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.
For the millionth time, Lemmy is censored by the authorities today.
Docs say Tor federation isn’t allowed. This means the authorities can just defederate any instance from every other instance by blocking the domain name or IP address. This explains why there are no zero-censorship instances.
There is no org to join that would have a better use of my time than using my technical and political knowledge to explain what I’m explaining, though you people making me repeat the explanations like this do impact the efficiency of the whole process.
It says it isn’t “supported”. You are free to change the code to add socks5/tor support or make some bodge where it connects over tor and have your tor only network. Just don’t complain when nobody can connect to you.
You are reiterating my point that Lemmy currently doesn’t allow unrestricted federation (by supporting/allowing Tor) and also reiterating my point that there should be a version of Lemmy that actually works, but you’re weirdly trying to reframe both points into insulting me. Why?
Lemmy isn’t censored by the authorities today. You gave an example of how they could be, but not how they are.
Secondly, no, absolutely join an org. That’s far more useful than what you’re doing right now.
I didn’t mean to give any specific examples, future or present. If you cannot see examples today, showing them to you does nothing, you’re fundamentally misunderstanding something and need to be shown how to see the examples, not simply told what they are.
If you know what “censored by the authorities” means - simple words, middle-school-level at the worst - you can see the examples for yourself. We’re both adults.
I get that the censorship fetish can make you enjoy it when you see a human banned, but you have to learn to use words correctly and tell the truth. Just because you enjoy it doesn’t mean the person isn’t censored. Just because you are one of the people giving the authorities their authority, doesn’t mean it’s not authority and they’re not authorities.
Are you referring to moderators and admins as “the authorities?” I already acknowledged that moderation exists, but the idea of the government censoring Lemmy is baseless.
Are you asking if moderators and admins are all of the authorities, or some of the authorities?
I’d just answer the question, but you don’t seem to be discussing this in good faith, and I feel like you might ignore part of my answer to focus on a “yes” or “no” part that lets you reframe it as “all of these people are mods+admins” / “none of these people are mods+admins”
As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, I agree it’s baseless to say a government would censor Lemmy. Censorship of political discussion seems like it could only happen when you give authority to criminals who don’t believe in governance. Having a real government should actually prevent it, if we had one.
However, I am repeatedly pointing out that the authorities we do have do censor Lemmy, which is true.
Moderation exists, sure. I don’t agree with creating unmoderated spaces, they almost always end up as far-right echo chambers where people that can’t say slurs in other places end up.
I didn’t ask. Why are you wasting my time with this reply? The thread is downvoted to shit, does it even serve as an echo chamber for you anymore? I guess it does because you psychologically enjoy dogpiling on someone more honest than you
I’ve been honest from the outset. The fact that I disagree with you doesn’t mean I’m lying. I merely responded to what you were saying, as is how these types of forums work.
You just now, in the comment I was replying to, seemed to imply saying “retard” makes someone far-right. Seems like a pretty blatant lie. Not scrolling up to check for others