cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/70156 since it wasn’t allowed and I got banned. Worth checking the original post for comments.

For a long time I’ve been grappling with the project lemmy. As a person never really been interested in reddit I’ve found it fills the role of a decentralized forum platform, which is something I’ve been looking for for a long time.

Unfortunately a lot of it’s user, and even more concernedly It’s developers are of a certain political mindset. Believing and spreading propaganda denying current and genocides of the past, posting things like “defeat israel”, defending russia and china, pushing misnifnormation and propaganda in the dictatorship of Belarus’s favour and even supporting north korea.

It’s all pretty crazy.

In the beginning I believed Lemmy could grow to be more than it is now. But I’ve come to realize that Lemmy is just the gab of the left, but as an alternative to reddit so they can spread their stuff.

So I’ve decided that I am not vouching for Lemmy as a viable platform anymore. I don’t think Lemmy is going to have much of a future in the fediverse anymore either. I’ll actively work against Lemmy and it’s developers and there isn’t much projects or organizations that are going to want to associate with Lemmy either.

You could consider this a kind of goodbye, but I am just here on the fediverse doing my usual stuff. But you can consider it an end to ‘better’ world news and lemmy drama of the century. Now there will be 99% tankies on the platform instead of just 98.9%.

Another better desentralized forum will come, and when it comes I’ll be ready for it.

Peace and love, Chris from Norway

  • @soferman@lemmy.mlOP
    -2•3 years ago

    An additonal thing from the earlier post

    I’m not going to discuss anything in the thread, but I’ll explain a bit.

    A) How does it’s developers affect the project and code

    The problem is that the developers represent the software they are making. If they push anything or behave any way externally to the masses it’s going to reflect on Lemmy. But how Lemmy is set up also affects it’s ecosystem. With the ecosystem being how it is will mean the major community can make hurdles for other instances. The flagship instance is also where most people will end up, which means that most of the community will be on the flagship instance which the developers control, and all the biggest groups will also be on the flagship instance. This gives a lot of power to a group of developers I’m not sure will act in my best interest.

    B) What do you mean in the political realm

    Yes, this is tricky. Particurarly for us from Scandinavia. But I mean in terms of a extreme left even in Norway and Sweden. They’d be like like excluded from the red party in Norway and the equivalent in Sweden. I consider these what is called ‘tankies’ which I’ve never really met before now.

    And with tankies I’m working with this definition:

    A hardline Stalinist. A tankie is a member of a communist group or a “fellow traveller” (sympathiser) who believes fully in the political system of the Soviet Union and defends/defended the actions of the Soviet Union and other accredited states (China, Serbia, etc.) to the hilt, even in cases where other communists criticise their policies or actions. For instance, such a person favours overseas interventions by Soviet-style states, defends these regimes when they engage in human rights violations, and wishes to establish a similar system in other countries such as Britain and America.

    The term is used to distinguish the rare individuals with these kinds of beliefs from communists more broadly (including Communist Party members), whose adherence to Soviet doctrine and attachment to existing “socialist” states is somewhat weaker.

    It is always more-or-less abusive in the sense that those termed tankies do not use the term themselves, but it doesn’t have any particular bite (unlike, say, Trot).

    The term derives from the fact that the divisions within the communist movement first arose when the Soviet Union sent tanks into communist Hungary in 1956, to crush an attempt to establish an alternative version of communism which was not embraced by the Russians. Most communists outside the eastern bloc opposed this action and criticised the Soviet Union. The “tankies” were those who said “send the tanks in”.

    The epithet has stuck because tankies also supported “sending the tanks in” in cases such as Czechoslovakia 1968, Afghanistan 1979, Bosnia and Kosovo/a (in the case of the Serbian state), and so on (whereas the rest of the communist movement has gravitated towards anti-militarism). I wouldn’t be surprised if the tankies even defend Saddam Hussein.

    Some of the people round George W Bush used to be left-wing, but they haven’t really changed their views much; they were mostly tankies.