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.
Then “authority” is a word of no value or utility by your logic. Indeed, its impossible to not have authority by your logic. Everyone has it.
But the only authority actual of any instance on the Fediverse are the instance owners who fund the instance, maintain it, and can terminate the instance if they see fit.
Everyone has authority, and some of them used to have convenient authority over who could have a savings account, until Bitcoin was invented and made it a lot harder to exercise authority over that.
I’m not asking for a world where nobody has any kind of authority, I’m trying to get a more Bitcoin-like Lemmy brought into the world.
So, mainly the MAGA base’s figureheads, right now - they’re the ones “printing” the money (funding the instance), clicking the buttons on ICANN screens to keep an instance online (maintaining it), and can terminate the instance if they see fit.
Which seems like it should be recognized as a huge problem by the community, but it’s not, because it’s just “mainly,” and aside from those “main owners” you also have “leftist sub-owners” who right now are allowed by the MAGA base to have an inverse-censorship space (to “prove” the false MAGA point that “leftists are the ones into censorship”), and the censorship fetish is so widespread, plenty of supposed “leftists” seem happy with this “small-scale inverting the censorship,” instead of big-scale erasing it.
But this is vague. Clearly a member of the FCC has more power than I do on topics like this, for instance. What I am concerned about is who with power might seek to censor or shut down lemmy or piefed instances.
Has any specific instance been shut down or pressured by ICANN?
You’re inventing a legal relationship hierarchy and then imposing it on the “leftist sub-owners” (as you call them). Have you got any evidence of ICANN being compromised by MAGA zealots just waiting to shut down instances?
And what do you mean by “censorship fetish” exactly? No instance owner here would be happy with some regulatory body intervening and shutting them down.
Every instance has been pressured by ICANN. Even if there are instances at onion address, ICANN forcibly preventing them from using more mainstream addresses should clearly count as “pressure.”
I’m not sure if any instance was on a domain name/IP address before being shut down or moving to an onion address or something.
How?
Is this a strawman or do you have some reason for asking me for evidence of some random thing that incidentally uses some of the same words I used?
“Censorship cultism” would be more accurate, but also harsher and less approachable wording.
Notice how many times in this thread I’ve had to copy and paste the “censorship fetish” part because people wasted my time trying to justify censorship, or pretending it isn’t happening, because they enjoy seeing it happen to the people it happens to right now and somehow that makes it not count (italics for the “absolutely batshit insane nonsense they really must be fucking embarrassed they haven’t snapped out of” part)
Then every instance owner should be using Tor for hosting and federation
When was lemmy.world or lemmy.zip or piefed.social pressured by ICANN? Pressured to do what?
How is that a strawman? You specifically said that Fediverse only exists because MAGA allows it, implying that they could just press a few buttons if they wanted to completely wipe it all out. This seems nonsensical.
I don’t see what’s wrong with “justifying” basic rules on a community or instance against child porn, incitement of violence, threats, general personal abuse etc. I don’t think that’s a censorship fetish anymore than a place of work having basic decorum standards has a “censorship fetish” or is in a “censorship cultism” trance.
It’s a hypothetical risk that’s never happened.
When they were created, they were pressured to censor non-spammers, such as people who share CSAM or other forms of “child porn.”
It’s not. That’s how DNS and IP addresses work, they can be blocked by pressing a few buttons. I also implied MAGA could make it permanent by using their guns on non-MAGA staff at places like ICANN offices, which is also true, not nonsensical.
I addressed this in my original post. This place (Lemmy/Earth) is overrun with people who are into stuff like this. You know that, and you’re willingly ignore it, since you quoted it with the words “censorship fetish.”
Making me repeat myself isn’t gonna magically make Lemmy do much better than reddit.
Making me repeat myself also won’t move past and present events out of the past and present.
Were they? How do you know that? I think it’s more likely that the original lemmy.world admins want to censor that to begin with.
And when has this happened? Is there any good reason to assume it is going to happen?
Okay, so you’ll have to get used to the fact that people, mostly, don’t want zero censorship in their communities.
Past events and present events that you can’t even name.
You know the answer.
Same way as you, difference is I’m not trying to lie or gaslight anyone.
More likely than what? I never said they don’t.
I don’t know, have you tried looking it up?
Yeah. hamas.ps has been down for almost 2 years, which is ongoing, and it’s safe to assume it’s due to the authorities.
Can’t “get used to” something one is already used to.
Example of “get used to” being used correctly in a sentence:
Perhaps in the future, you’ll have to get used to more people wanting to be in uncensored communities.
Incorrect. I have specified many times. Scroll up.
I do: They weren’t. They just didn’t want to host CSAM.
No, I think that they came to that decision on their own.
So no-one forced them then. So no pressure.
So you don’t actually know, yet you claim it must have happened.
Never been there. I’m guessing it’s a Hamas related site. I doubt it has anything necessarily to do with the US authorities or anything to do with Reddit or Lemmy concerns.
So what now? What’s your next move? You know there’s no interest in what you want.
You have finally named one example hamas.ps. You’ve provided no examples of any Lemmy community being shut down.