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.

But less censored than most places, and they’re a shithole.
No, I did not. That’s not what I meant. You’re just wrong.
So now into personal insults, are we?
Have you heard of the burden of proof?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
Okay, that’s not what you seemed to say initially. But so how is lemmy.world specifically “run by glowies”?
“My own poor ability to explain what I mean shouldn’t be clarified. People should just know my clearly bizarre mindset”.
They aren’t pressured into having rules that they hacvve chosen to have.
That’s what Lemmy means when they talk about self-hosting.
You seem to be operating under basic definitions of words that no-one else does.
Incorrect. Twitter, X, and 4chan so far have all been more censored than most places have been throughout human history, contributing to their shithole statuses.
Yes you did.
Didn’t ask. Not my problem. Get it looked at by a professional.
Nope.
I don’t know, are we? I definitely am.
Yes, I mentioned it earlier in this thread. The person it should be on in this context is you, since you’re the one making the outlandish claims and offering nothing to back them up.
Incorrect. You understood me fine, you’re just pretending otherwise as a form of gaslighting.
My understanding is they mainly use keyboard, mouse, and touchscreen for inputs, while using screens to see what they’re doing.
Why did you just make me explain that? Dumb as fuck.
Stop putting your own statements in quote marks, it’s weird. And maybe you should stop wasting my time if you can’t handle clarifying your own statements.
Incorrect, as I assumed.
What I asked was why waste my time with it when I didn’t ask. This doesn’t seem like a reason.
Incorrect. Maybe what you mean to say is I’m one of the few people who still tend to use “literal” and “literally” correctly.
You think they’d somehow be better if they weren’t censored? Both Twitter and 4chan have less rules than Reddit or Lemmy.
No, I did not.
You made an accusation, I reject it.
So should I report you? That’s usually against instance rules.
What claims have I made? Be specific.
No, you specifically said: “Because they’re glowies”. No nuance.
What is your definition of “glowie” here? My understanding is that it’s supposedly an undercover government agent. Got any evidence for this for lemmy.world mods?
I’ll do whatever I like. And I wasn’t clarifying my statements, more noting your complaining about being asked to clarify.
No reason to believe they are “pressured”. You’ve never backed this up.
You don’t really use any words correctly. They’re all a bit off.
Not sure what you’re trying to say here. Get better at typing.
Is repeatedly lying making you feel better about any of this?
Sounds like a you problem.
I don’t care, but your question baits me to say something you could try to use to justify getting me banned, which sucks. Try asking on nostr, where I can’t be banned, if you want my answer.
Didn’t ask.
What’s in it for me?
To be clear, that’s a rhetorical question. I understand that you have nothing real to offer anyone.
Misuse of “no” since this doesn’t change what I said, which is still true.
Also, didn’t ask.
The colloquial one, originating from Terry Davis.
Yep.
Do you read what you type?
Didn’t ask. You should stop putting your own statements in quote marks, it’s weird.
Again, didn’t ask, didn’t finish reading this sentence, stopped at “more” since you keep refusing to explain why you wasted time typing things after I waste time reading them and ask why
Incorrect.
Incorrect again.
Incorrect yet again. I’m basically the most fluent English speaker alive (and quite monolingual).
4chan and Twitter are less censored than Reddit, but even more garbage.
I’m not lying. You just can’t read. I did not imply that nazis would somehow take over and censor a hypothetically unmoderated space.
I don’t see how that question baits you.
You keep replying. I obviously don’t need to give you anything here.
So as I said: Where’s your evidence of lemmy.world mods being glowies?
Yes. You did claim that lemmy.world mods are glowies. Source
“So why do you think lemmy.world has rules beyond just blocking spam?”
“Because it’s run by glowies, duh.”
I’ll do whatever I like.
Name me these reasons for them being pressured.
You think you’re the best living english speaker on the planet?
“Less censored” and “more garbage” are both heavily debatable, but why did you bring this up? What’s the relevance?
That’s why I suggested you try asking on nostr, instead of here. It’s hard to know the answers to questions you’ve asked in places the person you’re asking knows it’s not really possible to give an appropriate answer.
I didn’t ask, but why did you put this right after a part where you ignored yet another question I asked? At least it was explicitly a rhetorical question this time, but still weird behavior to keep copying and pasting all the questions for no reason.
I’ll half-answer this if you answer one of the many questions you’ve ignored from me.
Why are you acting like I suddenly forgot this?
I didn’t ask if you would.
You should stop putting your own statements in quote marks, it’s weird.
What do you mean by “these?”
Most fluent, that’s what the evidence suggests.
It shows that we have a good idea what will happen without censorship.
I don’t really give a fuck about your questions.
It’s pathetic that it took so many posts for you to finally acknowledge this question.
What sort of comical Jordan Peterson style reply is this lmao
Lmao what evidence fucking hell
How would it do that? How does it do that?
I didn’t ask if you do.
How many?
Also, is there a way to tell if (or maybe when) a post here is edited, so you could prove your answer with numbered links?
Neither comical nor Jordan Peterson style.
If I remember right you said “these rules” but it was a question, so it’s acting like I somehow know what set of rules you mean when you didn’t establish a group of rules to be talking about before calling it “these rules”
The lack of anyone else demonstrating the same level of fluency as me despite what seems like immense pressure to do so in the current state of the anglosphere / planet
By being less censored than Reddit, and both being complete garbage and full of slop, spam and trolls.
How would they do that? You’ve spoken to everyone to know that you have better fluency?
Why should I do that?
No, it wasn’t.
I was asking what pressure the lemmy.world admins were supposedly under when they made the instance.