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.
That’s exactly what someone acting in bad faith would say.
You absolutely know without a doubt that he doesn’t want child porn to be decriminalised, i quoted him saying the opposite a few comments ago, yet you’re more obsessed with turning his sentences in a bad way than honestly seeking to understand his p.o.v.
That’s interesting, because (edit : it makes me understand your view better, however )that’s not my p.o.v., and he repeatedly, over and over, insisted on the censorship of political opinions, here as well that’s something you really should have known by reading him
Oh, so he wants it remained criminalised - but people shouldn’t remove it from their websites if someone posts it?
Okay, and you don’t need TOR to make a lemmy instance where there is no censorship of political opinion. There are likely lemmy servers that already exist that do what he wants if its purely about no political censorship.
I think it should be censored, and can’t defend him if i don’t understand his p.o.v. here.
But he clearly states that those doing it should be found and prosecuted.
That’s a difference from reddit where you can’t escape the reddit admins.
But he’s probably mentioning Tor because you can’t escape from national/federal laws on Lemmy, and many many laws to restrict our freedom of speech on the internet have been brewing these last years, it’s not only an interdiction of defending our enemies anymore(, terrorism apologia).
Covid led to many bans, each war brings its batch of censored accounts and medias/journalists, TikTok has been bought, and there’s the Digital Service Act, the Online Safety Act, the Network Enforcement Act, …
Yes you can. Make your own “uncensored” political instance and host it. You’ll be heavily defederated, probably, but it can exist. What lemmy.ml or lemmy.world choose to do doesn’t have any impact on this hypothetical instance.
As for other laws that you reference, Lemmy is far too small to be even noticed by much of this.
Are you still speaking about state/national/federal laws ? Because you can’t, and these laws expect every platform to comply, it’ll probably be automated and only ignored for a while until really applied, or only if necessary in some contexts
There are already laws in place in many US states that Lemmy is mostly ignoring. OSA technically applies to Lemmy in the UK but only 2 instances have geoblocked the UK.
Just like terrorism apologia wasn’t applied for all citizens, give them some time to enforce an already existing legislation, they still don’t have all the tools but it’s coming together.
Usually they ask the platforms to do the censorship for them.
Anyway, that’s perhaps why he mentioned Tor, i.d.k.
He actually hasn’t mentioned a single piece of legislation.
Then ask him if that’s indeed why he talked about Tor, i.d.k. 🤷
His original post states « it just gets blocked instantly and easily, every time the authorities feel like blocking anything » if that’s any indication