You could always message an admin and ask them to transfer the account to you.

One of the best parts of this - especially if the trend continues - is that it makes the “Extinguish” part of a possible “Embrace, Expand, Extinguish” attack by Meta’s Threads more difficult.

Cutting off access to a bunch of tiny self-hosted private instances won’t even ping on their radar. But cutting off federation with official government platforms? That’s different.

the chinese might not have destroyed our democracy for corporate interests, but they are the ones who kill people for thinking different, and are the ones who invade other countries because of “reasons”,

The People’s Republic of China has never invaded a foreign country in it’s history, with the exception of Vietnam, and minor participation in anti-terror operations - alongside NATO - in Mali and Somalia.

The idea of China as a territorially expansionist, politically interventionist power is a myth. These are both directly against Chinese foreign policy; what their foreign policy actually is in writing and practice is to build trust and economic codependency with the de facto governments of anyone who will have them.

You don’t have to qualify your opinion that Threads should be defederated by bringing up the lolicon instance. They are two completely separate instances and the questions to defederate from either are completely separate.

Burggit, Exploding-Heads, and Threads each have their own reasons for defederation (lolicon, nazism, corporate influence) and it doesn’t make any sense to bring up one when discussing the other.

I think the best we can hope for in the long-term is an email-like adoption.

Individuals self-hosting major servers on donation money is not sustainable. This sucks for the people for whom this is “what Lemmy is”, but it’s the truth. There will come a time when Lemmy-at-large gets so big that Lemmy.world has to close (or de-federate), as users and content will outgrow voluntary revenue.

What we can hope for is that Lemmy is not taken over by one huge corporate instance, but instead 3-4 competing, inter-federated corporate instances. A Meta instance, a Google instance, and a Bytedance instance, for example. In addition to these, smaller (non-social-media) companies and institutions (game companies, universities, political organizations, etc.) would run their own Lemmy instances for the benefit of their members and users.

Xi is a bad actor. He actively removes opponents, like his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who sat right fucking next to him and was publicly removed.

This is a bad conspiracy theory. Hu Jintao was allowed to sit at the table because he is an important historical figure. He’s in his 80s and has Alzheimer’s. He was having an episode at the table and was escorted out. The idea that he was publicly removed from building and disappeared is tabloid-level misinformation.

Under Xi, China is asserting ownership of international waters in the South China Sea that have historically been either international waters or even owned by smaller nations.

Nations fight over territorial waters all the time, whether it’s Turkey or Kenya or China. There are EEZ disputes in the North Sea between Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the UK. Why should I care whether China or the Philippines own the Spratly Islands? What does it have to do with China being Marxist or not? I really don’t understand why you even brought it up.

Under Xi, the Uyghers’ and Mongolians’ culture is actively being erased by outlawing local religious and cultural customs.

Neither their local religion nor cultural customs are being infringed upon. If anything, the re-education programs in Xinjiang seek to remove recent (90s-now) religious influence from Arabian missionaries, who have spread Modernist interpretations of Islam that are what is endangering local Traditionalist Islam in Xinjiang.

The one thing I would actually agree is an issue is language - the biggest sticking point in Mongolia is that recently public schools have been mandated to teach in Mandarin. However, nothing is being done to prevent locals from speaking Mongolian at home; the goal is just to guarantee that all people in China are fluent in Chinese, while a Mongolian-language school system means some amount of people are just never learning Chinese. Cultural assimilation isn’t even really the goal; not knowing Chinese is correlated with worse career prospects for indigenous people in China.

And of course, most countries in the world, including the U.S., mandate that public schools teach in the official language. This is nothing new nor unique to China.

There is a similar problem in Tibet, where in addition to the above issues, boarding schools are being mandated for rural children because it’s less expensive to have a large, centrally located boarding school in low-density areas than managing a public school in every remote Tibetan village (China recently outlawed private schools, which I think is a big plus for equality of opportunity).

Isn’t claiming to be a Marxist state while still maintaining power within a small group of people (the inner party, a political version of the bourgeois) worse?

The Chinese system isn’t perfect but I think questions like these put the cart before the horse. Is the Chinese system set up in such a way that, if bad actors got their way to the top, they would wield an immense amount of power? Yes, definitely. This question is separate from whether or not the people at the top right now are bad actors. And I think, like in any country, it’s a mixed bag; there are oligarchs and business-industry plants and corrupt officials, but there’s also well-meaning bureaucrats (Xi Jinping broadly fits into this category) and ideologically-driven Marxists.

The idea that Xi Jinping is a power-hungry dictator is an overblown trope. He is a fat, old, boring bureaucrat who got into office because he is an agreeable political moderate; a compromise between the ideological Marxist wing of the party and the pro-business Dengist wing.

As we saw in the Soviet Union, unrestricted Freedom of Speech is the downfall of Marxism. Home-grown Liberals are only the first issue; the United States government spends literally billions of dollars propping up anti-government organizations, whether that’s Uyghur terrorist groups, the Falun Gong, Tibetan Independence movements, or “LGBTQ+ Rights” organizations who always seem to spend more time arguing for political liberalization than they do actual LGBTQ+ Rights (and, before you strawman me, I want to make my point here clear: LGBTQ+ Rights are good, but many such organizations in China are funded by foreign actors in order to disrupt Chinese politics. The bad things about them are not their LGBTQ+ Rights advocacy, but their advocacy for other forms of Liberalization that undermine Communism in China. If an LGBTQ+ Rights organization in China calls for the downfall of the CPC, they do not deserve to exist)

Being “unbiased” is not a virtue. I am a Marxist. I judge people, governments, and ideas based off of a Marxist framework. That is my bias.

I give China the benefit of the doubt because they are, at least, claiming to be a Marxist state. This on its own puts them above any non-Marxist state.

Agreed. There is too much false equivalence of “Tankies” and fascists.

Fascists want to enslave your sisters and daughters and stick your trans friends in psych wards until they “decide” to stop being trans. They’re fine with Blacks wallowing in poverty as second-class citizens and having militarized police on every streetcorner.

“Tankies” (Marxist-Leninists) believe in all the same progressive things other (so-called) Socialists do but have different views on historical figures and foreign policy, something that does not matter a bit in the here and now.

Here is the difference between Fascists and “Tankies”: if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that China was trying to exterminate the Ughyr people through mass execution, 95% of the “Tankies” out there, myself included, would disown China and denounce the genocide (this will not happen, because it isn’t a genocide except in the broadest and most meaningless of terms). If it was proven beyond a doubt that the Holocaust happened (which it more or less has), the majority of Neo-Nazis would still say it was good.

If you really care that much about “Authoritarians” and “Tankies”, maybe you should just move to exploding-heads.