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.
An Instance is an Instance on a major profit-making network that relies heavily on advertisers.
It being an Instance instead of a subreddit doesn’t really matter, and neither does how major it is, or that it makes profit, or that there are advertisers.
The issue is that there are centralized groups of people given authority to control the entire space, so other, smaller groups can’t have their own authority over their own discussions without self-isolation.
You could make Tor as major and profit-making as you want and people can advertise on it all they want, and it doesn’t make Instances “subreddits,” but Tor still wouldn’t make it convenient for anyone to exert authority over what everyone else can post and see using Tor.
Lemmy doesn’t have ads, nor are any instances profit making.
So what? If someone is a nazi, people don’t tend to want to talk to you. Who knew.
Didn’t ask
I seriously doubt it functions on the charity of electric bill payers. Given it doesn’t use Tor, and DNS and IP addresses rely on generating “profit” for corporations (really just returning funds to the authorities, but you’re calling it “profit” because they have brand names on bank accounts taking in more money than they send out), it must be “profitable” or it would be taken offline.
Again, didn’t ask. Why do you keep injecting random side topics like this?
The donations go to maintaining the instance. It costs money to keep them up.
I am making the point that there’s a reason “free speech” communities and instances are blacklisted and marginalised. Because people don’t want to associate with nazis.
Didn’t ask a single thing answered by anything you just said. Why do you say these things?
The point here is that Lemmy instances are not for-profit ventures.
I really don’t get what you even want at this point. Even if a completely uncensored lemmy instances did exist, and was bulletproof against potential government intervention - it would not change how lemmy.world operates.
So it took you until now to say that was the point, and you still haven’t explained how it is a point here, let alone “the?”
I want a reddit-style feed with reddit and lemmy.world blocked and nobody who doesn’t block anyone blocked. I don’t care how lemmy.world operates unless they feel like joining in not banning any people who aren’t into people-banning.
They aren’t subject to the commercial pressures and interests of Reddit.
You could literally make your own instance and block all instances that block people. I’m sure there’s already one out there that fulfills this somewhere.
So?
Unless you mean “any commercial pressures and interests, like how reddit faces those” in which case, no, they are subject to those too
But it would be pointless, because they’d already block themselves before I block them, like all other instances.
What would make it useful would be if federation wasn’t broken, so I could block the censored ones without blocking all the others too.