Hey everyone, I’m new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn’t publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says “Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.”).
The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the “lemmy.ml” server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”.
So I thought I try that one when it’s from Lemmy’s own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I’ve never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.
This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?
it’s not sketchy, it’s basically a captcha to keep down automated bot sign ups, and they link to that document in particular, i assume, because the devs are marxists and figure folks who are vehemently anti-communist would refuse and thus keep down their moderation load.
The most correct answer here honestly.
.ml is treated as a bit of a bogeyman around here - most of my interactions with their instance and users has been good. I realise this could be different for others. But, yes, they are Marxist-Leninist so, obviously, their opinions and content will be closely aligned with their political philosophy. In my personal opinion and experience .world seems to have vacuumed-up a tremendous amount of people from the other site you mentioned (Robbit?). Their netiquette seems to have not changed. Also, myself and some others have noticed that on .world it’s not unusual to see comments that express views from outside what the majority believe get deleted. Fortunately the “mod logs” are public record so you can see why comments were deleted, whom by and what the original post/comment was. (I guess with the exception of illegal content that has to be scrubbed) I hope you enjoy your time here. Welcome.
(I guess with the exception of illegal content that has to be scrubbed)
Correct. There is a “purge” feature, but I’ve not yet had to resort such measures after several months of admining.
Thank you (and your fellow admins) for all you do and the time you sacrifice. It is appreciated, by me at least. I don’t even want to consider what vile obscenity you run the risk of exposing yourselves to and I’m happy you’ve not yet had to purge anything; but there’s some sick individuals out there and I’m glad you’re a bulwark against that.
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Yeah when I joined IIRC I just had to write a sentence about why I wanted to join. The communism thing made me laugh though!
Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.").
Yes, exactly, you can host your own or sign up at one someone’s already hosts. The resistance is in the ability to choose which admins you trust and align with your views while still interacting with the rest of us.
The devs run their own and have their own rules and censorship but you don’t have to sign up there. Does that help?
Helps a lot, thanks for your answer!
Open source is inherently political and you depend on software being developed by communists. We are here to evade corporate censorship, censor reactionaries, spread agitprop, and discuss raising the quality of life of all working people.
Not just tech workers. Everyone.
The fact that each instance can have its own rules and culture is f a b. I love that’s one of the criteria. Mander.xyz should have a ‘identify all the creatures from the Triassic’ image captcha.
I don’t know how to set up a specific image captcha, but I like that idea! I have added that to the registration form 😛
The developers of Lemmy are Communists, they don’t hide this fact.
To answer your first question, there are no “free speech” instances in wide use, depending on your point of view an instance might be “censoring” or fighting “misinformation.” It’s up to you to pick an instance you want.
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most people have answered your questions so i want to chime in with the information that i wish someone had told me when i first joined:
a lot of people came to lemmy from reddit like you and i both did and also mostly for the same reasons. most of them went to lemmy.world because it was the first search result on the big search engines like google & bing. those people have turned lemmy.world into a mini reddit and ended up recreating the same problems that reddit has plus more; hence the bot check that you ran into when you signed up.
the original instances of lemmy all have a strong leftist bent; i think of it like if r/politics; r/anarchy/; r/communism; r/socialism; etc. went off and created another social media platform and then started discussing everything like reddit does, but from this perspective. instances is the name given to individual servers and all those servers combined is nicknamed the lemmyverse, or lemmy, for short.
the fediverse is the nickname given to the pubg protocol that’s shared between all the platforms that use it like lemmy, mastadon, kbin, threads, bluesky, etc and that means that the conversations from all of those platforms are shared amongst each other so it’s possible to be on lemmy and have a conversation with someone on kbin, for example. i stick with lemmy because it’s doesn’t have any venture capital investors pushing the admins to enshitify it to maximize profits like has been happening to reddit and bluesky; i’ve been moving from one social media platform to another because of enshitification like reddit’s since the 1990s (before it was called social media) so this last part matters to me a lot.
i started off on lemmy.world like most ex-redditors did and discovered that they’ve duplicated the censorship thing that reddit likes to do with defederations so i switched to lemmy.ml since it doesn’t defederate with anybody due to fact they’re the primary instance where lemmy development takes place. the federation is what makes lemmy decentralized and when you defederate; you cut yourself off from the rest of the lemmyverse, but lemmy.world and some of the other instances that got most of the ex-redditors like the star trek instance use it to try cut off content and people from the instances that they don’t like and that’s their right since it’s their instance. lemmy is decentralized so trying to cut out people & content only serves to cut yourself off and that’s intention behind the fediverse; to make it so that no power tripping mod or ban happy admin can stop the conversation like they do on reddit.
everything is done by volunteers and donations and, if you don’t like one instance; you can move onto any other one and still get a similar experience. i don’t like letting other people decide what i can & can’t see and who i can & can’t talk to so i mostly stick to the instances that don’t defederate with anybody like lemmy.ml and i use the block-people and block-communities features when i feel like i need them for myself.
