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.
Okay, what other content are people on the Fediverse unable to talk about and share?
What do you mean? People on the Fediverse are able to talk about and share CSAM, so how would stuff they can’t be “other content” in the way you used the words in that sentence?
Do you mean “share widely,” in which case, you know the answer is everything and it’s weird that you’d ask yet another question you know the answer to?
No, people are not able to share CSAM on the Fediverse. Doing so gets your account banned.
What specific topics can you not say on the Fediverse, or indeed any website outside of TOR without the threat of being arrested?
What do you think “banned” means? It’s not “killed in the past with time travel” or whatever you’re implying.
According to Trevor Moore, it’s illegal to say “I want to kill the President of the United States of America”
I didn’t say it was. But you still get banned, and the posts deleted.
So you think that’s something that is missing here for the final piece of the puzzle? People feel the need, and want, to discuss inciting violence against politicians, public figures and whoever else?
But I correctly pointed out that it’s not whatever you implied.
Didn’t ask, don’t care. Why waste time typing that?
What do you mean?
Are you asking? You don’t know?
What is it you thought I meant when I said “banned” exactly?
The point was that you can’t, per the rules, share CSAM on here. You seemed to deny that.
You seem to think that the fact that you can’t incite violence on the fediverse is somehow harmful and corrosive to public discourse.
You keep asking me what I think you mean, as if I’m sitting here trying to guess what you mean.
I don’t know. I don’t even care about the answer anymore. I’ve repeatedly told you I will mainly respond to what your words mean instead of trying to guess your secret meanings.
That’s not a point, and you seem to be implying I’m incorrectly denying what rules are here instead of correctly rejecting misuse of English (e.g. saying “can’t” when meaning “shouldn’t”)
This seems like another reply where you’re trying to bait me to give you some kind of justification for banning me or removing my comments.
Banned as in your account shut down and being made inaccessible by the administrators/owner. Sometimes IP banned.
This is such an utterly frivolous correction.
You wouldn’t get banned for justifying why people should get to incite violence towards others. You might lose reputation though.