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.
Ok so you’re just absolutely unhinged, got it. How old are you? You’re against airplanes in a very black-and-white way. Millions of people use airplanes daily, you know? I just happened to be boarding my plane back home when I saw this brainrot post. You know nothing else about me other than I was boarding a plane while typing this, so you’re way too quick to jump to conclusions about people, which is… Immature. Greta’s decisions regarding travel are commendable, but not everybody is able to spend money and time opting for boats instead of airplanes.
As for the rest of your comment… Who tf said anything about killing anyone??? If you cannot agree on a simple concept such as moderation in the context of an online platform, then you have no place questioning the way this or any platform works, at least not without sitting down and learning about online platforms, or basic human decency, first. Extremist & childish tales such as “we kill all the offenders” is exactly how we’re in this mess of a worldwide situation to begin with, not to mention it’s such a tangential answer to my very straightforward question of, what do you do about people posting things nobody should post, while not knowing who posted it and not being able to prevent them from doing it again, all in the name of privacy or freedom of speech. TOR is a great tool for very specific people, that happens to also facilitate lots of nasty shit online. There’s enough nasty shit on Tor, or on unmoderated niche sites. We don’t want the bad rep from potentially allowing CSAM into a social network looking to bring in new people into it. Lack of moderation is exactly how you end up killing a platform… But I don’t think you want to listen to reason on this.
Replying 2 days later due to my ban, which is also why I suggest moving this conversation to nostr if you actually want to discuss it in good faith.
And not everybody responds to me saying things that are important and correct by talking shit to me. Grow up. Don’t ask me to forgive your actual flaws when you came in attacking me for what you pretend are flaws.
Looks like that was me. Not sure why you’d seem confused about it. Pretty common thing to bring up in this context.
Incorrect.
Given at this point what you’re saying sounds like denialism regarding my right to free speech, I stopped reading after this. Feel free to rephrase your comment to make me feel like reading it, or post your reply on nostr where I can’t be banned, as a basic sign of respect for my ability to reply freely.
Nah you got banned for a reason, you suck at discussing anything of value and have unhinged takes and total lack of respect for others as well. I would continue to probe your mind to try and understand how you expect to reconcile having anonymity online to post whatever the fuck you want, with killing people who post CSAM online… Even though they’d be anonymous and free to post whatever they like because we somehow skipped content moderation and went straight for firing squad… But I think the ban you earned speaks for itself.