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.
Why are you wasting my time like I want replies from liars?
“Right” or “good” censorship, as you call it, is censoring bots from political discussion, or censoring pedophiles from a kids’ TV channel, not censoring humans from political discussion.
You’re free to read and respond to any comments you want, you’re the only one who can waste your time.
Talk about blaming others. Interesting person.
Yes, it is interesting that people who discuss things in good faith blame bad faith discussion (and the time wasted therein) on those who choose it.
Incorrect.
Willingly baiting someone to read nonsense in bad faith makes you responsible for wasting their time. You don’t get to blame the victim for being willing to engage in good faith.
Bad faith is bad, good faith isn’t, that’s why they’re called that.
How did the person “bait” you? How is it nonsense? How does the responsibility, how you spend your time, shift to someone else? How are you a victim? How are you arguing in good faith?
So much to unpack.
Why do you ask? Is the context deleted now? I don’t feel like scrolling up to check
What do you mean? Why would one person’s responsibility shift to someone else? Is that even a thing?
Are you asking me to consult a dictionary for you, or asking me to repeat what I said above?
Again, can’t tell what you’re asking here other than “help me use a dictionary”
You could get better at doing gish gallops but luckily I’m pretty good at handling them
Edit - I checked and the context was not deleted, so the “how” at the beginning is another weird question
Hahahahahahahahaha what the fuck. I did not bother reading past your first section. Why should I? Waste someone else’s time.
You asked questions, I answered them.
“Waste someone else’s time,” but unironically. I hope you won’t waste mine anymore.
What are you talking about?
Scroll up and please stop wasting my time.
Personally I use other platforms for uncensored discussions.
Unfortunately they’re filled with insufferable twats like yourself, but that’s the price we pay for free speech.
It’s obvious for everybody except for you, that Lemmy isn’t intended as a free speech platform, but a means to form your own community based on shared interests and values. That inherently comes with some amount of censorship at the discretion of instance operators. I’m a free speech advocate, but I value and respect individuals’ right to maintain their property (Lemmy instance) as they see fit.
If you want free speech, hop on Simplex where you can yell racial slurs until you’ve satisfied yourself.
Or spin up your own lemmy instance. I’d be happy to join and engage in some debates.
No you don’t. We use other platforms for less censored discussions. Maybe you use nostr like me but that doesn’t mean either of us has overcome this era of censorship.
Yep.
This is self-contradictory. Which is it?
Not intended for free speech?
Or indeed intended for free speech (freedom to form your own community (discussion space) based on shared interests and values)?
Simplex isn’t what I use for free speech, nostr is, and my slurs are generally not racial.
How would you even use Simplex for more free speech? Does it have group chats or something? (I don’t actually care, I’m just mildly confused)
I will not be spinning up instances of anything. I will seed hashes in bittorrent-like P2P networks, I will put my posts where they fit, I will look for posts from others in the most anti-censorship ways I can find, and I will hope devs and server admins create a version of Lemmy that’s fitting for more of my posts - while hurrying toward a possible future where Tor isn’t enough to make Lemmy relevant anymore, because P2P networks become the only place worth posting anything.