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.
That’s maybe absolute individual ownership of a backup, nothing like absolute individual ownership of a Lemmy instance.
You have provided no reason I should provide an example, despite repeatedly suggesting I should, and repeatedly being asked why.
I’ll ask another thing this time: what do you find when you just look it up? Does that not work?
Because you made the claims. You back it up. Not moving on this.
There is no example. It doesn’t exist. It hasn’t happened.
I don’t see any valid reasoning here. Wondering if you’ll try again or not - hopefully you’re done wasting time repeating this nonsense.
Screenshot where you get that search result?
I’m never done. You made the claims, you back it up.
How can I prove a negative? There’s no example that you can provide of a lemmy instance being forcibly censored by outside actors.
Are you implying I’ll run out of motivation to embarrass you, before you run out of motivation to embarrass yourself?
Seems unlikely.
Why? You’ve repeatedly suggested I should do this, but repeatedly ignored me asking why.
What do you see when you Google it? That’s another question you keep ignoring.
Why do you ask such a dumb question right after quoting the part where I asked for proof of your search result, which you didn’t include?
Didn’t ask. Why waste time with this part?
How can a search result disprove a negative? Do you actually know what I mean by that?
I did. Where’s your evidence for this claim? And you have suggested it repeatedly in other comments.
Not my problem. Why the fuck are you asking me while you keep ignoring me asking you to prove a search result? Why would I have advice for you on some random unrelated shit right now?
I’m just reading it as plain English. If you mean something other than what you said, it’s not my problem, is there some reason I should give a fuck?
The question was: “why waste time with this part?”
I remember not asking.
Because you have repeatedly injected irrelevant shit I didn’t ask about in yours.
No, you don’t understand disproving a negative. You made the claim. You back it up. Where’s your evidence of a Lemmy instance being shut down by “the authorities”?
Not an answer. Do you know what “disprove a negative” means?
But I did. I want an answer.
I don’t even think you know what you’re replying to at this point.
Misuse of “no” since this wouldn’t change what I said, if it was true.
Also not true. “Disproving a negative” is pretty basic English. I might not understand you using random words you don’t know the meanings of, but I know the meanings of the words themselves.
Why? What do you get when you Google it? You keep ignoring these questions so far.
What do you get when you Google it? You keep ignoring this question so far.
I didn’t ask if it was.
Yep.
I didn’t ask if you did.
I didn’t ask if you do.
I didn’t ask if you do.