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.
Edit - I was banned from my instance, and before being unbanned, some of my comments seem to have been removed. I apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings, but it seems pointless to try to discuss this topic here. I'll give a few more replies, and then suggest any further responses be directed to me on nostr, where there are no bans. I've also had a good time posting on PieFed while I was banned, so I'll probably keep spending time there. If anyone's curious, I had a thread about this topic on PieFed too. Btw, instead of the misplaced focus on bots, I should have said filter spam, not people earlier in this post.
So you want to censor 99% of speech, leaving only people who agree with you on only hearing speech from people that post in your mkni community? I feel like that's counter-productive.
Sometimes people say Lemmy.ml is "high censorship," but I've never been censored here. People sort themselves into instances that generally align with what they want to post and comment, it isn't that there are censorship regimes going on.
As for Lemmy "failing," it already does what it needs to do, it provides a good platform. Reddit went downhill because of the profit motive, Lemmy doesn't have that.
It's almost like that was the beginning of a bigger point:
What I say isn't censored, so OP's idea that people are controlling their speech on instances that take a more active stance to moderation and therefore aren't worthy of federation is built on a false premise.
What you say aligns with what's considered acceptable viewpoints on that instance. Take those views to another instance that aligns with different views and you'll be censored, just like someone expressing dissenting views on lemmy.ml will be. I'm not sure I understand what point you're trying to make here.
What you just said is my point, minus the part where I said users sort themselves into instances already so that they don't get censored from what they want to say. OP's claiming that people control their speech on their own instances, therefore justifying OP defederating from this "controlled speech," but my speech and presumably your speech isn't controlled on our respective instances because they presumably align roughly with what we already want to say.
I'm well aware that Lemmy.ml removes comments and posts bashing communism, or that have bigotry in them, etc. Lemmy.world removes comments critical of the DNC, and has some Zionist mods. Users naturally sort themselves into whichever one won't censor what they want to say to begin with, we aren't all forced under one banner like Reddit, because of federation.
Make sense?
Maybe my lack of understanding stems from a misunderstanding of OP's post... which to be fair, I found fairly difficult to parse, and based on their responses to your and other posters' replies, I strongly suspect that's a 'them' problem, not a 'me' problem, as it seems everyone else is having an equally hard time understanding what they're actually trying to say.
I just want to be clear that it is a lack of understanding and not an attempt to be antagonistic. I have no inherent problem with you; we have strongly differing views on a number of important topics, but we seem to be able to co-exist on Lemmy (and even post in the same communities) just fine, which... seems to be a counter-point to OP's post? But maybe I'm just still misinterpreting what that point actually is.
That's fair! Yea, from how I have interacted with OP, it seems they want Lemmy to overtake Reddit in numbers, have no moderation outside of CSAM or something, and have TOR integration so governments can't censor it, and that they believe this is the key to achieving socialism (I think?). I think this person just has very specific desires and sees it as a problem for everyone that they aren't met.
No, the OP thinks that even CSAM should not be moderated. Click here.
What the fuck
Yeah, I had a feeling. And had to take the long road to get there.
Incredible.
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.
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.