I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.

One example of a community I became a moderator for often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted by existing staff.

So it wasn't about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.

Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I've seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators. Sometimes a community is so desperate for volunteers that they keep junk ones on-board, sometimes the admin personally likes them and enables their abuse, or sometimes the admin is too absent and no-one can kick the abusive staff out. And worse, if a staff team is toxic, it's harder to bring good volunteers in.

It depends on the community. Larger general purpose communities tend towards that, the people who acknowledge you are typically people disputing a ban or who took it personally. On the other hand, for a Lemmy example, look at the admin Ada (and similar examples) who have reasons to regularly communicate their decisions and achievements and are clearly in line with their general community's values – their community won't have as many people crying about censorship because the community doesn't pretend that they will tolerate bigotry.

Mods who just delete garbage posts (sometimes called "janitors" on other platforms) are typically faceless thankless volunteers, or abusive personalities powertripping. It's a tough job, and someone has to put their hand up for it.

lemmy.ml is not a general-purpose instance. We have community standards. To quote from that post, linked on our front page:

If you dont like the way lemmy.ml works, thats okay. Federation exists exactly to solve that problem, let different groups have their own instances, with their own rules and political views. You can see the list of existing instances, and instructions for setting up a new one on join-lemmy.org.

lemmy.ml, as a community, don't tolerate posts advocating the invasion and genocide of Gaza. Why should we? There's no value in their offensive post whatsoever. There's no societal benefit in allowing it just because, there's no reason in some abstract liberalist tolerance of everything, we are an anti-bigotry community and our moderators have an obligation to our community to kick that junk out. So why should they be allowed to say it?

And I think it's harmful to frame this as being about "opposing views" or "disagreement". It's about kicking out someone who wants innocent people, including some members of our community, killed by a proudly-genocidal ethnostate's imperialist invasion. That's not merely an opposing view or a disagreement! That's not even some abstract what-if or some reasoned critique, that's simply endorsing a threat to our community. If you want to see that stuff, for whatever reason, then you'll need to look somewhere else. We don't platform trash here.

(And, in case you need the cherry on top, they've also made another post supporting rape as a war crime ^[link])

Anyone wondering about the grep for balls results around 11:40, it looks like Spotify uses zxcvbn as a password strength checker, which contains some dictionary lists of common words people put in passwords, in order of how common they are.

Hackers will use this as one main technique for password guessing (as opposed to a simple brute force, like "0000", "0001", "0002", ... , "9999", it will probably be faster if we start with "1234", "1776", etc.). When I say 'dictionary', I don't just mean English words; the name of zxcvbn itself is an example of a common pattern, one that people think they're really smart for choosing and super easy to remember and type, but one hackers will obviously be aware of too, just like turning password into P455w0rd1!.

https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn for general info

https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn/tree/master/data has the .txt files

Sure, pity he's an edgy shit who caters to nazi scum, but I really don't see how it matters to this situation. Pointing out that Nazis like Linux too is like pointing out Hitler endorsed vegetarianism - that's not "bad PR" for vegetables, Linux isn't some corporation paying for celebrity endorsements as a reputation. All that really matters, as far as I see, is that Pew made a large and diverse audience turn their heads away from Windows and Mac towards Linux for half an hour, it's a rare good thing, and I still don't like them or really care about them. I'm definitely not going to be sad or think we need to stop this, I'll just make sure to continue rejecting any reactionary scum who show their faces in the communities.

For quick little clips I sometimes use ffmpeg like that, but if I want to do anything more complicated like optimizing file size (without a known target), I often jump to Handbrake, a graphical interface to FFmpeg.

That script seems pretty neat, I'll copy it. Gotta love an 8MB copy of Shrek 2.

lemmy

It's definitely not one homogenous platform, especially when some instances will block the more outspoken political instances who would bombard such posts.

you're making drama

projection, lol

Calm discussion doesn’t work, ridicule them and deplatform them.

They've tried calm discussion, it's confirmed their position, so (while this decision doesn't really affect me) I'd be satisfied that Ada's not jumping to conclusions. It doesn't matter how diplomatic or polite they are, they're on their way to becoming a Nazi bar.

