Soon after I joined Lemmy a few years ago, I searched for communities based on my interests and subscribed to the ones with the highest numbers of users to ensure they are active. Sometimes I joined multiple, but then saw that some people post the same thing to more than one, cluttering my feed, so I left the smaller ones.
It’s only after my community ban from !games@hexbear.net for disagreeing about Ukraine that I was told about MeanwhileOnGrad, learning exactly what “the tankie triad” means and why big Lemmy instances have defederated from those. Lemmy.ml, where the ML probably stands for Marxist-Leninist, seems to have been defederated by fewer, possibly because it’s run by the creator of Lemmy, Dessalines. Nevertheless, there is evidence of Dessalines holding the same authoritarian communist views as the rest.
Recently, there were two posts on !privacy@lemmy.ml about Signal, but then in both cases, admin davel (who is known on MoG for seeing CIA’s hand in running Ukraine, among other things) and Dessalines linked (1, 2, 3) the same article by Dessalines, which not only argues Signal could be a CIA honeypot (as if it matters when proper e2ee is used), but also manages to shoehorn China even into that, claiming its government “prefers autonomy”. This sort of portrayal of totalitarianism as sovereignty is the reason I unsubscribed from the community. As it has been said by others, ML is not a neutral instance but a means of pushing authoritarian views onto unsuspecting users.
Edit: Made the post title clearer.


They were a slave-based theocracy who was liberated. While I don’t know much about current policy and recent history in the region, its hard to take any criticism seriously from someone who doesn’t acknowledge freeing slaves as unambiguously good.
Nope, never been to Tibet. Have you? What Tibetans have you spoken to?
It was none of China’s business and they didn’t leave after. Cool motive, still colonizing.
Should have left so the US could airdrop their former slave-masters into the country with a shitton of guns, like they did?
They never should have been there. What part of “none of China’s business” do you not understand?
You think people should just ignore literal slavery?
No.
Lived with a family in Ladakh for a month. They have an interesting perspective… and a society that presents a way forward from the medieval semi-feudalism you call slavery. They are also living under colonialism but with very different outcomes than Tibet.
I lived in Dharamsala for six weeks. I have talked to a lot of other Tibetans from the refugee diaspora. Their proposed modernization would look a lot like Bhutan. Are the Bhutanese slaves?
You’d have to compare Bhutan to Tibet in the right timeframe.
Early 1900s both were theocratic autocracies in the designs of the British Empire’s sphere of influence.
Bhutan got absorbed into the British control. Tibet effectively became a vassal of the Qing dynasty in response to the British invasion.
Tibet pretty much was given autonomy through the rest of the Qing Dynasty, ignored by the KMT, and then after the civil war the CCP removed the system that placed the Dalai Lama as the head of state and government The Tibetan government in exile reformed over decades and only first directly elected a leader in the 2000s.
It’s unnecessarily hyperbolic to call either the modern Tibetans or Bhutanese as slaves, either way.
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