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 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 :) !
Removed by mod
Seems like you either slept ~4 hours or didn’t at all ^^"
Here’s the modlog just in case, it can be hard to find(, or even absent,) if you’re searching for it on a mobile app : https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=23021351
Bye !
(Addition : As an aside, perhaps that like me you’d have preferred to know who downvotes//upvotes your comments, just know that it was the devs’ intention, partly because of astroturfing, but the community refused)
(pfff, he’s been banned from futurology.today for ban evasion, what a stupid reason, and i didn’t know that in that case we can’t see his comments, here’s what i had before the ban)
Some last additions :

https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqs9q2w57rp7lmkwtstd6ahe4jzp0r7exwtsegqfjm603yk3myam93gzvfgh0
3 likes and one retweet, unusual for his account, and indeed a very different reception from here : https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqsyar8c3tjww0rpzawez7ged7gsnrvtamlrc4jqpwkwc8tr7jestpgtd2pqt
And also, perhaps :

Seems like there’s one more thing to add, a video published a few hours ago, reporting on the laws against hate speech, once more (ab)used to censor political dissent : https://youtu.be/1AiZQriMkDM
Some people will blame Youtube/Google, others our governments.
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.