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.
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?
Forgot to reply to half of this at first, my bad
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/tor_hidden_service.html
That would be pretty embarrassing for them and the Lemmy devs because Lemmy has no Tor federation, which makes lemmy.nazi an idiot project for trying to exist, and makes Lemmy an idiot project for baiting people to use it to try to make things it doesn’t work for
That’s just TOR, not federation.
How would they be “baiting” them exactly? I don’t recall where the Lemmy devs explicitly advertised it like that.
On desktop, use “ctrl+f”
On mobile, find the “search in page” feature for your browser
Then type “federation”
Or, to find it more easily: try reading the second paragraph of the link
Odd. People keep telling me Lemmy advertises itself as a place where everyone can start their own communities with “self-hosted” instances that combine using “federation”
Yes, Lemmy apparently doesn’t work over TOR. But normal federation works. You just don’t like how it works.
Lemmy is open-source software that anyone can use and host their own instance (not community) and set out the rules within that instance as they please. But that doesn’t mean anyone is going to want to play with you if you have posting standards almost everywhere else doesn’t agree with.
I don’t get what you mean by “normal federation.” Lemmy has a thing called “federation” that doesn’t work.
Incorrect, but why depends what you meant:
If you meant Lemmy’s federation, the issue is that it doesn’t work.
If you meant some other federation system, I don’t even know what you’re talking about, and haven’t given a position on it.
Why do you disagree with the dictionary’s definitions of the word “community” and Lemmy’s use of it in the UI?
Incorrect. Lemmy doesn’t support Tor federation, so this doesn’t work. How many times do I have to repeat myself in this thread?
Whether that means that, wasn’t in contention - the only reason you’d pretend it was, is because you’re into gaslighting.
And I never said anything about “playing” - the only reason you’d use the term “play with you” is because you’re into gaslighting.
And you know I’m not the only person who’s against censorship - so the only reason you’d waste time trying to suggest I’m on my own, is because you’re into gaslighting.
And you embarrass yourself severely with your standard of replies around someone like me, so the only reason for phrasing like “posting standards” is, again, because you’re into gaslighting.
Yes, it does. Instances can choose to federate with each other, to share content.
I haven’t read how Lemmy distinguishes between instances and communities and how they refer to them.
Not supporting TOR federation does not mean an instance owner can’t set out their own custom rules on the instance.
Dear me, it’s just a turn of phrase.
Almost everyone on the fediverse disagrees with you. That’s the relevant demographic here.
By “posting standards” I mean rules of an instance. If your instance allows abuse, slurs, insults, threats etc - you’ll be marginalised and isolated.
How?
How? Do I need to yet again repeat how this isn’t true, because you missed it, or are you just leaving out another half of the paragraph where you support your statements and connect your counter-argument to the context?
I don’t know who you are. I probably own most servers more than most people based on how much influence I’ve been allowed to exert so far without being killed. Not sure. Wouldn’t even be a topic to discuss though, if Lemmy used Tor, where instead of complex collective human webs of “ownership,” you just straight up have a guy with a thing that’s his that no one else has so he “owns” it
It’s backed up at home, presumably.
You have provided no example of any regulatory body or government meddling with interfering with the operation of any Lemmy instance.
That’s maybe absolute individual ownership of a backup, nothing like absolute individual ownership of a Lemmy instance.
You have provided no reason I should provide an example, despite repeatedly suggesting I should, and repeatedly being asked why.
I’ll ask another thing this time: what do you find when you just look it up? Does that not work?
Because you made the claims. You back it up. Not moving on this.
There is no example. It doesn’t exist. It hasn’t happened.
I don’t see any valid reasoning here. Wondering if you’ll try again or not - hopefully you’re done wasting time repeating this nonsense.
Screenshot where you get that search result?
I’m never done. You made the claims, you back it up.
How can I prove a negative? There’s no example that you can provide of a lemmy instance being forcibly censored by outside actors.