But you have no problem whatsoever in using the services these horrible people provide you? Why are you here?

I certainly dont praise or support civilians being displaced from their homes. Maybe there are some users who make such insensitive comments, but it doesnt mean that I agree with them.

But is not donating going to change anything?

What are you saying, there’s going to be the rapture?

ethical ads are virtually non-existent. when limiting ads to ethical ads it’s unlikely you’re getting even remotely close to bringing in the necessary funds.

people promoting ads are typically those who expect others to suffer while they themselves are using ad blockers. there are some people who honestly turn off ad blockers, but i wouldn’t recommend anyone to do that for any site, as i don’t consider the majority of ads ethical and it’s also often used as a malware/phishing/scam distribution mechanism.

this is also a vicious cycle of more people blocking ads -> ads getting worse to offset the lost ad revenue -> more people blocking ads. this is what lead to the internet today, where the majority of the internet is basically unusable if you don’t use ublock origin or a comparable solution.

I still stand by what I said. Not a single fraction of any currency either directly or indirectly to that instance.

Tell you what, if you make lemmy.ml like a jail for those users where they can sit there all day long and let the other users themselves disconnect or not even see their posts, I will start donating. Almost like a 4chan for lemmy.

I did. I can’t force the instance I am on to de-federate and I can’t ban all users. I also don’t agree with this campaign of those users to start the Reddit refugees and exiles there. You’re making all of Lemmy appear like they support that specific view of politics.

That’s how I use them but i am not giving a dime to those who want to kill me and constantly spew russian peopaganda. They can beg putin for funds.

I feel that’s missing the forest for the trees in regards to what we’re discussing, though. Enforcing rules is one thing; actively enforcing the suppression of any dissent of opinion is censorship, full stop. It isn’t “curating” communities when you are aggressively enforcing all those communities stay in lockstep to your political views.

But yes, federation helps to mitigate the completeness of that censorship. However, the original devs of Lemmy itself created the .ml instance, so it’s kind of an ironic situation, which is why I bothered replying in the first place to the original comment.

Lemmy the software is a net positive, but nobody should be giving money to support their extremism and love of censorship, particularly when it happens on what’s arguably the “official” instance.

Numotic and Dessalines actively cultivate very toxic content:

• Pro-Russia, blaming Ukraine as a Nazi aggressor;
• Pro-Chinese Communist Party, banning discussion of the mistreatment of the Uighur minority or the anti-democratic takeover of Hong Kong;
• Anti-Semitic, going way beyond the confines of criticism of the current Israeli government, on to hateful comments about all Israelis as a people, and sometimes Jews in general,
• Pro-Communism, at times advocating for the violent overthrow of Western governments by Marxist groups.
• Strongly in favor of left wing dictatorships, like Venezuela, decrying any discussion of human rights and democracy as capitalist propaganda.

If you disagree with these positions, too bad! Because your posts will be deleted, or you’ll get banned, or your instance defederated, from ml.

I got banned on ml for arguing that it was obvious that trump was worse than the Democrats

So use a different instance? You dont seen to have a problem freeloading at least?

I don’t like what they’re doing, they are actively using their positions and instances position of influence to push harmful propaganda, misinformation, censor opinions critical of it and all the while turning a blind/lenient eye to what their users do if they consider them to be ideologically aligned with them.

If they actually surrendered .ml admin duties to a more balanced team that actually allowed non-Tankie mods to well mod, I would reconsider donating.

While I consider their “ideology” to be harmful, if they stopped trying to “infuse” Lemmy with it and separated their work from their personal politics it would satisfy a lot of concerns

People are being asked to give money to the mods of .ml in their role as devs. There’s even a statement at the start of the thread that says (paraphrased) “yes, some small percentage will go to .ml because it is the primary testbed”.

The issue isn’t federation. It’s being asked to give money to support a place that prescribes values that the donator disagrees with.

Also, if they can’t make enough money in donations to keep doing this full-time, why don’t they let other people into the project on a volunteer basis? Reduce the workload on themselves so they can get part time jobs or something. All I’ve heard is how controlling they are, but it feels like this is too big of a thing to be on two individual developers in the first place.

If more people than just them could be involved, I’d happily donate. I would like to donate to something that’s going to grow and get better over time, not to two individual developers treading water. I get it’s difficult to find people that know Rust, and I sympathize, but my point stands. This entire project is operating very precariously on two individuals and if it’s going to grow, that has to change at some point.

And as Arotrios said in another comment, the reason they’re asking for money is because they lost the money they were getting. The way they operate, and allow that instance to destroy the reputation of their project, is what led to this. And it will continue to lead to this, unless they do some radical changes. I’m not putting my money back in until I see them doing something different and showing they’ve learned the lesson.

We have various test servers, but these are not enough to catch all the potential problems in a new release. Lemmy is very complex software, and a minor change can cause performance problems in an sql query and cause downtime for instances. Such problems are impossible to catch on test servers, at least with our very limited resources.

How would you do public testing without making it significantly more expensive?

They have 5 peoples in the admin team, 2 of them is the dev. If they stop moderating, it will still have 3 on the team. It’s VERY easy to separate themselves from moderating but they still chose to put their resource(time) into it.

It’s easier said than done to separate the dev team and the mod team

That has to apply when deciding whether to support them as well, then.

Not to mention that the communities over there have moderators - the devs just insist on taking matters into their own hands, which is a significant part of what makes them so deeply unpopular. They’re choosing to mod like this, when they really don’t have to.

I do agree that Lemmy.ml should never be recommended as the “official” Lemmy instance, but (correct me if I’m wrong) the Lemmy devs don’t do that.

Yeah you’re correct, they explicitly don’t want it considered the main instance.

Nine times out of ten I hear people say “join Lemmy.World, it’s the catch-all and de facto default instance”. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen people recommend Lemmy.ml unless they’re already ideologically aligned with Marxism–Leninism; if anything, most people seem to expressly recommend people don’t join Lemmy.ml for ideological and censorship reasons (edit: reasons I agree with and echo, to clarify).

lemmy.ml is an important testbed for new releases at scale. Many many issues have been caught by the dev team deploying there. lemm.ee too for that matter.

In general, it’s considered bad practice to use a live site for testing dev updates, but I can see the value in having this available in this case. However, if they want to use a live site as a test bed for new features using a large audience, then they should ensure their moderation team doesn’t allow the reputation of the instance to become what lemmy.ml’s has. The fact of the matter is that it’s become toxic branding to the overall Lemmy effort, and is actively undermining the dev team’s efforts by impacting them financially.

The only way I can see to do this is at this point is by ceding their involvement in lemmy.ml to another team and rebranding join-lemmy.org as a software package, not a political statement.

It literally recommends lemmy.ml within the first 3 listings in most cases or even worse, Hexbear