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.
No, it’s not. Someone with “authority” is usually someone with power, with the ability to sanction or punish someone for an action. That’s not me. I have no power to compel any instance to do what they like.
Can I see an example of when ICANN or the President leaned on or shut down a Lemmy/Piefed instance?
I don’t know if it can be done. If it can’t - that’s an issue for the developers, and I doubt they’re interested.
Correct, you don’t individually. You just use the relays you want to use, but if those are ones that censor people, then that’s how authority is generally more collective than authoritarians seem to think.
You give the President and random mods/admins the authority to potentially delete posts or have users banned, but you also collectively give yourselves and each other that authority. You want to pretend Nazis don’t exist, instead of dealing with them, so in your authority as a user, you use instances with admins in line with that.
Sure, if you can find a Lemmy instance hosted at an onion address, which honestly I would bet is probably out there.
According to the documentation, any Lemmy instance on an onion address would be sacrificing “federation” to use Tor, so it’s safe to assume the only instances doing that are the ones doing stuff ICANN / the President wouldn’t allow, and that would probably be confirmed by looking at those instances.
On the other hand, there might be none, in which case, no, the instances “shut down” from DNS/IP address access are gone, no onion address, nowhere left for you to see.
Have these relays now specifically censored anyone?
No, I just don’t want to interact with them an argue with them over whether or not Jews and LGBT people get to live.
So you don’t have an example?
You keep talking about the prospect of a Lemmy instance being censored by ICANN or the President directly, but it’s just simply never happened.
Yes, every instance (I accidentally said relay which fits fine, thanks for not nitpicking that) apparently blocks federation with any Tor instance, perhaps unintentionally.
I usually don’t either. I want my main social media feed to filter out the whole list of those people, like I want my Lemmy instance to filter out all Lemmy instances outside an uncensored cluster.
But it’s also a duty to spend time fighting with Nazis sometimes, and there are people like me who can take breaks from regular social interaction to thrive in doing that duty, unless you ban us and them for “using slurs” or something.
I’m definitely not looking for one. Are you trying to bait me into “incriminating” myself? Without federation, as I said, whatever ones are out there would surely be focused on stuff banned by the authorities.
That sounds insane. Can you support that statement by showing me a federated instance that doesn’t ban anyone but spammers, or another explanation for why they all do?
How do you know that this isn’t a decision of the Fediverse, and not from downward pressure?
Does not compute. If you want an uncensored feed, then that’s what you’ll get. You’ll get nazis in your feed all the time.
That’s a duty you can do for yourself even on mainstream sites like Twitter.
I’m asking for a time where a lemmy instance was pressued by a regulatory body to censor content.
Why do you assume that the only reason an instance would have rules against things other than spamming does so because of fear of state retalitation?
Have you considered that the owners and admins of the instances chose the rules because they want them and don’t believe in a free-for-all uncensored instance?
I don’t get what you’re trying to ask, but whatever it is, I get the feeling you ignored me saying “perhaps unintentionally.”
Didn’t ask.
Not so far.
It’s extremely weird that in this part you seem to have “everyone being uncensored” confused with “the Nazis censoring everyone else”
Get that looked at bro
Yeah, but I have more than 2 minutes in a day, so what do I do when Elon Musk has gotten as much of my attention as he deserves?
OK. I’m not helping find one you can still look at. I’m probably not helping find one at all. Try Google or something.
I don’t. Why do you pretend I assume that, while ignoring my questions? Just a weak attempt at gaslighting, right?
No, that would be a waste of time to consider since Lemmy advertises itself as “self-hostable” and there are people into so-called “self hosting” who are also into free speech.
What uncensored feeds are you looking at currently to know this?
What? I am saying that in a completely uncensored feed, whatever the site is, you’ll end up with nazis populating it. People don’t want to interact and associate with nazis. I said nothing about that particular group censoring anything.
You could just use Twitter generally and interact in an almost no-moderating environment. Or go to 4chan. Or many other sites that I’m sure exist.
So no evidence. Got it. You are just making things up.
Everything I do apparently is gaslighting, according to you.
So why do you think lemmy.world has rules beyond just blocking spam?
Yeah, I’m talking about specific instances. The lemmy.world owners and admins. The sh.itjust.work owners and admins. They make their own decisions for their own instance. They don’t control other instances that are made that yes, are self-hostable.
Good for them. What’s your point?
I don’t get what you’re trying to ask. Again, I have not gotten any uncensored feeds just by wanting them so far. Freedom isn’t free.
It’s extremely weird that your explanation of what no censorship would supposedly be like, is exactly how Nazis censoring everyone else would actually be.
Nazis typically explain what no censorship would supposedly be like, by describing how it would actually be if they could censor everyone else - instead of actually explaining what no censorship would be like.
Why did you put this after a quote section of yet another question you ignored, while basically repeating the point I was addressing with that question? Just another attempt at gaslighting, right?
Incorrect. Did you try looking it up?
That’s not what I said, but it sounds like it might be a confession, falsely attributed to me.
Because it’s run by glowies, duh.
Why did you waste my time with such a dumb question right after quoting more of my questions you refuse to answer?
Not sure what you mean but sounds irrelevant
Internet stuff isn’t literally self-hostable. “Self hosting” is basically just a euphemism for using your own server, not literal.
The point was what I said it was: that therefore, what you suggested considering would be a waste of time to consider.
Why did you need that repeated? Seems like more trolling and gaslighting
So you don’t know what they’ll actually look like - but we can make a good guess by looking at Twitter and 4chan.
No? I said they’d be there to take advantage of it and just spam up the feed.
Other repulsive people would be there too, of course.
“Any disagreement or question I don’t like is gaslighting”
You made the claims. You back it up. Not moving on this.
So every single community that has rules beyond “don’t spam” are run by glowies? Without exception?
They aren’t told to. They aren’t pressured into. They have specific ideals for their instance that they wish to happen via the rules of their instance.
Okay. So? I’m not interested in the semantics. The Lemmy software is accessible for anyone to spin up and use as they like.