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.
But the authorities cause it willingly, so it’s censorship, imo. Maybe debatable
Another way of looking at the problem is, without Tor federation, all the federated instances will be 100% one group of people, and each Tor instance will be 100% another group
That’s not healthy, there needs to be a balance where each place has some of each group. I don’t want a place full of nothing but pedophiles, but I also don’t want a place full of nothing but people who send pedophiles to their own place. I want a place full of nothing but people who agree everyone should be allowed to talk
To do that, would it be enough if instances can’t block each other, or if users could unblock the foreign instances blocked by their original instance ?
You’d also want some .onion instances, and that they could communicate with those using the DNS.
Am i missing something ? You seem to also have more to say
Absolutely. That all sounds perfect to me. I actually don’t think you’re missing anything
Then the first part(, leaving the choice of blocking an instance to the user,) is a relatively common desire since i’ve already seen it expressed before. If enough people keep asking for it then it may happen.
I’m making a lemmy app and among other things you’ll be able to follow (a group of )users and not only (a group of )communities, sthg reddit will end up adopting probably. And you’ll also be able to display the “All” tab with multiple accounts. So, if you have an account on lemmy.world, as well as on the instances blocked by lemmy.world, then you’ll be able to have access to all instances at once.
You can see the instances blocked by going to sh.itjust.works/instances, or lemmy.ml/instances, and as you can see only very little instances, for spamming i think, were blocked. Which means that you’re probably already seeing ~99% of lemmy in your “All” tab ?
It doesn’t solve the presence of moderators in communities but that may be kinda out-of-topic from your original subject.
(i’m going to sleep r.n., so don’t be surprised if i don’t answer before tomorrow, not that there’s necessarily something to add, but you seemed to go further than being able to talk with all instances from any instance of origin)