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.
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.
Nope, I am not using the word “authority” in an idiosyncratic way. The way I am using it is how it is used.
Are you trying to gaslight me, or what?
Why did you add this whole paragraph after the part about how “authority” is used, when it has nothing to do with the conversation?
I didn’t say it is. Are my replies different on your screen or something?
Why? What’s your train of thought from my post saying “we need a version of Lemmy that doesn’t blacklist them” to you being like “this guy will have to find them?”
Not in common parlance, and not in this context. It usually refers to people in positions of actual power. Stop being so sensitive. I find it hard to believe you could ever cope on a truly free speech instance.
Lemmy doesn’t blacklist these instances. Specific lemmy instances that most people know and use blacklist them.
Both in common parlance and in this context.
No, but if it did, that would still be irrelevant, since “mod/admin of a large online community” and “ICANN executive” and “President of the United States” are positions (with people in them) of actual power.
Why?
That’s dumb - am I allowed to use a stronger word for “dumb” or would I get banned here?
Then someone should change the docs to explain how to do Tor federation instead of saying it’s unsupported
No, it’s not. Someone with “authority” is usually someone with power, with the ability to sanction or punish someone for an action. That’s not me. I have no power to compel any instance to do what they like.
Can I see an example of when ICANN or the President leaned on or shut down a Lemmy/Piefed instance?
I don’t know if it can be done. If it can’t - that’s an issue for the developers, and I doubt they’re interested.
Correct, you don’t individually. You just use the relays you want to use, but if those are ones that censor people, then that’s how authority is generally more collective than authoritarians seem to think.
You give the President and random mods/admins the authority to potentially delete posts or have users banned, but you also collectively give yourselves and each other that authority. You want to pretend Nazis don’t exist, instead of dealing with them, so in your authority as a user, you use instances with admins in line with that.
Sure, if you can find a Lemmy instance hosted at an onion address, which honestly I would bet is probably out there.
According to the documentation, any Lemmy instance on an onion address would be sacrificing “federation” to use Tor, so it’s safe to assume the only instances doing that are the ones doing stuff ICANN / the President wouldn’t allow, and that would probably be confirmed by looking at those instances.
On the other hand, there might be none, in which case, no, the instances “shut down” from DNS/IP address access are gone, no onion address, nowhere left for you to see.
Have these relays now specifically censored anyone?
No, I just don’t want to interact with them an argue with them over whether or not Jews and LGBT people get to live.
So you don’t have an example?
You keep talking about the prospect of a Lemmy instance being censored by ICANN or the President directly, but it’s just simply never happened.
Yes, every instance (I accidentally said relay which fits fine, thanks for not nitpicking that) apparently blocks federation with any Tor instance, perhaps unintentionally.
I usually don’t either. I want my main social media feed to filter out the whole list of those people, like I want my Lemmy instance to filter out all Lemmy instances outside an uncensored cluster.
But it’s also a duty to spend time fighting with Nazis sometimes, and there are people like me who can take breaks from regular social interaction to thrive in doing that duty, unless you ban us and them for “using slurs” or something.
I’m definitely not looking for one. Are you trying to bait me into “incriminating” myself? Without federation, as I said, whatever ones are out there would surely be focused on stuff banned by the authorities.
That sounds insane. Can you support that statement by showing me a federated instance that doesn’t ban anyone but spammers, or another explanation for why they all do?
How do you know that this isn’t a decision of the Fediverse, and not from downward pressure?
Does not compute. If you want an uncensored feed, then that’s what you’ll get. You’ll get nazis in your feed all the time.
That’s a duty you can do for yourself even on mainstream sites like Twitter.
I’m asking for a time where a lemmy instance was pressued by a regulatory body to censor content.
Why do you assume that the only reason an instance would have rules against things other than spamming does so because of fear of state retalitation?
Have you considered that the owners and admins of the instances chose the rules because they want them and don’t believe in a free-for-all uncensored instance?