block their communities 🤷.

Other than that, their communites are mostly like everyone else's, politics, memes, piracy, comics, etc. They even have a few LGBTQ+ dedicated communities and about 20% of them are LGBTQ+ acording to a recent demographic survey they had (you can find it in their main community), so... basically, they're human, just like the rest of us.

Many of them are well informed, not to mention highly educated, so I can see why there is fear amongst other instances - a debate starts, most people will flop regarding info, facts, whatever, they'll have the upper hand in the debate, so why actually try and listen to what they've got to say, they're just tankies anyway - defederate 🤷.

If you don't like their communities, just block them, no need to defederate from them... at least I can't see a reason.

[–] areyouevenreal@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

They support North Korea for goodness sake. Being communists isn't the problem, it's that they support fascist dictatorships pretending to be communist.

[–] TiredSpider@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 years ago

I don't know why you're insisting people who don't like lemmygrad are anti-communists. Not all communists are pro-stalin tankies.

[–] coolin@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

Lemmygrad is specifically problematic for being predominantly Marxist Leninist (as the .ml suggests). I think you're probably right that people just reject them outright because of AH THE COMMUNISTS WANT TO END CAPITALISM red scare type stuff present in Western countries, but where I specifically find Lemmygrad (and other tankies) being way too negative to interact with is when they get into defending Communist regimes.

If you asked the average Lemmygrad user, they too would be enveloped in propaganda, though this time coming from communist regimes and praxis they've read. They have been deluded into believing Stalin and Mao were good leaders, that authoritarianism is okay if it advances their favorite political agenda (though for some reason also claim that these countries aren't authoritarian), and that these regimes should be implemented everywhere.

The worst of it all is their constant genocide denial. Yes, the USA and other Western countries have done a similar amount (maybe even more?) of really bad stuff in this area (e.g. natives, apartheids, roma, etc. 💀), but I think broadly a well educated Western citizen, especially a leftist one, should be able to understand and admit that what their country did was wrong and should never be done again. A Lemmygrad user instead defends things like the Uighur genocide and Holodomor, saying both that they don't exist and are "western propaganda" while at the same time entertaining the counterfactual and saying if they did happen it was justified because the West did it too and they were being very mean to communism 😡.

When you get to that level of malevolent stupidity, you start to look more and more like a fascist that supports genocide and absolute power of the state and that uses strategic ambiguity to express your toxic beliefs, than you do a leftist. I don't think anyone suggests we stay federated with a fascist instance because fascists are misunderstood after "years of propaganda pushed by western countries" to discredit Hitler and Mussolini, but here you are doing the moral equivalent.