For those who weren't here before the reddit API exodus last year, Lemmy used to have a sizable US Free Speech instance, Wolfballs, whose owner was more the anti-vax flavor than the bigoted kind and sincerely believed in the Libertarian/liberalist marketplace of ideas. Perhaps out of desperation for growing the platform (Lemmy was in the hundreds of users at that point and that owner was contributing software improvements), it took a while before the bans turned to full defederations. Their admin was diplomatic, they were polite, I believe they were sincere, their instance rules were neutral and open to everyone, and then after a couple of years they shut down their own instance when they realized the literal white supremacist neo-nazis they were platforming, who had scared anyone sane away, weren't just doing a bit to troll the libs and actually did believe they ridiculous junk they spouted about shapeshifters and non-aryan marriages.

When someone creates a permissive instances which platforms bigotry, the people other instances reject will tend to flow there, whether the admin agrees with them or not.

They’ve only grown stronger because the neolibs want calm discussion between The people who want to exist and the bigots who hate them for existing.

Ah, the classic both-sides false equivalence - I've seen a few rare losers playing the "banning someone for their political choices and actions is the same as oppressing someone for having a body I don't like!", and it's mindboggling that certain instances tolerate their fake-neutral chavanism.

It does, and especially removes the spoiler effect, where voting for a US "third party" is seen as talking a vote away from the for favorable of the only two viable parties, leading to garbage coping mechanisms like "vote blue no matter who", saying you should vote for a candidate who doesn't represent you just because they're a lesser evil.

In those preferential systems, you can vote for the most trivial perfect candidate, even if you know they'll only get a few thousand votes, and it will still flow up to your preferred of the major parties. And I'm guessing that's a part of their steady rise of their middle crossbench they've been mentioning, meaning neither the Labor Party nor the Liberal/National Coalition have a full majority and must appeal to the smaller parties to pass any legislation they can't agree on (e.g. in their Senate, the Greens Party can demand progressive concessions because Labor+Greens+like-minded independents are enough to gain a majority, from what I understand). Their minor parties are growing and their big two are overall shrinking, it will be interesting to see what happens since the US election took some wind out of their conservative coalition's sails, similarly to Canada.

Yeah it obviously depends on context, many do say it cheekily and others (like your friend, I'm guessing?) take the charge of militancy in stride, lemmygrad even have a tank in their logo as a reference, but it's originally meant to accuse someone of advocating authoritarian military violence, and there's a scattering of people using it that way on Lemmy, some going as far as calling tankies "right-wing". I mean, the left-right spectrum is a flawed model, "left" and "right" are ultimately vibes, but even then that's just getting silly.

I just didn’t know if there’s some subtle anti trans stuff as part of being a communist/tankie or what

There's no part of their theory that implies an anti-trans position, and like flicker says, I also haven't seen many anti-trans M-Ls, even the hardliner "tankies". As for the iron fist stuff, I have mixed feelings. It's definitely not ideal, it's a bad sign if any government has to resort to that kind of suppression, but at the same time there is also a need to combat the disproportionate power of foreign adversaries (e.g. the CIA's Operation Gladio aiding European fascist organizations and other counterrevolutionaries), and the power of the former owning-class who usually try to regain power through fueling counterrevolution and sabotaging industry (see bosses strikes under the democratically-elected socialist Allende). As horrible as some regimes have been at times, we've seen that a capitalist counterrevolution is even worse - see Russia in the 90s, characterized by alcoholism, mail brides and child prostitution, so bad that it allowed someone as horrible as Putin being seen as a good leader, or take the (CIA supported) military overthrow of Allende leading to Pinochet's fascist regime, far worse than anything I've heard tankies support. If (hypothetically!) the options are between the tanks and that, the humane choice for society is the tanks. But again, it should never get to that point! It's a sign of a failure.

This four-minute extract from Michael Parenti, starting at 2:20 explains a lot of context around how the strong-arm perspective often evolved, even among groups that tried to avoid it like the Sandinistas.

