Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide

https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342

Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.

Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:

https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:

https://lemmy.world/post/16235541

What is a tankie?

Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

  • absquatulate@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    This whole lemmy tankie dev thing has been discussed ad nauseam here for the past year or so. Not sure what solutions you suggest, but if I were to filter my software by who’s an asshole dev and who’s not, that list will end up really short.

    As far as the ml instance goes, I don’t agree that we should start defederating left and right with any and all undesirables, but to each their own. At least people now will be in the know, and it might take some weight off lemmy.world

    • ɘlddoW .ᴙM@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I’ve only been on Lemmy a month, and this shit is already exhausting. Isn’t a main point of this whole fediverse thing that you can just block entire instances as well as users? Why is this even an ongoing topic that spans multiple communities?

      • nahuse@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        It’s all over because it’s a pervasive problem, and it’s obviously off putting to a lot of people.

        And it’s especially a problem when there are random communities peppered in your feed that you simply can’t participate in randomly, even though they may be the largest of their kind.

        Ive been banned from communities I have yet to participate in, for no reason, and without any responses from mods when I ask what happened.

        It’s making it so the entire platform becomes toxic unless you actively persevere through their unfair practices.

        It’s important to me because I really liked Reddit back in the day, and before that the disperate forums that existed all over. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are interested in those same things, but are put off when they inevitably say something “liberal” in a meme space and are attacked for it. It’s toxic and it is counter to growth.

        Not to mention how blatant an echo chamber it creates, and how naive users can be indoctrinated to misinformation without even a hint of counter discussion being allowed.

        Edit: desperate to disperate

        • otp@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          I can’t even see what instance you’re from, but your account is only a couple months old. Why not create one on a different instance?

          • nahuse@sh.itjust.works
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            30 days ago

            I’ve been banned from several .ml subs, some of which are so popular they appear on All, and I didn’t know I was banned until I tried to upvote, but I’ve never participated otherwise in them, it was punitive for other comments and discussions I’ve had where I have debated politics and, propaganda, and media with mods.

            I may actually be banned from the instance, but i don’t know how to investigate such things. But .ml came up an awful lot when I was looking into how to join Lemmy, obviously, and I had no idea how bad the mod practices and ideological bend would be on what amounts to one of the “main” instances.

            I’m on shitjustworks, which I really like. But before I knew how different instances worked, I just assumed Lemmy was Reddit power tripping mods 2.0 across all of Lemmy. I’m glad I persevered a little bit to get to more communities.

              • nahuse@sh.itjust.works
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                29 days ago

                I had a conversation with the mod who deleted my comments for being uncivil. A troll reported me being an asshole to him, as he trolled. If you look at the deleted thread, you can see their deleted comments.

                it’s not my proudest moment, but I firmly believe that assholes should he confronted by assholes, and I took it upon myself in that moment.

                Aside from that single interaction, I have abided by the rules of the forum and been polite, within reason. But I have, without remorse, questioned bullshit and disinformation.

                • OpenStars@discuss.online
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                  29 days ago

                  Well I hope it helps that now you know how to check your modlog actions:-). You put your name in the box, but the hard part is figuring out which modlog even has the record of the event - though usually the instance where the community is located at.

                  Yeah I wonder how much assholery those admins bring upon themselves by being that way to others first, it’s like they almost do it on purpose and then use it as an excuse - e.g. Russia will say “poor me, the Ukraine is attacking me, it’s so not fair boo-hoo” :-P.

      • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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        1 month ago

        Because the Lemmy user base is still relatively small, so the drama in one corner takes up a nontrivial amount of the total area. If it were the size of reddit or tiktok, you wouldn’t pay threads like these any mind.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      OP has been here two months, and they were shocked to find out an instance literally named after Karl Marx and John Lennin would pretend to be on the left but support authoritarian governments…

      And they assume since they just “discovered” it, no one else knows.

      • HappyFrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        29 days ago

        They were wondering about the dev thing. Having a lead dev be an asshole isn’t that big of a deal. It’s open source, so any code that would somehow benefit them would also benefit you.

    • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      It’s the Vampire Castle phenomenon of online leftist spaces. One dev and instance admin of Lemmy has problematic personal beliefs, so now we aren’t allowed to be on Lemmy anymore because it’s failed an ideological purity test that OP decided for the rest of us. In other news, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is a hardcore Ayn Rand style freemarket libertarian, so I guess we should all ditch wikipedia and each buy a 400 pound Encyclopedia Britannica set. Because that’ll show him to believe things I think are terrible.

      • StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world
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        30 days ago

        It’s all so melodramatic. I’ll take a jaunt into the comments sections of these posts once in awhile to see what the libs are clutching their pearls over now. Today we have:

        Oh nooooo, a dev is a ban happy shithead! How unusual and extreme! Better raise the banner and gather the troops, the tankies are coming for us all! We must defederate and/or fork a parallel Lemmy because only tankies have weird ban happy power trips! This will solve all the issues!

        On the bright side, block op and the surprisingly small number of the other more vocal tankie drama lords and it gets a lot quieter.

        • Kilgore Trout@feddit.it
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          30 days ago

          On the bright side, block op and the surprisingly small number of the other more vocal tankie drama lords and it gets a lot quieter.

          Getting worked up over a Lemmy instance upholding principles misaligned to yours, while Lemmy constitutes 3% of the Fediverse and the Fetiverse is still unknown to the vast majority, is a pointless waste of energy.

        • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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          28 days ago

          You are more than welcome to block any and all content from that instance. You can do this by going under your user settings and clicking on the “Blocks” tab and searching for lemmy.ml in the Block Instance section. That’s the thing about Federated content. You have the power to selectively engage with the content of your choosing. You don’t get to quarantine others because there is no centralized authority that gets to say “your instance gets stuck in an internet ghetto where it isn’t allowed to interact with other users.” You have to quarantine yourself by excluding content. If that doesn’t work for you, then maybe it’s less that you dislike their authoritarian ideology and more that it isn’t the same flavor as your own.

      • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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        30 days ago

        Not defending his behavior but I would note that he has been actively seeking to remedy his cunty-ness after becoming aware of how problematic it was and the problematic people that it attracted.

        • eldavi@lemmy.world
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          29 days ago

          i’ve been on the receiving end of his cunty-ness in person as a lowley tech support minion that he was forced to work with, as well as several other well known pioneers; i can tell through this thread that dessalines is an angel by comparison and i’ve never met them.

    • realitista@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      I had to block a handful of bad actors, maybe around 15, and don’t have much issue now. As usual it’s a very small, very vocal minority that’s doing most of the shitting in the pool. Unfortunately many are also mods of communities like politics@lemmy.ml, so generally not subscribing to stuff there is a good policy too.

    • Iceblade@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Yeah, I honestly give very few shits about the political opinions of the lemmy devs as long as it doesn’t taint the project itself -and if it did at some point in the future, forking an open-source project is stupidly easy.

      I even donate a smidge of money to the development effort via librepay - man does need it to live after all.

      Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.

      • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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        30 days ago

        Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.

        I’ll add that they’re also generally quite pleasant when I see them on Lemmy. And I haven’t seen either of them involved in being ban-happy. Some will argue otherwise based upon misconstruing the relationship between FLOSS devs and FLOSS consumers as a business/customer relationship (expecting customer service and product manager input on software that’s donated free of charge). But, I think that those folks are just not yet familiar with how FLOSS development works.