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.
I’m being entirely honest and good-faith, bad-faith is calling me right-wing. I’m a communist. When I say slurs are common in the far-right, I mean exactly that, slurs are common in the far-right.
You’re a “communist” that refuses to help make communism happen because you’re more attached to censorship.
That’s called being right-wing.
Left-wing people are not attached to censorship, so when we say “I’m a communist” we mean “I am actively trying to do communism,” not merely “I would try to do communism if I could find a way that’s more compatible with censorship”
What on Earth do you mean by “making communism happen?” I do think misinformation and bigotry should be censored, this isn’t at all incompatible with communism. I do org work, that’s what communists do.
You think we should redefine “slur” to include common words, and then redefine “right wing” to mean “people who use what we now call slurs,” and then redefine “far” to mean “near” or “middle”
These things do not help achieve communism - we need honesty in order to achieve communism, not lies
No.
I don’t think we should “redefine slurs.” Slurs are slurs.
I don’t want to redefine right-wing to mean people who use slurs. I stated that slur-usage is most common among the far-right.
I’ve been honest this entire time, and you’ve been picking fights and dismissing anyone’s input by saying that you didn’t ask for it. This kind of behavior would be considered wrecker behavior, and would be corrected if you were actually in a competent org.