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.
Again, can’t.
That’s the whole point of my original post. Don’t know how many times I have to repeat it. Lemmy uses DNS / IP addresses, stops Tor from being used, can’t have free speech instances under this configuration. Might need new code, not just new instance
Do you consider taking down CSAM as censorship?
Why are you asking me if I recognize a valid dictionary definition I’ve said nothing to indicate I wouldn’t recognize?
Bad faith, that’s why.
Let me rephrase. Do you think sites should be forced to take down CSAM?
Reply next with the right answer to my above question, and I’ll reply to that with the right answer to yours.
Fine, it’s censorship. I was really meaning to try and see if you are opposed to CSAM being taken down.
I was looking for right answers, like “bad faith” or “a weak attempt at gaslighting”
Care to try again before expecting me to waste time answering a dumbass question you should be able to figure out the answer to / find my previous answers to yourself?
I’ll do whatever I like, without your permission. I reject your claims about my behaviour.
My question stands: Are you against laws that compel site owners and administrators to remove CSAM?
Didn’t ask. Why do you bring this up? Did you misread a word as “permission?” I didn’t say any words that use any letters like “permission.” Did you get confused in some other way?
Don’t care.
Yes, since you decided not to earn an answer, your question stands. Let me guess, you just learned the phrase “my question stands” and you were in a rush to use it?
The correct punctuation mark also would have been a period, not a colon, to end a sentence.
Your phrasing, and the misused colon, could confuse a reader who joins in here, into thinking this was the old question - not a new one.
Either way, it’s pretty dumb to add a second question when you just commented on how you decided not to earn an answer to the other one.