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.
Okay. Some people are here because Reddit banned them. Many aren’t though. I imagine most people who got banned on reddit also ended up getting banned here.
I would argue that it is not the primary reason for why most active users come here.
But did you make me explain that in good faith, or were you just posting incorrect shit willingly?
And do you have anything for me or are you just trying to troll me because you don’t like me?
I have no idea who you are. I nothing you.
All I was saying is that your opinion on here is a minority.
So you’re too cowardly to admit your thought processes and feelings to a stranger you’ve trolled on the internet, or you’re too selfish / too addicted to trolling to stop when asked directly.
I am not trolling you.
Also, I thought you were a free speech absolutist?
This statement reveals: either you have me confused with someone more gullible, or you’re pathetically addicted to gaslighting.
I don’t know what you mean by “free speech absolutist.” I just notice that IP address bans should be for filtering bots, not humans; and that we have no infrastructure for organizing political resistance, despite modern technology offering new possibilities there.
According to you, the entire thread is apparently trolling you.
IP bans can be for whatever the site owner wants them for. You can set up or join another site with its own policy.
Nope, I don’t have a view on “the entire thread” because I don’t feel like trying to remember all the comments at once. But I can’t remember any replies from people that didn’t end up trolling me. So the statement you attribute to me might be true, even though the attribution isn’t. Either the entire thread is trolling me, or a large enough portion to drown out the others in my short-term memory right now.
Sure, but - like so many other things I’ve felt it was a waste of time to read and reply to in this thread - why are you telling me this?
So as I said: According to you, the entire thread is apparently trolling you.
You said that “I just notice that IP address bans should be for filtering bots, not humans”. This is just an opinion. It doesn’t oblige website owners to operate like this. The principle of free association runs up against you.