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.
If 99% of speech comes from people who are against free speech, I want to let 99% of people censor themselves by posting in censored communities while I stay in a free speech zone.
You can phrase that as me wanting to “censor them from my own feed” as long as you recognize the caveat that, unlike them, I give them the option to deactivate my censorship of them any time, all they have to do is deactivate their censorship of me.
Was it in good faith that you just made me explain this, or were you only pretending not to understand me?
But I can say whatever I would want to say here, I’m not censoring myself. People sort themselves into places where they can already say whatever they would want to. I understand your point, I just don’t think it’s actually an issue because people post on instances where they can say what they want already.
If Lemmy doesn’t allow federation over Tor, you are potentially helping censor both of us by posting here, unless your posts aren’t made with goals like making ambulance rides free, in which case you’re just helping censor me & other honest people, not yourself (who might be fine with “only reaching nerds” when posting here).
That may become a problem down the line, but it doesn’t seem to be one yet.
I explained exactly how it is a yesterday, today, and tomorrow problem, not a waiting-to-come-tomorrow problem.
Is it in good faith that you make me copy and paste myself?
I can agree that TOR functionality would be useful, I can’t agree that it’s necessary at the present moment.
Are you saying you think ambulance rides should cost money, or are you just saying you can’t understand what I’m saying?
Then where is a zero-censorship instance for me to use?
you can spin up your own one to use, that’s part of the point of lemmy
Make your own, or join an instance that is broadly federated like Lemmy.ml that censors less of the fediverse from you than sh.itjust.works.
Did you just make me go get this screenshot to reply with in good faith? Did you really not know Lemmy.ml advertises its censorship on the front page, or are you being deliberately obtuse?
There are some instances that could be described as ‘free speech zones’. It’s just they’re usually heavily defederated and so you’ll have to find them.
Replying, here as it’s a bit higher (I’ve been down quite a few subthreads): don’t feed the troll.
“heavily defederated” - again, my core point in this whole thread has been that according to Lemmy’s docs, they can’t federate.
You mean over TOR, according to your OP
How else would they do it?
Currently federation works now. You just don’t like how it works, and you’re paranoid that the authorities will intervene and dictate to Lemmy instances what they should do.
It doesn’t work for what many people wish it would do (and pretend it does), which is to create a decentralized discussion space controlled by the people and not restricted by the authorities
There’s no evidence of any restriction by the authorities.
Just because you are one of the people giving them authority doesn’t magically stop it from being authority. Authority isn’t a word for “others” that each person exempts self-related things from. Why the fuck do I have to keep explaining this and copying and pasting where I addressed it in my original post?