I’ve been trying Lemmy for a little while and wasn’t sure how to feel about it.
Today, I wanted to start blocking the most high-censorship instances until I could find a fully zero-censorship instance and simply block all the ones with censorship. Filter bots, not people.
When I looked into it further, I found out there are no zero-censorship instances, because Lemmy relies on a broken “federation” system where each instance is supposed to be able to fetch posts from other instances, but it’s never been finished to reach a fully working state. Lemmy’s official docs say you can’t even do federation over Tor at all. This means it uses DNS, so it won’t actually allow Lemmy instances to fetch posts from each other freely, it just gets blocked instantly and easily, every time the authorities feel like blocking anything.
So you can only ever have the “average joe lemmy” and “average joe reddit” with everything approved by the authorities, and then “tor copies of lemmy” and “tor copies of reddit” where you have free speech but you can only reach other nerds.
People seem to think Lemmy is different because this weird censorship fetish is extremely popular and most of you are happy to see bans happen to certain people, not just bots, so a small Lemmy that censors certain people feels fundamentally different from a big reddit that censors more people. But it’s the exact same thing, it’s reddit.
When reddit was smaller, you could say basically anything you wanted there, they just wouldn’t let it reach the main audience. Then it got too big, and any tiny part of the audience you could reach would be too big, so they won’t let you talk at all.
Lemmy is now the small part of reddit where you can say whatever you want, separated from the main audience, until too much growth happens and you have to move again.
It’s not actually a solution to reddit. It’s not designed to be different, it’s designed to match the past today and then match reddit’s present tomorrow, while being part of a system that’s about the same in past, present, and future.
Last year, this year, and next year, you’re posting somewhere it won’t be seen by many people, and the system that charges people for ambulance rides is getting another year of ambulance ride revenue, facing no organized resistance. There’s no difference here.
Lemmy urgently needs federation between onion service instances and DNS addresses in order to actually do what most users seem to wish it would do: allow discussion outside what the corporate authorities allow, while outgrowing reddit & helping undo the damage social media has done to human communication.
Your point was about people censoring their own speech, ie Pawb.social posters can’t say certain things, Lemmy.ml users can’t say certain things, etc. That may be true, but Lemmy is federated and accounts are free, I use Lemmy.ml because I won’t be censored for being a communist and they presumably use Pawb.social because they have interest in doing so.
You don’t gave to comment on other instances, you can spin your own, but defederating from others makes no sense. You can let others visit and just not remove their comments. By blocking, say, Hexbear, like you already do with a sh.itjust.works account, you are limiting the number of communists you interact with already.
You’re ignoring so many of my words. Is that in good faith? Are you in a big hurry but still considering this important enough to try to engage in a rushed way? Or are you just willingly refusing to understand something simple?
Instances don’t censor based on size, but based on stances. slrpnk.net is biased against Marxism-Leninism, but is a very small instance. Growth won’t increase censorship, because we aren’t appealing to advertisers. It’s a false premise.
Secondly, I’m not a free-speech absolutist. Misinformation and bigotry should be removed, especially in the modern age where massive propaganda networks push narratives.
Instances are and will continue to be censored based on size, just like subreddits.
This is incredibly obvious, enough to prevent any major effort towards even trying to make mainstream zero-censorship instances so far.
I don’t get how you don’t get this.
You start a zero-censorship instance on DNS, it gets blocked immediately.
You start it on Tor, docs say it can’t federate with other instances.
When current levels of censorship get too many users, they can be blocked too, like how they’re currently blocked from reddit, keeping the spread of ideas controlled by the authorities, the same way it was when we were all on reddit.
What fundamental change do you see here that justifies saying the opposite?
The reason size had an impact on Reddit, advertisers, does not exist on Lemmy nor is there a single large umbrella.
That makes no sense. If having advertisers is what caused reddit to be censored, then how did the smaller less censored reddit have advertisers the whole time? You’re letting the authorities distract you from their actual systems and methods of control with nonsense explanations like “advertisers”
Ignoring all that - assuming you’re from an alternate timeline where reddit only got advertisers right before going to shit - how does it negate the fact that Lemmy docs say Tor doesn’t work, thus requiring DNS / IP addresses, which factually simply are controlled by corporate authorities?
How does any of it negate the fact that, like last year, ambulance riders simply are being charged money while you post where not many people see it?
How does any of it negate the fact that, like last year, we simply don’t think we’re just one day away from changing it via organized resistance?
How would any of it change the reality where once you posted for few people on reddit, then it was more people and they got splintered between reddit and Lemmy, then as Lemmy grows they split between different parts of Lemmy, while debt collectors keep going after people for ambulance rides?
They had cheaper advertisers. Once Reddit reached scale, it needed to take a more active stance.
Why would size have anything to do with anything otherwise?
I edited my comment, not trying to make you look like you ignored the parts I added, I’m just very bad at realizing a post isn’t done before prematurely posting.
I don’t see it as connected, nor do I see how size on Lemmy correlates to strength of moderation. As for ambulance rides and the predatory healthcare system, we need to abolish capitalism and move onto socialism.
An Instance isn’t a subreddit on a major profit-making site that relies heavily on advertisers. The Fediverse just doesn’t operate at base as you think.
An Instance is an Instance on a major profit-making network that relies heavily on advertisers.
It being an Instance instead of a subreddit doesn’t really matter, and neither does how major it is, or that it makes profit, or that there are advertisers.
The issue is that there are centralized groups of people given authority to control the entire space, so other, smaller groups can’t have their own authority over their own discussions without self-isolation.
You could make Tor as major and profit-making as you want and people can advertise on it all they want, and it doesn’t make Instances “subreddits,” but Tor still wouldn’t make it convenient for anyone to exert authority over what everyone else can post and see using Tor.
Lemmy doesn’t have ads, nor are any instances profit making.
So what? If someone is a nazi, people don’t tend to want to talk to you. Who knew.
Didn’t ask
I seriously doubt it functions on the charity of electric bill payers. Given it doesn’t use Tor, and DNS and IP addresses rely on generating “profit” for corporations (really just returning funds to the authorities, but you’re calling it “profit” because they have brand names on bank accounts taking in more money than they send out), it must be “profitable” or it would be taken offline.
Again, didn’t ask. Why do you keep injecting random side topics like this?
The donations go to maintaining the instance. It costs money to keep them up.
I am making the point that there’s a reason “free speech” communities and instances are blacklisted and marginalised. Because people don’t want to associate with nazis.