"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
(caution of biased source)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism, Islamic Terrorism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.
Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users as it handwaves their extremism.
Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.
Off-topic Discussion — Do not discuss unrelated topics to the point of derailing the thread. Stay focused on the direct content of the post as opposed to arguing.
You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.
Excuse me while I go donate even more money to PieFed
A lot of folks think their decentralized internet forum of choice should be a free for all, but that's not realistic.
Moderation and censorship are easy to get confused. Moderation includes reviewing content and sources for quality and safety, while censorship aims to control or manipulate a narrative. (general words taken from this page)
A PieFed instance defederating from a historically nasty fediverse server or 12 is just a form of moderation, and is up to whoever runs the server. The reason for blocking hexbear/lemmy.ml/lemmygrad could just be to cut down on the amount of manual moderation that's required by having their stuff federate to your server -- not trying to control a narrative or suppress any opinions -- just historically lots of wrong, inaccurate, inflammatory stuff that adds to a moderator's workload. Easier to avoid it.
Lemmy.ml removing comments and banning people for having opinions that differ from theirs is censorship, because 1) they are very consistent about it and 2) it drives their narrative.
Ehh that sounds like "I'm not punishing I'm disciplining" wordplay.
The wikipedia article on censorship lists a lot of forms of what we consider just plain moderation, like banning hate speech or harmful content:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
It's not just the manipulation of a political narrative or the malicious suppression of opinions. Sometimes censorship is good.