Hey everyone, I’m new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says “Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.”).

The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the “lemmy.ml” server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”.

So I thought I try that one when it’s from Lemmy’s own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?

  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    This seemed very sketchy to me.

    👻 A spectre is haunting @[email protected]

    Some of Ayn Rand’s earliest works are out of copyright now. Would that have made you more comfortable?

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    The .ml admins (and devs of Lemmy the software) are from that crowd, basically. If you don’t like it, try another instance.

    Edit: .ml is for Marxist-Leninist, even. There’s no connection to Mali.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        Mali is a Saharan country with low population, spotty, super expensive internet and unreliable power; I’d be surprised if the machines are literally there. And anyway, Dessalines has never mentioned being from a Malian background, but he does identify as ML.

  • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    It seems like most have this covered, but it is my limited understanding that which instance you pick can defederate from others of their own choosing. This means you can’t see their content AFAIK.

  • teagrrl@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    Filters out conservatives pretty well and stops bots because it requires the user to read.

    • OceanSoap@lemmy.ml
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      Interesting. Must be newish because that wasn’t a requirement when I signed up a few years back.

  • LukácsFan1917@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    Open source is inherently political and you depend on software being developed by communists. We are here to evade corporate censorship, censor reactionaries, spread agitprop, and discuss raising the quality of life of all working people.

    Not just tech workers. Everyone.

  • Sprokes@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    Censorship still exists in lemmy. I got banned from an instance just because I said some things that weren’t aligning with far left ideas. I was one of the active members of that instance (we were very few) on non political communities.

    I made a political post and one of the administrators wasn’t OK with it and started insulting me and then banned me from the whole instance.

            • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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              5 days ago

              Let it be clear, you took an effectively anti-immigration stance on the basis of cultural differences, then praised Imperialist Ethno-States. Yes, it was correct to ban you.

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                5 days ago

                Where did you see that? Even if it is the case isn’t that just censorship which the subject of this post to which I am responding? There were no discussion or anything and ban you from the whole instance (not just the community).

                • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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                  the people will let in should benefit the society and not the opposite. If you check Switzerland, Japan, Nordic countries which have good immigration policies, the quality of life is way better.

                  Right there. Anti-immigration on the basis of cultural differences and praise for Imperialist ethno-states.

                  Secondly, no, racism should be banned and censored to protect marginalized groups. Censorship of racism is a good thing.

        • frauddogg [they/them, null/void]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          I am not against welfare or immigration but the people will let in should benefit the society and not the opposite.

          This is not a “leftist” tenet. For someone who ‘hates’ rich people you sure as fuck think exactly the way they do, piglet.

  • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    The developers of Lemmy are Communists, they don’t hide this fact.

    To answer your first question, there are no “free speech” instances in wide use, depending on your point of view an instance might be “censoring” or fighting “misinformation.” It’s up to you to pick an instance you want.

  • edric@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    Join us at lemm.ee. It’s as neutral as can be, the admin is cool, and they leave blocking to the users instead of just defederating outright.

  • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    Welcome. Admins and mods of every instance, not just ml are very trigger happy to enforce their opinion. Going as far as fully disabling users accounts. Not by using an automatic word filter though.

    Each instance has different political opinions you need to agree with. This one likes communism. Upside is no email verification required, so it is very private.

    Lemmy is much more wild west than moden Reddit. Similar to old Reddit. Enjoy the ride.

  • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    This wasn’t around when I joined. I suppose this serves two purposes:

    • Stop conservatives from joining the instance.

    • An additional filter to make it a bit harder for bots to make accounts.

    I think that’s killing two birds with one stone.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      Yeah when I joined IIRC I just had to write a sentence about why I wanted to join. The communism thing made me laugh though!

    • grte@lemmy.ca
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      5 days ago

      .ml is actually Mali’s TLD. That it happens to also be an initialism for Marxism-Leninism is a coincidence.

        • coolusername@lemmy.ml
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          Mali also happens to be under attack by US funded terrorists. The same pattern repeats itself over and over and over

        • grte@lemmy.ca
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          Right, but .ml doesn’t stand for Marxist-Leninist is the thrust of what I’m saying.

          • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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            Except it does stand for that in this context. It’s like saying “the TV in twitch.tv doesn’t stand for television, it’s Tuvalu”, like, yes the ccTLD tv is Tuvalu’s, but twitch wouldn’t have chosen that TLD if it weren’t for the “coincidence”.

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              It does stand for Tuvalu. It is a happy coincidence for Twitch and any other media company that wants to use that TLD that such a seemingly in theme TLD exists (so long as you only use the abbreviation and never spell out what the TLD actually stands for), but .tv 100% refers to Tuvalu. There isn’t a Television-land that it’s reserved for.

        • juli@lemmy.world
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          The ccTLD was free when lemmy started. And developers like to test out things on free resources. The ccTLD just became paid last year.

          Repeating the same thing for the 1000th time doesn’t make it the truth.

          Yes they’re tankies, have awful censorship and are thin skin snowflakes. but making out the whole .ml ccTLD a marxists-leninist agenda just makes them see you as conspiracy nuts.

          For what? a couple domains you’ve noticed to fit your narrative? Holy fucking batman. LMAO!

          • SolOrion@sh.itjust.works
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            … when did I say everything on .ml domain is marxist-leninist? It’s not any kind of conspiracy lol.

            I said they picked this one because it was an obvious reference. Apparently some other people have spoken directly to them and said it was purely because it was free. Which I didn’t realize, and also makes sense.

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        5 days ago

        They used that TLD because it had the same letters as Marxist-Leninist, not because they’re from Mali. They’re not from Mali.

    • krolden@lemmy.ml
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      Why do people keep repeating this? Every time they do someone corrects them but they seem to just assume that’s what .ml is without so much as a google search about it.

      • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        Wait? What’s the reason? Like, the tld is for Mali, but lemmy and lemmygrad use it as “marxist-leninist” as a joke. Or at least that’s what I thought the story was

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          They were free up until 2023

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

          This part is funny

          Employees for the United States Armed Forces regularly misspell emails—suffixed with the .mil TLD—with .ml. In 2013, Dutch internet entrepreneur Johannes Zuurbier took on the .ml TLD. He attempted to contact the United States government about classified information being sent to army.ml and navy.ml in 2014 through Dutch diplomats.[citation needed] The contents of these emails include crew and staff lists, maps and photos of installations, naval inspection reports, and passwords. Emails that were sent to the .ml TLD include the travel itinerary of chief of staff James McConville on a trip to Indonesia in 2023, information about Kurdistan Workers’ Party efforts in the United States, and Australian Department of Defence documents detailing issues with Australian F-35s. On 17 July 2023, Zuurbier’s contract expired and control was reverted back to the Malian government.

      • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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        To be fair, it is a large coincidence. I get that it’s wrong, but it’s widespread because the dots are close enough the brain closes the gap by itself.

        • SolOrion@sh.itjust.works
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          It’s not exactly wrong, though. It’s clearly intentionally chosen because people are gonna connect these dots.

        • krolden@lemmy.ml
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          The domain was initially managed by Sotelma, a Malian telecommunications company. After Sotelma was privatised in 2009, the .ml zone was redelegated by IANA to the Agence des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (AGETIC), a Malian government agency, and the process completed in 2013.[1] The agency then announced that it would give away .ml domains for free in partnership with Freenom with a view to improve the usage and the knowledge of the IT industry in Mali. It was the first African nation to start giving away domains for free.[2][3][4] The ten-year contract with Freenom expired on 17 July 2023. Since then the registry is operated by AGETIC itself and the free domain offer was discontinued. All paid Freenom .ml domains were migrated to the new system.

          • [email protected]@sh.itjust.works
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            I understand that, but I’m asking whether a .ml domain was chosen as a quirky little reference to communism? Like, I can start selling contacts on contacts.contact. I’m curious about the intent

          • Incandemon@lemmy.ca
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            I’ve got no skin in this game, but i thought you could register a site on a TLD for a country other than the one you live in? That you can hunt around for one that matches whatever backronym your looking for now. From what other posters have said it sounds like the craters of lemmy .ml may have chosen the Mali domain because it was also a communist call.

            • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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              So, there are a few different categories of TLDs. com, net, and org are among the original generic TLDs, which had the ideas of being for specific types of site, but in practice have always been available for pretty much any purpose.

              Then there are country-code TLDs, your au, ca, and tv domains. In these, the registrar of that particular country sets the rules. au domains require some specific connection to Australia, while Tuvalu has seen it as a good source of income for the country to sell .tv domains to sites that want to have a domain that recognises their primary purpose as relating to video.

              In 2012, ICANN opened up the ability to buy new TLDs with almost no restrictions beyond the minimum 3 character length. Though technically com, net, org, etc. are considered generic TLDs, when you see people say gTLD they almost always mean those created under this new scheme. Examples include zone (which my instance runs on), new (owned by Google and restricted to people who use it to perform “new” actions, like Google’s own docs.new which creates a new Google Doc), and tokyo (intended for use by things related to Tokyo, but not restricted to such. Other city gTLDs also exist, like melbourne which restricts to businesses and citizens of Victoria). gTLDs are very expensive to create, but whoever owns the gTLD can choose what rules it applies to domains registered under it.

              So if you want a domain name that calls to a particular thing, you can find a gTLD that matches that thing and is open for registration for your purpose, or you can spend big to register a gTLD for yourself, or find a ccTLD that’s open to those outside the actual country and which fits your purpose.

              Mali’s a weird one because the reports were that .ml domains not related to Mali were being restricted last year, and fmhy.ml lost their domain over that. So it’s weird that lemmy.ml did not.

            • krolden@lemmy.ml
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              It was free making .ml domains good for web development.

              I’m sure @dessalines and @nutomic has a chuckle about it. Definitely a fitting TLD to use, especially for lemmygrad.

  • Aria@lemmygrad.ml
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    Lemmy.ml is explicitly a Marxist Leninist instance of the Lemmy software. It’s why it’s called .ml. You can use a different instance if you aren’t a Marxist Leninist. Lemmy.world is a Hitlerite instance.

    Federation is censorship resistant, but each instance is still going to remove gross content for the sake of their users and instance culture. You can see removed content in the modlog, it’s public for every instance running unmodified Lemmy.

    As for why you need to copy/paste the sentence – It sounds a lot like an anti-spam measure. Captchas and the like are extremely common, I’m surprised you find them novel. Are you asking this because you’re planning a spam-attack and need to make sure the spam isn’t removed? Your spam will be removed. While it’s technically possible to go find, no one will care enough to do so.

    • badelf@lemmy.ml
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      To clarify, Hitler and Marx are not in any way related. Hitler was a fascist, racist dictator (like Trump and Putin). True Marxism would be if the government of the USA was formed by, and responsive to the working class. A Marxist government (true communism) has an obligation to take care of it’s workers, not let them die because they can’t afford health care.

      It’s a short explanation, but it’s pretty much correct. Join any server, and change later if you’re not comfortable.

      • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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        Hitler and Marx are related if you’re a believer in horseshitoe theory or in Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism. You’ll never guess who funded and promoted Arendt (who unsurprisingly came from a wealthy family) and her theory.

        One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front. Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world. Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

        • badelf@lemmy.ml
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          “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” She pretty much nailed it, didn’t she? Fuck up education has been the Republican playbook since Reagan, and clearly successful.

          As an aside, I was impressed by the Marxist kibbutz started in Israel when it was formed by the Brits (legally or not). They were wildly successful. I don’t know of any other true Marxist orgs.

          • MarxMadness@lemmygrad.ml
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            4 days ago

            Considering every socialist state invested heavily in education once they came to power, no, I would not say she “nailed it.”

      • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        I think it’s incredibly stupid to call Trump or Putin dictators just because you don’t like them. Fuck I even predicted Trump would win the popular vote this go around.

  • socsa@piefed.social
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    5 days ago

    Because dessalines is legit in competition for the most cringe person on the internet.