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.
Instances can be created freely, and are free to both associate and disassociate with other instances as they please.
Each instance decides their comfort with content within their instance and outside it. There are left leaning instances, centrist ones, and I’m sure a few right leaning ones. Some are ban-happy, but many will allow you to post all sorts of content, as long as it’s not too outlandish.
If the content you wish to see/post is wildly outside the overton window, you can join an instance that allows this or create your own. But other instances are under no obligation to federate with content they don’t wish to see.
No. Instances can be created in a restricted and censored way.
I see no proof. Docs say Tor doesn’t work, so you’re restricted by DNS / IP address usage, making it up to the authorities who can federate with who, not each instance’s “owners.”
I addressed in my post how this weird censorship fetish is so common, many of you are unable to see what’s happening, because you’re fine with seeing bans happen to certain people, not just bots. It’s like you completely missed this before typing a sentence that ends in “as long as it’s not too outlandish”
And I’m under no obligation to recommend Lemmy or stop myself from criticizing it for blocking a basic bit of functionality that would stop it from being increasingly useless for me and others like me
Edit - a lot of this is just pointless. Why make me explain that I’m not obligated to recommend Lemmy? Why explain to me that you’re under no obligation to federate with stuff you don’t want to? Who asked?
Yeah of course
And you’re next.
(you must feel powerful to write that, it’s fortunate that the mods only censored one of his comments)
You can tell you’re all mentally ill by how the context of this reply is someone else wasting my time with paragraphs of bullshit before you admit the real point they were too passive-aggressive to say
And I mean YOU can tell
Deep down, you know this about yourself, because it’s so obvious, that’s my point here
So many nice personal insults from you, I really wonder why you want/need a “no censoring” area… Oh wait, no, I do not and I am happy that people like you are not allowed everywhere.
Didn’t ask. Why do you reply with this, though?
Any instance made can have its own policy.
Do you actually have an example of an instance being dictated to by the “authorities”?
Yes, every instance, as I said in my original post.
I also explained in my original post how many of you have a really hard time with this because the censorship fetish is so popular, you are actually OK with seeing bans happen to certain people, not just bots.
Are you making me repeat this yet again in good faith, or are you willingly refusing to understand me?
What are you calling the “authorities” exactly? Currently instance owners design their own terms of service. They aren’t dictated to by any other “authority”.
And yes, I am not a free speech absolutist. What’s your point?
People who are given authority is what the word means. In this context, that would mean people who are given the authority to censor posts online. That should be pretty clear.
Then by “instance owners” you mean ICANN and the other (“other than ICANN”) authorities that design the terms of service allowed on federated instances, not the individual admins of each instance, so it doesn’t matter that they aren’t dictated to by “other authorities” (“other than the ones that dictate these things”)
On the other hand, maybe you’re just incorrect, and using “instance owners” to mean the individual admins of each instance, who are dictated to by authorities like ICANN and the President, who are filed under “other than instance admins”
So when you asked who I’m calling authorities, you are one of the people who give them authority to censor the internet, and possibly one of the people given such authority. You should be more familiar with these words.
My main point is that Lemmy needs Tor federation in order to do what it ostensibly tries to do: solve reddit’s problems.
My point in this subthread is that it’s remarkable how a lot of you reply trying to justify censorship, like I didn’t make it clear I’m not open to bullshit - and meanwhile the thread is downvoted to shit, so there aren’t many people you could be trying to talk to other than me.
The people who have the authority to control what is on the Fediverse, currently, are Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed instance owners and admins.
No-one has applied pressure so far as I know.
Sorry, are you alleging that the instance owners of lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemmy.zip are dictated by the president? (I don’t know what you mean by ICANN)
That you want no censorship doesn’t bind us either. I am not obliged to change my positions because you don’t like it.
You are leaving out the authorities that these people answer to so far, or including them in “owners” without being clear enough about it.
Yet again, for the millionth time you people make me repeat this: I am aware some of you have the censorship fetish and it makes it hard for you to see when a person is censored, because you can be too busy enjoying it. My post invites you to try using words objectively and telling the truth.
Yes. ICANN is the term for people who are “given authority” to click buttons on computer screens that make your .com name stop working. President of the United States is the term for people who are “given authority” to write papers that give other people authority to shoot/imprison the ICANN guys if they don’t click those buttons for the .com names they’re told to. These are examples of the people in the bigger group collectively called “the authorities”
So far, this makes it impossible to find any instances that won’t block posts. ICANN would click a button that says “block this .com name for allowing child porn” or the President would write a paper that says “shoot/imprison the ICANN people for refusing to click the button” and so far people aren’t really trying hard enough to take authority away from those people. Making instances that would get blocked doesn’t really even seem worth trying when Tor can’t be used to try to bypass the blocking.
You are responsible for your choices
You have provided no evidence that instance admins “answer to” the President or “ICANN”, or are placed at his whim. What you insist without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Are you claiming that the US government issues orders to the instance owners of piefed.social, feddit.org and lemmy.zip?
You know that these instances are both owned and hosted by non-americans, right?
I can believe that nazis should be banned by the fediverse and oppose hypothetical government control of the fediverse, you know. These aren’t mutually incompatible positions.
And yes, I suppose sites can be taken down for child porn hosting. So? That seems like a good thing to me.