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.
Personally I use other platforms for uncensored discussions.
Unfortunately they’re filled with insufferable twats like yourself, but that’s the price we pay for free speech.
It’s obvious for everybody except for you, that Lemmy isn’t intended as a free speech platform, but a means to form your own community based on shared interests and values. That inherently comes with some amount of censorship at the discretion of instance operators. I’m a free speech advocate, but I value and respect individuals’ right to maintain their property (Lemmy instance) as they see fit.
If you want free speech, hop on Simplex where you can yell racial slurs until you’ve satisfied yourself.
Or spin up your own lemmy instance. I’d be happy to join and engage in some debates.
No you don’t. We use other platforms for less censored discussions. Maybe you use nostr like me but that doesn’t mean either of us has overcome this era of censorship.
Yep.
This is self-contradictory. Which is it?
Not intended for free speech?
Or indeed intended for free speech (freedom to form your own community (discussion space) based on shared interests and values)?
Simplex isn’t what I use for free speech, nostr is, and my slurs are generally not racial.
How would you even use Simplex for more free speech? Does it have group chats or something? (I don’t actually care, I’m just mildly confused)
I will not be spinning up instances of anything. I will seed hashes in bittorrent-like P2P networks, I will put my posts where they fit, I will look for posts from others in the most anti-censorship ways I can find, and I will hope devs and server admins create a version of Lemmy that’s fitting for more of my posts - while hurrying toward a possible future where Tor isn’t enough to make Lemmy relevant anymore, because P2P networks become the only place worth posting anything.
It’s not self-contradictory. Any user created community will have rules designed to keep on-topic. Whether or not its a music community, video game community, national community, pottery community. “Free speech zones” so to speak are contradictory to those goals.
It is self-contradictory.
Reddit has the authority to hijack a subreddit and change the mods and the rules, or just ban it. Reddit staff take that authority, and reddit users grant it.
If you want Lemmy to improve on that, which I also want, that area of improvement is what we call a form of “free speech.”
You cannot accurately say Lemmy should offer this improvement over reddit, but it is not related to free speech. That is just incorrect.
Yes. So do lemmy instances.This is because community moderators don’t actually own any part of the instance they operate on. How is it you imagine Reddit users can somehow not grant it?
But ignoring that, any user-made community has specific topics and themes in mind for what it wants to focus on. This necessarily requires focusing on those things to the explicit censorship of other topics.
By coding a decentralized P2P reddit and moving there, I guess.
Or just a tor version of Lemmy could be good.
Right, and you can’t pick those other topics for your community, because federation is broken.
The Fediverse existed for disgruntled reddit users.
Huh? Community owners (I’m talking about the equivalent of subreddits here can pick the topic and focus of their communities). And in terms of instances, an instance owner can absolutely choose the theme of their instance. There are many different instances with different vibes, aesthetics and political persuasions across the fediverse.
Didn’t ask.
Don’t get what you’re trying to say here.
Incorrect. Federation broken, which prevents this. How many times do I have to say this?
Incorrect. All of them are in the same pro-censorship bubble so far, because Lemmy so far is designed with broken federation to promote that outcome. How many times are you going to make me explain the same shit again?
How does federation allegedly being broken mean that lemmy.blahaj can’t be an LGBTQ focused instance? How does federation allegedly being broken mean that slrpnk.net can’t be a solarpunk themed instance? Or that adult.swim isn’t themed around animation?
Are you of the opinion that a “pro-censorship bubble” is somehow a single theme on its own and that there’s no difference between hexbear.net and maga.place?
What would distinguish an instance from each other in your mind? Also, the federation system has no relevance here to the culture of the Fediverse. Even if the Fediverse was on TOR - it would not stop instances having federation standards.