They sure screech about democrats and then it’s just silence for republicans.

I think they really have no idea how unpopular their viewpoint is. If you ever go and look around at “Lemmy” based on how it looks when hosted on .ml or Hexbear, it looks pretty dramatically different. I think part of the reason the mods are so aggressive with this kind of censorship is that it creates a really surprisingly effective illusion that a lot of the world agrees with them. You can find off-instance communities where people post a counter-narrative if you search, but that’s easy to write off as “the lib instances” or something. I think they have no idea how far in the minority they are.

The name for the cognitive bias involved is “what you see is all there is.” Your brain doesn’t take account of content which is hidden from you, so if 90% of what you see is pro-Russia, and everyone there is of the opinion that anything outside of that is weird Western propaganda and distorted and fake, it’s pretty easy for your brain to run with it. And once you’re in that box you have no idea that you’re in the box. And also, a lot of propaganda frameworks like that are self-sustaining (describing any contrary information as deliberate lies or giving this huge emotional emphasis to reasons for discounting them, so it’s really hard to bootstrap yourself out of the box.)

I’m not trying to make excuses for the people who are running the operation, I have to assume that they know better. Although, maybe not. Maybe they have some other kind of dysfunction and really think they are standing up against US imperialism or something. I do also think that professional troll farms are also involved in creating the impression, too. My point is, I think the average users may be genuinely confused by these events and see them very differently from the rest of Lemmy does.

@nutomic@lemmy.ml said I could donate directly to him since he doesn’t do as much moderation over there

Having observed a few different types of small team dynamics in my time, my speculation from a distance is that nutomic is the sensible one who does the bulk of the actual work, and dessalines is the other one.

He kind of has my sympathy and I do like Lemmy as software and it is clearly a good thing, but at the same time, at this point in the world if someone on your team is working to silence anyone who talks about Russia in unflattering terms, you can go fuck yourself as far as I am concerned. I am happy their instance is failing and I hope it keeps on failing until they stop doing legwork for murder, tyranny, rape, and torture. Honestly, “I wish my internet place had more users and people didn’t make fun of me so much” is a pretty mild negative consequence to experience from that.

Cutting off funding because of political differences is stupid. Would you rather this go down the same path as Reddit?

If we all stop donating to Lemmy just because the devs are being tankies, how will Lemmy survive?

I don’t want to go back to the bot-ridden reddit with its elon-simping CEO.