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.
Edit - I was banned from my instance, and before being unbanned, some of my comments seem to have been removed. I apologize if I hurt anyone’s feelings, but it seems pointless to try to discuss this topic here. I’ll give a few more replies, and then suggest any further responses be directed to me on nostr, where there are no bans. I’ve also had a good time posting on PieFed while I was banned, so I’ll probably keep spending time there. If anyone’s curious, I had a thread about this topic on PieFed too. Btw, instead of the misplaced focus on bots, I should have said filter spam, not people earlier in this post.
It’s almost like that was the beginning of a bigger point:
What I say isn’t censored, so OP’s idea that people are controlling their speech on instances that take a more active stance to moderation and therefore aren’t worthy of federation is built on a false premise.
People are controlling my speech on instances that take a more active stance to moderation, and therefore aren’t worthy of federation.
That isn’t very well-written wording, but I can’t spot the lie.
What false premise do you think it’s based on? Apparently, that you’re censored - but I didn’t say you’re censored, if you’re fine with ambulance rides charging money, so where’s that false premise actually appear in my train of thought or connect to the statement you’re trying to connect it to? I said censorship exists, and I implied it applies to people who want ambulance rides to be free - I didn’t say anything about you personally.
If you think ambulance rides should cost money, that’s a false premise, but it doesn’t change anything I said - the idea that it does would be a second false premise.
Is it that you think ambulance rides shouldn’t cost money, but political discussion doesn’t impact policy? Because it does, so that would still be you with the false premise.
Is that you’re aware of both why ambulance rides should be free and how political discourse impacts that, but you’re not understanding how you need a majority to win elections? Because you do, so that would still be you with the false premise.
Do you understand all that, but think Tor users are a majority? Because they’re not, so that would still be you with the false premise.
I can’t see how you get from me saying “there is censorship” to “Cowbee isn’t censored and there is no censorship” without using a false premise. Meanwhile “there is censorship” remains a true premise.
People here mostly don’t want to interact in a 4-chan esque ‘muh free speech’ zone. The policy of most used instances that federate out reflects that.
I like 4chan because of the fact that you can say anything on there. Good, bad, ugly. I don’t mind seeing it all, even if I don’t personally believe in it.