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.
Banned from the community or instance they’re posting in. If a nazi joins lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works and starts being a nazi, they’ll get banned from the instance. Do you object to that?
lemmy.world: yes, fuck em, I will basically object to anything they do if I even slightly disagree at all
sh.itjust.works: kinda, but not really. I wouldn’t ask sh.itjust.works to change how they operate when they’ve been chill with me so far. I would hope they change someday, but not demand it or have a problem with them staying as they were.
Right, well it’ll go the same in almost every instance. Sh.itjust.works has rules:
Right, and I made a whole post about how I found out the reason every instance has these rules is because Lemmy isn’t designed to allow a censorship-free instance. That’s the post you’re commenting on today
No, that’s not why these rules exist. Sh.itjust.works doesn’t have to block pornography. It doesn’t have to have rules against racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia or xenophobia.
“These rules” as in the rules all Lemmy instances have, which matches what I said.
Not “these rules” as in one specific instance’s rules, which would obviously not match what I said.
Why are you making me explain this? Seems like bad faith discussion from you
No, some lemmy instances have different rules. Some allow pornographic content. Some do not. There’s a specific instance that is explicitly about porn: lemmynsfw.com. Sh.itjust.works could change the rules tomorrow and nothing will happen to them.
What “rules” are you referring to that all Lemmy instances have?
I didn’t say they all have identical rules, so the “no” doesn’t make sense here, and neither does bringing this up again overall.
Didn’t ask. Why are you telling me all this?
You were literally just listing some of them, now you’re pretending you’ve never heard of a Lemmy instance having rules?
Those are not rules that /all/ lemmy instances necessarily have. Or have to have. Those were just sh.itjust.works rules.