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.

  • iloveDigit@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    11·
    5 days ago

    You did ask what I meant some time back by banning.

    My bad if it came off like I actually cared what you had to say anymore.

    You seemed to think I was somehow baiting you into incriminating yourself over your opinions on incitement to violence.

    Yeah, you have kept doing that.

    I pointed out that this wouldn’t get you banned.

    Baselessly, as if I would be gullible enough to take your word for it.

    Presumably you would want to allow the incitement of violence for anyone, not just war criminals.

    If you have a design that enables the incitement of violence against war criminals and no one else, maybe someone is all ears. I don’t really care, I’m still kinda tired of you wasting my time with relatively pointless inbox notifications.

    • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      Baselessly, as if I would be gullible enough to take your word for it.

      How would it get you banned? You might get banned for actually inciting violence, but not explaining your position on the legality of it.

      If you have a design that enables the incitement of violence against war criminals and no one else, maybe someone is all ears. I don’t really care, I’m still kinda tired of you wasting my time.

      You don’t have to reply to me, you know. I’m not forcing you to do so. I’m not making you “waste your time” by replying. You choose to do so.

      • iloveDigit@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
        1·
        15 hours ago

        Replying 5 days later due to my ban

        How would it get you banned? You might get banned for actually inciting violence, but not explaining your position on the legality of it.

        Why do you keep needing things repeated? And why did you put this right after copying and pasting the quote this implies you need me to repeat?

        You don’t have to reply to me, you know.

        Didn’t ask. Why waste time pointing out something so obvious?

        I’m not forcing you to do so.

        Again, didn’t ask, too obvious to be worth bringing up, and now it’s just basically a repeat of the previous sentence.

        I’m not making you “waste your time” by replying.

        Again, didn’t ask, too obvious to be worth bringing up, and still pretty much rephrasing the previous 2 sentences.

        You choose to do so.

        Nope. I choose to give the best replies I can, which is potentially worth the time. So far, you’ve chosen to waste my time and yours with your replies and how you handle mine.

        Heads up, if you reply to this I might not see it because I was banned here so it doesn’t seem worth trying to have much discussion here. If you have anything to say to me, try the nostr version of this thread