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.
I absolutely think nazis should be censored from political discourse in communities I am involved in.
Didn't ask, but why did you tell me?
So you seem to think that should never happen?
That question baits me to say something I could get banned for here. If your goal is actually to learn something and not just get me banned, try asking me on nostr.
I don't think you would get banned for saying you don't believe nazis should be banned.
That's not what you asked, and it's much easier to answer, but it can only be answered with a question: banned from what?
They should be banned from eating food non-Nazis need at the same time, but not banned from political discussion.
Banned from the community or instance they're posting in. If a nazi joins lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works and starts being a nazi, they'll get banned from the instance. Do you object to that?
lemmy.world: yes, fuck em, I will basically object to anything they do if I even slightly disagree at all
sh.itjust.works: kinda, but not really. I wouldn't ask sh.itjust.works to change how they operate when they've been chill with me so far. I would hope they change someday, but not demand it or have a problem with them staying as they were.
Right, well it'll go the same in almost every instance. Sh.itjust.works has rules:
Right, and I made a whole post about how I found out the reason every instance has these rules is because Lemmy isn't designed to allow a censorship-free instance. That's the post you're commenting on today
No, that's not why these rules exist. Sh.itjust.works doesn't have to block pornography. It doesn't have to have rules against racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia or xenophobia.
"These rules" as in the rules all Lemmy instances have, which matches what I said.
Not "these rules" as in one specific instance's rules, which would obviously not match what I said.
Why are you making me explain this? Seems like bad faith discussion from you
No, some lemmy instances have different rules. Some allow pornographic content. Some do not. There's a specific instance that is explicitly about porn: lemmynsfw.com. Sh.itjust.works could change the rules tomorrow and nothing will happen to them.
What "rules" are you referring to that all Lemmy instances have?
I didn't say they all have identical rules, so the "no" doesn't make sense here, and neither does bringing this up again overall.
Didn't ask. Why are you telling me all this?
You were literally just listing some of them, now you're pretending you need me to?
Those are not rules that /all/ lemmy instances necessarily have. Or have to have. Those were just sh.itjust.works rules.
You also mentioned lemmynsfw.com remember? You can clearly find examples of instance rules yourself, why are you asking me like you have zero examples when you yourself were just mentioning at least 2 instances worth of Lemmy instance rules other than "don't spam?"
Yeah, they have different rules. They're not sh.itjust.works.
The point is the moderators chose those rules, they weren't pressured into them.
No, I asked more than once why you're pretending you can't remember any instance's rules right after you mentioned several from at least 2 instances.
My point was it seems like you're trying to confuse anyone reading this, which is weird, because you've already gone on an hours-long gish gallop and you can't necessarily assume anyone else will even read this far.
What? When did I say I can't remember any instances rules? I quoted sh.itjust.works rules and then referenced lemmynsfw as another example as they have different rules, and allow pornography.
It's text, just read it again.
Why are you asking like I would know, and why are you putting it right after a quote of yet another question you're ignoring?
I didn't ask you to repeat yourself like this, why waste the time? Just because you're an abusive person, right?
Still really weird how you asked me for examples you had just given yourself. Care to try explaining that? Seems like you were just trying to be confusing, which is really weird when it's basically just us in this subthread.
You claimed I had forgotten the rules of any instance when no such event happened.
You are a sensitive little soul, aren't you? I'm not keeping you here. You don't have to reply.
I don't think I claimed that. You were clearly pretending to forget, not actually forgetting. I made it clear that seemed pretty obvious from how you had just mentioned examples yourself, right before asking for them.
Me, the soul? I don't know. I'm pretty sure my sensitivity is powered by the central nervous system. There's not a clear scientific answer on what souls even are, but it feels like I might have a honey badger type of one, in the body of a human pothead.
I didn't ask if you were.
I didn't ask if I did, and while it's debatable, I don't really have enough of an opinion to debate on it.
I did neither.
My point is that it's laughable to claim abuse when you keep coming back for more, so to speak.
Incorrect. You did what I said you did.
That's gibberish, not a point.
Does lying make you feel better about being an abusive psycho?
No, I didn't.
So yet more insults. Reported.
I don't think I'd say you did something you didn't do.
Didn't ask.
So was there a reason you told me? I asked this above but you still didn't answer it