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.

What? When did I say I can’t remember any instances rules? I quoted sh.itjust.works rules and then referenced lemmynsfw as another example as they have different rules, and allow pornography.
It’s text, just read it again.
Why are you asking like I would know, and why are you putting it right after a quote of yet another question you’re ignoring?
I didn’t ask you to repeat yourself like this, why waste the time? Just because you’re an abusive person, right?
Still really weird how you asked me for examples you had just given yourself. Care to try explaining that? Seems like you were just trying to be confusing, which is really weird when it’s basically just us in this subthread.
You claimed I had forgotten the rules of any instance when no such event happened.
You are a sensitive little soul, aren’t you? I’m not keeping you here. You don’t have to reply.
I don’t think I claimed that. You were clearly pretending to forget, not actually forgetting. I made it clear that seemed pretty obvious from how you had just mentioned examples yourself, right before asking for them.
Me, the soul? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure my sensitivity is powered by the central nervous system. There’s not a clear scientific answer on what souls even are, but it feels like I might have a honey badger type of one, in the body of a human pothead.
I didn’t ask if you were.
I didn’t ask if I did, and while it’s debatable, I don’t really have enough of an opinion to debate on it.
I did neither.
My point is that it’s laughable to claim abuse when you keep coming back for more, so to speak.
Incorrect. You did what I said you did.
That’s gibberish, not a point.
Does lying make you feel better about being an abusive psycho?
No, I didn’t.
So yet more insults. Reported.
I don’t think I’d say you did something you didn’t do.
Didn’t ask.