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.
You mean over TOR, according to your OP
How else would they do it?
Currently federation works now. You just don’t like how it works, and you’re paranoid that the authorities will intervene and dictate to Lemmy instances what they should do.
It doesn’t work for what many people wish it would do (and pretend it does), which is to create a decentralized discussion space controlled by the people and not restricted by the authorities
There’s no evidence of any restriction by the authorities.
Just because you are one of the people giving them authority doesn’t magically stop it from being authority. Authority isn’t a word for “others” that each person exempts self-related things from. Why the fuck do I have to keep explaining this and copying and pasting where I addressed it in my original post?
I am not a member of a government or regulatory body with powers of enforcement. I am just “some guy” here with opinions.
You considered that the admins of lemmy instances would implement rules regardless of what the audience thinks?
And apparently one of those opinions is that it’s fun to see people banned from political discussion, which means you’re one of the people granting some the authority to ban others, and apparently that makes you think it isn’t authority, which makes no sense, because nothing about the word “authority” makes it have everyone exempted from self-related things like it.
Yes, and since that was so weird, I looked into it more, and found out federation doesn’t really work due to the authorities, which makes more sense than thinking there’s just no anti-censorship server admins aware of Lemmy.
Yeah, you are using the word “authority” in an idiosyncratic way. That is not how it used. Yes, instance owners tend to have to listen to their audiences if they wish to maintain usage of their communities. This is just a negotiation that happens in life in general. Any service provider will have to account for what their audience wants, or they won’t have an audience. And presumably - they do want an audience in most classes.
Its also true that most instance owners set up their own rules from their own choices, unrelated to the crowd shouting at them.
There almost certainly are “anti-censorship” instances, but they are all blacklisted - so you will have to find them.