the fediverse is the nickname given to [instances using] the pubg protocol
Haha I’m guessing that was meant to say ActivityPub
the original instances of lemmy all have a strong leftist bent
[Bonus info]
Reddit has a history of big events when a clump of subreddits get banned all at once when a newspaper reports on them. A lot of right-wing ones went to Voat and later *.win, and some socialist ones (notably /r/GenZedong) went to Lemmygrad, which became the largest federated instance at the time. /r/chapotraphouse also made their own fork, Hexbear, although while it was the largest, it wasn’t federated with the rest for years. Most instances were either hard-left (e.g. Lemmygrad, Lemmy.ml, SLRPNK) or a slight left, but tge third most populous for a while was Wolfballs, a ‘free speech’ instance, de facto alt-right (US right-Libertarian style instance), which ended up defederated from almost all the others due to constant bigotry and rule breaking when posting on other instances. Wolfballs admin eventually shut it down before the Reddit API exodus because, among other reasons, they realized the neo-Nazis among their users were serious and not just trolling.
Overall, the few right-leaning instances are alienated from the bulk of federation and become islands or vaporize, but most just dismiss Lemmy or even the Fediverse at large as a left wing commie thing.
Haha I’m guessing that was meant to say ActivityPub
yes, that’s what i get for going fast; thanks for the correction and the history lesson.
they’ve duplicated the censorship thing that reddit likes to do with defederations
I disagree that defederation is censorship, but no worries, we don’t have to agree! However:
i switched to lemmy.ml since it doesn’t defederate with anybody
If you switch to the “blocked” tab you’ll see that this is absolutely not true.
One of my primary criteria when I needed to make a new lemmy account (due to problems with my original instance) was to be sure I picked an instance that had pre-emptively defederated from Threads. (as .ml does, but there are a lot more in that list)
If you switch to the “blocked” tab you’ll see that this is absolutely not true.
oh yes, i keep forgetting about the fascist and corporate shill instances; they were also the reason why i went with lemmy.ml and why i think it’ll take longer for it to enshitify. thanks for correction.
If you have an email address, you’re already used to the federated service pattern. When you sign up for a gmail, you’re making an account with Google to be able to send emails to anyone else with an email address. And there’s nothing stopping Google from making you fill out a “sketchy” application to get an account.
On Lemmy, each instance has its own set of rules, and if you don’t like them, you just make an account on a different instance.
As far as censorship, each “community” (analog to subreddit) lives on a certain instance and the rules of that instance apply.
Edit: also on the topic of communism, however you feel about communism in the physical world is irrelevant when it comes to the digital world. Free and Open Source Software makes the world go 'round, and is often communist in nature, even if done unintentionally. The pattern of people developing software for their own purposes, and then sharing it freely with others is the purest form of “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” That said, running an instance isn’t free, so make sure to kick your instance a few bucks if you appreciate their work.
Okay but implying that a given instance is the main community for Lemmy by promoting that it’s run by Lemmy’s developers and then making people repeat phrases from the Communist Manifesto just to make an account ain’t exactly the best first impression to give, no?
If they’ve been trained to immediately recoil at the word “communism”, and don’t understand how federated moderation works, then yes, it’ll probably scare away a good number of users. But on the flip side it’s not a for-profit business trying to hook DAU using predatory and emotionally exploitative patterns, so who cares about first impressions? The people who use Lemmy know why they’re using it.
It’s not the context of the article, it’s the presumption of solemn affirmation as a requirement to entry that is agregious, no?
You’re just restating what OP said. I refer you to my original post.
Yeah, you’re discussing communism specifically. I have no beef with communism or any other political ideology. Except perhaps capitalism, I might have beef with that. Digressions aside, the ask could be for quoting an article about Spongebob Squarepants and I would have the same grievance. Can we discuss the action itself, without going into a discussion about communism?
If you don’t like SpongeBob, pick a different instance, that’s federation.
To me this is like having a problem with the flags someone else has in their yard. Not your yard, not your flags. You’re free to not like their flags, but if your grievance is with the action of them peacefully demonstrating free speech, that’s a you problem.
Sure, maybe that guy also happens to work at the flag factory down the street. Probably explains why he has so many flags. Doesn’t mean he’s going to make you put the same flags he likes in your yard.
Edit: for the record, I’m not downvoting you, I think you’ve been very reasonable in this discussion
I appreciate you addressing the downvoting; I had noticed the trend and it’s very easy to jump to the “I’m under a personal attack” conclusion.
While I believe 107% that each instance owner can do what they want; if this given instance is the first instance to which most people will be introduced, being the closest thing to an “official” instance, should they have a duty, or at the very least, an interest, in maximizing the inclusitivity of their community?
Ensure you aren’t a bot I guess, and if somebody programs the paste text they can switch the text to copy from?
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Thanks for that information!
Lemm.ee is a great neutral instance and the admin seems nice, you probably made a good choice choosing it over .ml. Glad to see you were not scared away from Lemmy by it. Welcome! It can get confusing, but it just takes time. It’s a nice little place, overall and feels more like reddit used to be once.
