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’m saying Lemmy’s censorship is the same as reddit’s because we still have roughly the same groups as on reddit.
I still post to about the same audience or smaller, not bigger than peak reddit.
The people saying “ambulance rides shouldn’t cost money” are still drowned out by the people saying “poor people should die because I’m rich enough to be the one people listen to” so I don’t think we should choose who to listen to based on money.
If reddit worked as a system the authorities could use to control discussion, what we have now with reddit and Lemmy definitely isn’t any less useful for the authorities that way, because I seem to be making slower progress towards making ambulance rides free, instead of faster progress.
If these two sentences are meant to be understood together, then it’s misleading to use the word censorship i think, it’s more a mix of a lack of visibility and echo chambers, in which case these are two things that don’t seem debatable/false.
If i understood you correctly, could you expand on your solution ?
But the authorities cause it willingly, so it’s censorship, imo. Maybe debatable
Another way of looking at the problem is, without Tor federation, all the federated instances will be 100% one group of people, and each Tor instance will be 100% another group
That 100% isn’t healthy, there needs to be a balance where each place has some of each group. I don’t want a place full of nothing but pedophiles, but I also don’t want a place full of nothing but people who send pedophiles to their own place. I want a place full of nothing but people who agree everyone should be allowed to talk
To do that, would it be enough if instances can’t block each other, or if users could unblock the foreign instances blocked by their original instance ?
You’d also want some .onion instances, and that they could communicate with those using the DNS.
Am i missing something ? You seem to also have more to say
Absolutely. That all sounds perfect to me. I actually don’t think you’re missing anything
Then the first part(, leaving the choice of blocking an instance to the user,) is a relatively common desire since i’ve already seen it expressed before. If enough people keep asking for it then it may happen.
I’m making a lemmy app and among other things you’ll be able to follow (a group of )users and not only (a group of )communities, sthg reddit will end up adopting probably. And you’ll also be able to display the “All” tab with multiple accounts. So, if you have an account on lemmy.world, as well as on the instances blocked by lemmy.world, then you’ll be able to have access to all instances at once.
You can see the instances blocked by going to sh.itjust.works/instances, or lemmy.ml/instances, and as you can see only very little instances, for spamming i think, were blocked. Which means that you’re probably already seeing ~99% of lemmy in your “All” tab ?
It doesn’t solve the presence of moderators in communities but that may be kinda out-of-topic from your original subject.
(i’m going to sleep r.n., so don’t be surprised if i don’t answer before tomorrow, not that there’s necessarily something to add, but you seemed to go further than being able to talk with all instances from any instance of origin)
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I don’t have an access to everything from your account, which wasn’t that big, including your inbox and possible private messages, but i made a copy of your comments and posts if you’re interested : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1aA8MU4ToqNwKQb3RyW6W77FtNFOei6Rl
It’s in .json, and i don’t know of an existing lemmy viewer that accepts a .json(, excepting the app i’m making obv.), but if you’re like me you’d perhaps like to keep an archive of what you wrote, somewhere on your ‘hard drive’/cloud.
(Good to know if you didn’t that admins have a command to “purge” accounts, which shouldn’t be your case since it was a temporary ban, but when your account is purged no-one can ever recover its content anymore, which may suck depending on the user)
The principle behind trolling is that we can never be sure, but it’s possible that Skavau ragebaited you into getting you banned, we know that he reported you many times(, on his own admission), and he’s kinda implying that he had a goal in mind here
Like, it’s common knowledge that as soon as the 90s, e.g. on m.m.o. forums, users realized that they won’t get banned for gaslighting another user, and if the other user ends up throwing an insult, then s.he will get a temporary ban which could affect h.er.is ingame character(, moderators of that forum were usually paid). So you have players that are now recounting with nostalgia how they managed to get multiple players banned with a single “it’s easy, you just don’t have the skills”, or something along the lines.
Anyway, next time perhaps don’t try to have the last word with him, your anger is sometimes a bit painful to read, and getting downvoted even for good comments(, because some people followed you from another comment or post,) is never a pleasant experience, everyone seeks some amount of social validation as you already know 🤷, not that you seem weak enough to be affected
I’ve quickly looked for instances that explicitly claim that they’ll never ban their users, even temporarily, but haven’t found it, there were more than 700 of them at one point, and now “only” more than 500.
Typing “censor” in the search bar here brought https://lemmybefree.net/, even if it’s not perfect.
I.m.o., instances should never be allowed to ban anyone sitewide, even temporarily(, except for spamming/bot accounts), or only a minority of them, explicitly stating that they want to represent a group of users, and reserving themselves the right to say that a given user makes them a bad publicity.
Communities should also never be allowed to permaban, and a one-year ban should be the maximum, but only after, e.g., at least 3 one-month bans, themselves preceded with a demand to simply edit the comment/post.
Another really awesome thing with Lemmy that i love, compared to reddit, is their modlog : moderators are forced to display publicly the reason for banning someone, and have to display the censored comment.
Meanwhile, not only will reddit moderators usually won’t even give you an explanation, sometimes even if you send them a d.m., but reddit won’t even warn you that your comment or post has been shadowbanned/censored, i systematically have to double-check with other accounts, and one day i may have to use VPNs if they begin to shadowban you according to your IP adress.
Anyway, you posted hundreds of comments for something like 18h straight or more, and it doesn’t seem like it was a pleasant experience, i hope that you’ll have more success/fun next time :) !
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And how would you ensure this type of policy is enforced, exactly? Lemmy is open-source software that can be modified by instance owners. Lemmy isn’t even the only Reddit-like software in the Fediverse.
See above.
And how do you force current instances like lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works then to tolerate /some/ pedophiles exactly?
Because that’s what would have to happen under your system.
I don’t get what you mean.
Again, not sure what you mean.
For crying out loud. You just said: “That 100% isn’t healthy, there needs to be a balance where each place has some of each group. I don’t want a place full of nothing but pedophiles, but I also don’t want a place full of nothing but people who send pedophiles to their own place.”
Now, this implies that the current instances that currently ban pedophiles on sight would be expected to host some amount of them.
Yes, I’m pretty sure I did say that.
Not sure what this part means, or what any of this has to do with anything.
Right, so naturally in order for that happen the moderated side of lemmy would have to change to have some of that group.
Still don’t get what you’re trying to say. Seems like you’re pretending you can’t remember a lot of what I’ve said