It's pretty funny watching tourists who aren't using blahaj (or even feddit.uk) crying out that this doesn't fit their ideals. This instance is clear about its purpose, and this moderation is perfectly in line with that goal. There's no need for hypotheticals, because like you said, this was received almost-or-fully unanimously.

Disclaimer: long-time member of lemmy.ml

It's not really a problem instance for most people, and it's a pretty diverse one as far as explicitly leftist communities go. It's the original instance created by the original Lemmy devs, who are openly Marxist-Leninist communists. That's a big part of how Lemmy has generally remained anti-corporate and anti-capitalist, why it's not covered with ads and awards and karma gamification and all that junk.

Until the relatively-recent reddit API exodus, the biggest instances were lemmy.ml (general purpose for FOSS tech and left-wing, with all kinds of socialists present), Lemmygrad.ml (Marxist-Leninist-only), and Hexbear.net (dirtbag left). Lemmygrad got a negative reputation among a lot of ex-redditors because of their overall campist, anti-Western positions and critical support of traditional enemies of the US, while Hexbear joined federation later, had built a culture of crass trolling methods to keep visiting conservatives and other capitalists away, and surprised everyone by how large they were, creating an illusion of brigading whenever a post was big enough to get to their front page and gain a sudden influx of Hexbear users mocking them. All three of these communities also had a strict interpretation of anti-bigotry and anti-chauvinism, to the point where echoing a pretty common (albeit unknowingly racist) black-and-white American understanding of countries like Russia and China could be enough to get a ban, leading people used to a pro-Western media bubble to just dismiss these instances as being intolerant echo chambers who ban people for disagreeing, when they were really getting banned for unintentionally and unknowingly being bigoted or spreading misinformation. Hexbear and Lemmygrad have been defederated by a few instances.

Hence, the other reply, just saying "tankies" (a perjorative that can mean basically anything these days).

I'm amazed you ended up on lemmy.ml, we've been banning bigots for years. Solidarity with Blahaj on this one.

There was no discussion prior

I've been involved in a lot of communities, some alright and some which nosedived, and it's always amazing how out-of-touch most moderator cliques become if discussion isn't ingrained in their culture. I also haven't kept up with 196 comms, not my style, but I hope the community has enough consciousness to tell the mods where to shove that crap and become independent.

I didn't know the wobblies still had that much power, great to hear!

Installing cross-platform programs like that is a great way to prepare for a move over to penguin town, and check for any blockers keeping you from making the leap.

Provided you say that russia / china are in fact not communist

The capitalist Russian Federation was formed in the 90s (leading to the economic disaster and the desperation that allowed Putin to rise to power). Russia is literally not, in any way, a socialist state for 35 years now.

The former Soviet Union, similarly to China today, was ruled by a communist party. This means the government is trying to move towards socialism, but it does not imply they've established a socialist mode of production - the goal of the socialist movement. This is a big source of ambiguity and confusion when people try to argue if countries "are/aren't socialist", that's too vague, and even then you can't just tell by the current situation - a government or society can follow a school or thought or ideology (socialist theory) before it achieves its goals (a socialist mode of production). "Communist" can refer to either the social movement (SU and PRC were obviously that) or the politico-economic reality (obviously neither has achieved that, let alone a socialist MoP),

Economies like China's are a big source of debates among socialist theorists about whether it's state capitalist, communist, or some mixed hybrid economy. Their economy has departed from capitalism-as-we-know-it, but still have the core features (capital, private property). But, regardless of their economy, they're clearly a party trying to achieve communism, and therefore the PRC is a communist state that hasn't achieved a communist mode of production.

TL;DR: Until we ask more specific questions, someone can say these countries are communist, someone else can say they're not, and both are correct answers.

There are pre-industrial societies (including some like Zapatista territory in Chiapas, Mexico with 300,000 people) which some would call socialist or even communist, but I don't think they're worth bringing up when discussing whole modern countries - their situations aren't as applicable to our conditions.

That author was so dubious that even two other co-authors of the book later denounced it.