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 you just said is my point, minus the part where I said users sort themselves into instances already so that they don’t get censored from what they want to say. OP’s claiming that people control their speech on their own instances, therefore justifying OP defederating from this “controlled speech,” but my speech and presumably your speech isn’t controlled on our respective instances because they presumably align roughly with what we already want to say.
I’m well aware that Lemmy.ml removes comments and posts bashing communism, or that have bigotry in them, etc. Lemmy.world removes comments critical of the DNC, and has some Zionist mods. Users naturally sort themselves into whichever one won’t censor what they want to say to begin with, we aren’t all forced under one banner like Reddit, because of federation.
Make sense?
Maybe my lack of understanding stems from a misunderstanding of OP’s post… which to be fair, I found fairly difficult to parse, and based on their responses to your and other posters’ replies, I strongly suspect that’s a ‘them’ problem, not a ‘me’ problem, as it seems everyone else is having an equally hard time understanding what they’re actually trying to say.
I just want to be clear that it is a lack of understanding and not an attempt to be antagonistic. I have no inherent problem with you; we have strongly differing views on a number of important topics, but we seem to be able to co-exist on Lemmy (and even post in the same communities) just fine, which… seems to be a counter-point to OP’s post? But maybe I’m just still misinterpreting what that point actually is.
That’s fair! Yea, from how I have interacted with OP, it seems they want Lemmy to overtake Reddit in numbers, have no moderation outside of CSAM or something, and have TOR integration so governments can’t censor it, and that they believe this is the key to achieving socialism (I think?). I think this person just has very specific desires and sees it as a problem for everyone that they aren’t met.
No, the OP thinks that even CSAM should not be moderated. Click here.
What the fuck
Yeah, I had a feeling. And had to take the long road to get there.
Incredible.
You can call wanting to avoid planetary extinction a “very specific desire” but it’s very weird to pretend it being unmet wouldn’t be a problem for everyone.
Are you one of those science denialists who pretends climate change isn’t manmade, or will be solved by corporations before the 100 more years it would supposedly take to become a problem, or something?
Non-sequitor.
Nope. The person I was replying to mentioned a “very specific desire” of mine. They were trying to pretend politics is no big deal, like people who think climate change is a future problem that will “just get fixed.”
No, that’s not what happened.
It is. Do you have anything else or just completely unexplained denialism?
It isn’t, and I’ve already explained why.
No, it’s that you’re in a community full of mostly people like you, including the same issues.
I’m speaking coherently. I even rephrased my original point in my main post to where I thought I was making it too long, for the sake of making sure people could understand. People are basically just too upset about the part where I called out their censorship fetish, and not mentally able to think straight about something upsetting.
If you’re really undecided about whether it’s me or everyone else, keep re-reading or asking more questions until you understand what went wrong in your own first reading. That should really help you understand more of the world in general.