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 submitted this project bounty to try to improve the state of decentralized git, so now I'm promoting it where I can (first time using Lemmy).

This was drafted for a niche audience and it's not really self-explanatory, it might require reading a lot of background stuff to make any sense. Feel free to discuss, and I'll try to remember to check here and respond.

Funding is currently at about 5 XMR at time of posting. Please share this post if you find it interesting.

View Monero bounty page (stuck before removal of point 9)

Nostr mirror

Project Zymogen

Goal: to potentially create a decentralized GitHub.

Phase I

1. Radicle, forked or mimicked (with reasonably close feature parity)

2. including a desktop app with both Linux AppImage and build-from-source availability¹ (as a response to desktop.radicle.xyz)

3. including a javascript-free Tor browser interface (one-upping app.radicle.xyz)

4. using nostr's keypair formats, replacing Radicle's

5. [desktop app] default launch state is offline, waiting for the user to click a fully-integrated "connect to Tor" button, meanwhile allowing them to access offline data or reconfigure settings (including bypassing the default Tor integration)

6. [desktop app] including an easy, automated way to generate onion service keys, use them to seed repos, and host an instance of the browser interface (the main important part here is a simple method of seeding to make the app truly P2P)

At this point, if no one else beats them to it,² I believe this fork's dev(s) + Radicle's devs might want to ask Jack Dorsey about his separate 10 Bitcoin bounty for a decentralized GitHub (unafilliated with me or this Monero bounty)

Phase II

+7. [desktop app] including an easy way to enter wallet addresses, including Monero (XMR) / doggie (DOGE) / Bitcoin (BTC), for tipping npubs (possibly compatible with Garnet's profile metadata)

+8. [desktop app] no built-in wallet - just links to wallet addresses, opening external wallets³

Point 9 removed

At this point, I anticipate the devs should hopefully be receiving good amounts of tips, even if Jack Dorsey isn't paying out

Phase III

+10. project repo hosted on itself, and backed up on a traditional platform such as the Internet Archive (or, if there's no avoiding it, GitHub)

+11. Full bounty payout issued after project has been hosted on itself for long enough to demonstrate the aforementioned requirements, to at least one or two observers, using its own repo as an example

Footnotes

¹ A Linux AppImage and easy building from source are the specific availability factors of Radicle that I deem most important to match. There is no requirement in this bounty to match Radicle on other builds, like Windows or MacOS or Debian. Those are all optional.

² A payout from Jack Dorsey might seem dubious. It is subject to his own arbitrary personal taste; it's already been up for a long time, for others to start working on, or for Jack to lose interest in; meanwhile, others might already be working on similar (or not-so-similar) solutions. Therefore, this bounty relies on its own Monero funding, and probably doesn't help with Jack's bounty.

³ As a courtesy, please consider continuing to prioritize vital improvements (especially stability and GitHub feature parity) over complicated wallet integrations, even after the bounty is paid out.