So you want to block people who block people? There's no corporate centralisation, that's a huge fundemental difference. Big Daddy's not there, its more anarchic.

I think I got cancer reading this post.

Lemmy is designed to fail the same way as reddit when reaching the same size

I didn't ask you about this. Why waste time telling me about it?

The no-censorship crowd is funny. "I wanted to block everyone whose admins block someone, in order to find the people whose admins don't block anyone, so I could talk to the few people I hadn't blocked because they don't block people."

(And that's ignoring the traditional entitlement in that people somewhere else deciding not to listen to you somehow means you're censored locally.)

Hypocracy -- and conspiracy-level rambling -- aside, there's actually an interesting kernel of commentary here on how we talk about joining and administering Fedi. On the one hand, we say that newcomers shouldn't worry about which instance to start out on, because every one connects to every other, but on the other we celebrate how the instanced architecture allows admins control over which other instances to connect to. And then you have the deeper issue of the vast majority of the software assuming DNS, so even if admins do want to connect to Tor instances, they can't feasably do so without a fair bit of host-system tweaking. Yeah, those mixed messages are just the emergent result of which layer of abstraction we're talking about in any given conversation, but it would be nice if we could find language that doesn't take literally the opposite tack on each successive layer.

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.

"allow discussion outside what the corporate authorities allow" apparently meaning "Allow CSAM"

I don't want Lemmy to be zero censorship.

In every case I've known, anywhere claiming "zero censorship" either adopts it sooner or later, or disappears - and in every one of those cases, it was a godawful place to be 100% of the time. IME, those who do say they want this tend to be either edgy teenagers, crackpot conspiracy theorists or psychopaths.

Sure, you can say "well, zero censorship except bots" - well that's censorship, isn't it? And given no anti-bot tactic is reliable, you'll be blocking humans. Or you can say, "zero censorship except CSAM, or extreme pornography, or anti-terrorist" and you're either applying societal laws or your own morality on others. You can't use "no censor" and "except" in a sentence without contradiction.

If you want zero censorship, I don't think Lemmy is for you. I don't think the fediverse is for you. But if you disagree, then run your own instance and put it on an onion address, please stop trying to rant at us for not sharing your views.

My problem with reddit was not censorship, and I can't think of why I would want to visit a forum with absolutely no censorship. I want "right" or "good" censorship or however that ends up relating to my values. Lemmy was not designed to address your problems with censorship, but it definitely addresses some problems of censorship.

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. [...] I found out there are no zero-censorship instances

Unless you're using a zero-censorship instance it likely will block zero-censorship instances. So it's not a surprise you couldn't find one.

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.

You need to define "fully working state".

Lemmy's official docs say you can't even do federation over Tor at all. This means it uses DNS

Not necessarily. It could be possible to use standard IP addresses directly instead of domain names. In fact odds are good that would work already.

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.

That's overly simplistic. Under a substantially sensorial authority the "average joe" would out of necessity, become such a nerd.

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.

It's not Reddit. The difference is, democratic censorship vs corporate censorship. Reddit users have no real power over what gets censored or not. On Lemmy they do. If your instance censors something you want to see, there's little friction in moving to another one.

That's a big difference.
Unless you think people are owed reach and exposure to a broad platform. In that case yes all censorship is suppressing your right to be heard by everyone in the world.

To be clear you don't have that right.

It's not actually a solution to reddit. It's not designed to be different

Censorship isn't the only way to differentiate from Reddit. Lemmy is also different in countless other ways; Algorithms and advertising to begin with. It's myopic and supremely egotistical to think your one idea is the only difference that matters.

Just host your own fucking instance then nerd

Mods please censor this guy

I agreed with the title, but then downvoted immediately upon reading your post.

Censorship is not Reddit's problem. It’s enshittification.

Reddit didn’t fail because Spez has some niche political opinions he pushes and you aren’t allowed to say, it failed because its algorithm/UI is structured to farm users and turn to shit.

Lemmy has major problems and power tripping mods, but its existential issue (IMO) is collapse from spam, trolls, attention algorithms, commercialization, and so on.

But federation is a good first step to avoiding the enshittification traps, like the original internet did until Google/Facebook got such a grip on it.

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.

Instances can be created freely, and are free to both associate and disassociate with other instances as they please.

Each instance decides their comfort with content within their instance and outside it. There are left leaning instances, centrist ones, and I'm sure a few right leaning ones. Some are ban-happy, but many will allow you to post all sorts of content, as long as it's not too outlandish.

If the content you wish to see/post is wildly outside the overton window, you can join an instance that allows this or create your own. But other instances are under no obligation to federate with content they don't wish to see.

ActivityPub is designed to create platforms that enable customized moderation experiences in order to resist corporate/commercial influence.

ActivityPub also resists government censorship, because a thousand copies get made for every post, one for every federated instance.

If you're looking for a platform where your personal speech can be forced upon others then ActivityPub is quite literally the opposite of what you're looking for.