I’ve found that the other replies don’t really express my personal take on this, so I’ll go ahead and write mine down.

First of all, and it’s important, people’s take on such topics is heavily dependent on the country they live in. It’s legitimately hard to imagine why you would want to break government rules hard and be a good person if you live somewhere in Norway. And it’s legitimately hard to imagine a world where you really trust your government and think that the current levels of censorship is actually good if you live in a dictatorship country.

With this in mind, a comfortable and universal level of censorship simply doesn’t exist.

I think the lack of Tor support is valid criticism if you’re in a dictatorship. Of course, DNS-based solutions are not good-enough for you. I hope you’ll find something that solves your problems. Unfortunately a simple Lemmy instance is not a solution for you.

Generally, if I’d advise something, I’d suggest to look at what the project actually aims to do, not at what you think it should be doing. E.g. visit https://join-lemmy.org/ and there it says:

Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking,…

Well, does it sound like a solution made for people in heavily censored environments? To me – not. If you want to present your case and incentivize the Lemmy devs to ADD another perspective or direction to the software that they’re spending time developing, prepare your case and argumentation well. Explain your situation (e.g. “I’ll be hung if I speak freely where I live”, or more relevant, “my country heavily DNS-censors 90% of the good existing Lemmy instances, I’m deprived of good information you have circling here”), propose some solutions or offer help. I don’t know really. It’s up to you. Good luck with your seach

I think/hope it was a joke.

But none that I’d like or find healthy, to be honest.

I confirm, I’ve personally edited a post 3 times over until a day later I’ve understood what’s exactly happening: https://lemmy.ml/post/37434570

You’re kind of proving my point right now, this comment and the downvotes above.

I personally feel somewhat uncomfortable with the strong political push in general-purpose channels, especially since lemmy.ml is supposed to be about free software.

Oh, I forgot one thing on the downsides. The onboarding captcha-like thingy on the lemmy.ml instance is quite elaborate where you have to quote some text from a Communism book. Instances like Memes are rich with upvotes and glorification of Stalin and of the Soviet Union. While I do agree on many of the downsides of for-profit culture (as you can see in my comment above for example), here it’s just extreme levels in my opinion. I personally feel somewhat uncomfortable with the strong political push in general-purpose channels, especially since lemmy.ml is supposed to be about free software.

That’s the other downside. I still use Lemmy as you see, but I felt it’s fair to share a negative point even if the overall conclusion is positive.

Good day! I’m here for around ~2 months.

• Something that I like better here, is the higher average level of thought put in the comments. Fewer dismissive one-liners, fever thoughts that seem to start and end within a single second. That does not go for all communities, but I’ve received some great help when I posted some questions, and posts where I shared info got valuable comments too. Reddit can also be good for this - but sometimes not exactly on par to the quality level.

• Another plus, and that’s obvious, Lemmy is a free platform where you know you won’t be cut away, or have to tolerate a bad UI with animations and opening treasure chests because the for-profit core of the business thinks it’ll sell well. (The legal goal of any Reddit emloyee is to maximize company’s profits. Not satisfy user’s needs. Only in the places where these two coincide you get something.)

• I miss certain specific communities.

• Also the feel of it sometimes: 9x% of all communities here are unofficial of course. And migrating your community here might be scary, of course, because the total number of Redditors is magnitudes higher (these redditors are not all in YOUR community, but the lizard brain is nevertheless afraid of such commitments).

• A bit of both, different and the same. I think the people and their motivations are a lil bit different, and you can feel it. But it’s still also people. Having their jobs, doing things for fun or out of boredom, etc etc. So also the same in a way.

Perhaps a wrapping thought. For my posts and comments personally, I’ve felt that communities here are larger than what I thought they would be based on numbers. You do get responses and help even in smaller communities. Maybe it’s a phenomena that for a smaller group, the noise levels are lower, so more people can survive the noise and continue reading besides “best of the month” filters. So they would go on and respond to something that would otherwise be filtered out as overwhelming.
Dunno.
Onboard and tell us how it feels later ;-)

This is disrespectful to common sense.

The number of people KILLED in the mentioned Gulags is in the millions. The total number of killed by the regime is estimated as ~~20 million people. The number of people imprisoned in the US is just a bit north of a million.

Having a mass murderer on a picture and trying to picture it as “wasn’t as bad as the US now” is distasteful. Have self-respect, spend effort and verify the numbers. Think critically about the picture you’re thinking to upvote.

P.S. I’m not a US citizen or resident. In terms of freedoms, both the Soviet Union was terrible, and a lot of the events happening in the US right now are terrible.

Russia cannot become socialist again because it never was socialist. It’s official regime was “communism”, but there was very little socialist about it in the way Europe is doing it now.

A dedicated community has been created for this, see https://lemmy.ml/c/librephone (I just saw this community and joined myself)

I disagree with the strong sentiment in most other comments. It’s not a total crime to cross-post individual things manually. For example, I’ve recently de-facto cross-posted this, and it was fine: https://lemmy.ml/post/37434570

That being said, I would absolutely not automate such stuff. I think having to do it manually is a good barrier so that you’d post truly interesting to you stuff, and skip the rest. I wouldn’t even participate or encourage software that tries to automate this.

Based on the comments so far, maybe something like this makes sense:

Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not End-to-End encrypted, so the respective instance owners are technically able to read them. Please use a platform with E2E encryption for private messaging. Lemmy recommends Element.io and XMPP.

Yes. And I think saying “messages in Lemmy are not End-to-End encrypted” is clearer communication than “messages in Lemmy are not secure”.

I wanna use JXL locally. It’s quite amazing technologically, you can losslessly compress a JPEG to 0.8 or so of the original size.

I compress my photos for long-term storage anyway, so why not do it with JXL.

Thanks for the app recommendation!

(Fossify is a fork of the discontinued SimpleMobileTools.)

Personally, I’ve found Fossify Gallery so far: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fossify.gallery/ Tried it out, it works well. Any other recommendations would be nice, too.

Signal, for example, does not support JXL as of today. But saving the photo and opening in Fossify Gallery works.

That’s not a full solution really… unless you believe that the bluetooth software on the lamp has zero vulnerabilities that would ever be found and mass-exploited.

I think a more fair name should be OnlyOffice. Wrapped in CryptPad for privacy and encryption. I’d also note a level of controversy around OnlyOffice, it being (still) developed in Russia, not making “we support Ukraine” / “we condemn the war” statements. There’s a bit more of that not just about the war, too.

And also to be fair, the product itself is visually quite decent, especially if you’re looking for online collaboration.