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.
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.
That is an insane position. You can look it up and you shouldn’t even need to. Why is your default stance that it’s not true and you won’t look it up, placing the burden of proof on me? Why would I look it up for you in response to that? It’s not like what I’ve said is some wild hard to believe shit where you could think I’m trying to embarrass you or waste your time looking it up.
I am not claiming that any particular individual is issuing orders to individual Lemmy instance admins.
I am also not claiming that there is a “US government,” or that any Lemmy instance has particular “owners.”
Why do you ask?
No, why?
OK. Why do you bring it up though?
But I didn’t ask if you think it’s a good thing. I’m tired of hearing about people paying for ambulance rides and not organizing any resistance. I want communication infrastructure. I’ve noticed a fundamental systemic problem with Lemmy. I know that problem exists because people like you think of it as a good thing. I addressed that in my main post. It seems like there is no point to your reply except to bother me out of hostility.
That’s how the burden of proof works. You make a claim, you provide proof.
You just made the claim that “you make a claim, you provide proof” is how burden of proof works, and didn’t provide proof for it. You refuted yourself.
You also said “that’s”, where “that” was supposed to be my comment you were replying to, but my comment didn’t say that. I never said “burden of proof is a term for how every statement should always be backed up by proof.” My comment was about how you tried to shift burden of proof onto me in an insane context.
The fact that your core statement is a refutation of itself should make me laugh, but the vote scores reveal I’m surrounded by mentally ill bullies here, and a few minutes on Google can reveal we still have the atmospheric lead and maskless COVID spread that you all probably got this brain damage from (I say with not necessarily any burden of proof because, like other things we’ve discussed, you are free to Google it), so this just scares me.
You should just get banned.
BREAKING: Fake commie threatens real commie with violence on the internet (this has never happened across all internet discussions)
If getting banned is violence, then sure.
You made the claims. You back it up. Where is your evidence that Lemmy instance owners are appointed by the government?
You alleged the US government appointed lemmy instances owners.
So they don’t answer to the US government. You should try to understand more about the instances on here you seek to chastise.
Because you keep bringing it up. You are essentially complaining about two separate things in your OP, one current - and one hypothetical.
No, you have noticed that instances have their own terms of service and you don’t like that, and that hypothetically Lemmy instances could be shut down by government bodies in the future due to the system. Two separate things.
This seems non-sequitur. How does this answer, actually answer? What am I missing? (Nothing, you’re just doing a gish gallop of nonsense, and it was non-sequitur as it seemed)
No. I have been clear, repeatedly, the US does not exactly have a “government” and Lemmy instances do not exactly have “owners.” Stop gaslighting and trying to confuse people.
What do you mean, and again, how is it an answer?
Where did I ever once bring up what I asked why you were bringing up at this part? And what was it again? I forgot
Incorrect. I have noticed, and don’t like, that instances with their own terms of service can’t federate. Why are you acting like you can’t read?
Incorrect. As I have been repeatedly saying this whole time, the impact is today, not in the future. There are already Lemmy instances being blocked from federating today. Government bodies would never contribute to this for any reason I can imagine.
The two things you made up are separate, but why?
Lemny instances absolutely do have their own owners. And any instance can federate with who they like, but that doesn’t mean the instance on the other side has to accept it.
Are you implying that no instance should be allowed to reject incoming federation attempts?
They can’t really have “their own owners” without Tor. They’re relying on DNS / IP addresses, which are (successfully) designed to collectivize all ownership of all addresses within them. Tor’s onion addresses are the ones designed for individualized ownership.
Then change the documentation to explain how, instead of having the docs suggest it can’t be done.
No, are you inferring that somehow?
They still own the actual instance that exists on their local servers. If they are meddled with, they’re meddled with but this is a hypothetical currently. They certainly “own” their server more than I do or you do.
What? What docs suggest it can’t be done?
So what’s your issue then? If lemmy.nazi set up shop tomorrow, every single instance would block them and they could be unable to federate because no-one would want to federate with them. What now?