You’re right, that Sunaurus admin guy is pretty cool.
Lemmy.ml is explicitly a Marxist Leninist instance of the Lemmy software. It’s why it’s called .ml. You can use a different instance if you aren’t a Marxist Leninist. Lemmy.world is a Hitlerite instance.
Federation is censorship resistant, but each instance is still going to remove gross content for the sake of their users and instance culture. You can see removed content in the modlog, it’s public for every instance running unmodified Lemmy.
As for why you need to copy/paste the sentence – It sounds a lot like an anti-spam measure. Captchas and the like are extremely common, I’m surprised you find them novel. Are you asking this because you’re planning a spam-attack and need to make sure the spam isn’t removed? Your spam will be removed. While it’s technically possible to go find, no one will care enough to do so.
To clarify, Hitler and Marx are not in any way related. Hitler was a fascist, racist dictator (like Trump and Putin). True Marxism would be if the government of the USA was formed by, and responsive to the working class. A Marxist government (true communism) has an obligation to take care of it’s workers, not let them die because they can’t afford health care.
It’s a short explanation, but it’s pretty much correct. Join any server, and change later if you’re not comfortable.
Hitler and Marx are related if you’re a believer in horsesh
itoe theory or in Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism. You’ll never guess who funded and promoted Arendt (who unsurprisingly came from a wealthy family) and her theory.One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front. Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world. Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” She pretty much nailed it, didn’t she? Fuck up education has been the Republican playbook since Reagan, and clearly successful.
As an aside, I was impressed by the Marxist kibbutz started in Israel when it was formed by the Brits (legally or not). They were wildly successful. I don’t know of any other true Marxist orgs.
Considering every socialist state invested heavily in education once they came to power, no, I would not say she “nailed it.”
The original developers of Lemmy are communists who were seeking to create a social media space that would be free from corporate censorship and centralization. When they created ml, they decided to have it be geared towards communists and leftists as their specific flavor of the Lemmy community, because that is what interested them.
If you are looking for a less political and more general instance, I’d recommend:
lemmy.world
sh.itjust.works
lemmy.dbzero.comAll 3 of those are highly political instances, though. Lemmy.world is overwhelmingly liberal and enforces that bias, and dbzer0 is mostly Anarchists. Sh.itjust.works genuinely leans towards fascism thanks to dedication to anticommunism and full support for the Military Industrial Complex and NATO.
And leans towards eating lots of glitter. At least in my experience.
😂
Very interesting, thanks for the reply. I signed-up on lemm.ee since that’s the 2nd biggest instance on their list. Is this a good server as well? (The description here says: “General-purpose Lemmy instance. New users and communities welcome!”)
Any instance whose rules you agree with is good. Picking a big one that’s not the biggest is a good call so good job.
Yeah, that’s a good one. Honestly, at the end of the day, it matters more what communities you follow than what instance you are on.
But what communities are available to you depends on which instance you picked. Right?
Technically yes, but in practice for any of the big instances, not really.
I still see all the communities I want from SJW: local, dot world, dot ml, lemm.ee, etc
Exception is Beehaw because they defederated us but they also deferedated Lemmy.world too so they’ve already cut themselves from most users. I have an acct there anyway but don’t feel the need to check it much anymore.
Edit: another notable example is Lemmy.world won’t allow federating with any communities focusing on piracy.
Edit2: why downvote this? Am I incorrect?
Wrong. You can subscribe to any community from any instance that is federated with yours, and it will show up in your feed. Once one person has subscribed to an outside community, it will start to appear under All in your home instance as well. If you pick a home instance that is federated with most of the others, then you essentially can see everything you would feasibly want to see.
I am subscribed to communities all over the Fediverse.
Lemm.ee is less politically oriented than any of the 3 that were recommended, by the other user, but it’s lesd of an instance and more of a tool for interacting with other instances.
I understand lemmy.world, but I’m curious what makes you say that about the other two? Stricter defederation or something?
dbzer0 is an Anarchist-leaning instance, though it allows others. Sh.itjust.works has ncd and meanwhileongrad, which attracts pro-NATO and anti-Communist individuals, though the lean isn’t as strong as Lemmy.world and dbzer0 and as such there’s more variety there.
Thank you. I forgot about meanwhileongrad. That makes sense.
No problem!
Lemme.ee is fine. It wouldn’t hurt to have multiple accounts in different instances in case one goes down for maintenance so you can keep browsing. I recommend dbzero since they’re techy and don’t lean on politics as much as other instances.
It wouldn’t hurt to have multiple accounts in different instances in case one goes down for maintenance so you can keep browsing.
Grass? Never touch the stuff. Worms fuck in it.
I’ve been happy on lemme.ee for the fact that they didn’t get caught up in the defederation drama about a year ago, and that they’re mainly a neutral landing instance to go about interacting with other communities on other instances. Other instances will defederate with instances they disagree with, a form of censorship in itself, whereas the admins of lemm.ee leave it to you to block what you don’t want to see yourself.
Exactly why I like it here too. They really do let the user choose their own censorship limit.
