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.
I said: “And in terms of instances, an instance owner can absolutely choose the theme of their instance.”
You replied: “Incorrect. Federation broken, which prevents this. How many times do I have to say this?”
I asked: “How does federation allegedly being broken mean that lemmy.blahaj can’t be an LGBTQ focused instance? How does federation allegedly being broken mean that slrpnk.net can’t be a solarpunk themed instance? Or that adult.swim isn’t themed around animation?”
The point is that different instances have different local cultures, rules, themes etc. That’s my point. Federation not working properly, as you claim, doesn’t change that.
Yes, I did.
Okay then so there are different instances, active instances with different cultures, rulesets, themes.
Yeah, about that, got any evidence of lemmy.world being run by glowies?
Your future imagined here would require all current active and used instances to become completely anti-censorship in the way you want. Which they won’t.
I don’t remember the adult.swim part at the time but why are you recapping the discussion instead of continuing it?
I don’t see how it’s a point, and it’s weird how you keep copying and pasting random quotes from me and then changing the subject without answering, while I copy and paste quotes from you and then my responses to them.
You keep asking this, like you can’t figure out the answer for yourself. It’s kind of amusing.
No, my imagination is separate from yours. You imagining something and typing it for me to read doesn’t make it my imagined future.
Didn’t ask, don’t care.
I added it in shortly afterwards. And I posted it because you seemed lost, and needed a recap as to what I was referring to. As usual. You did deny that instances could have their own themes.
You barely answer me ever. You get lost all of the time.
So no evidence. Of course. “Me when I make things up”.
The question was “why are you recapping the discussion instead of continuing it?”
Incorrect. You’re just gaslighting and wasting time.
Again, just gaslighting.
I doubt it.
Incorrect. I have been trying to clear my notification inbox of your replies for hours, and no matter what, you always have more replies before I can finish replying to the last ones. It’s like you’re typing extremely fast or I’m typing extremely slow or something. I’m definitely answering every single thing, though.
Incorrect again. Repeating it doesn’t stop it from being gaslighting. In fact, it’s a pretty common trait of gaslighting attempts.
Incorrect, unless you’re just observing that sometimes when you request evidence in bad faith, I might not have it on hand, or even necessarily feel like wasting time/energy providing it.
Not sure what you were trying to type here.
Yes you did.
“And in terms of instances, an instance owner can absolutely choose the theme of their instance.”
“Incorrect. Federation broken, which prevents this. How many times do I have to say this?”
Simply replying to me doesn’t mean you actually substantially answer my points.
So why would you expect me to just concur with your claims when you refuse to back them up?
This is a link, not a screenshot. Why waste time posting a link instead of a screenshot when I haven’t really been clicking your links?
These are sentences in quotation marks. Not reading them. Is there a reason they’re here?
I didn’t ask if it did. Why waste time typing that?
For a second time I tell you, I’m not really into riddles.
Sorry, so you’re too lazy to click a link. You need an image every time?
https://i.imgur.com/KXvX9Vv.png
Here is where you denied that instances can have their own themes.
The second sentence is your sentence. It’s in the link. I actually provide the evidence for things you claim you didn’t say.
If you refuse to back your claims up, why would you expect others to agree with them?
I’d also be fine with you not replying.
This shows up as an imgur link for me, not the actual image.
I doubt it. Maybe you’re misreading. Can you get an image to show up as an embed on the instance I’m using now?
But why post links when I’m not clicking them?
Not possible since I don’t really claim I didn’t say things I said.
Because people don’t typically disagree with themselves too much.
Here is where you denied that instances can have their own themes.