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.
I absolutely did not ask.
What the fuck? Everyone(?) is broadly unfamiliar with vast amounts of the future, everyone should still have a strong position on what the future ought to be.
So what? You made a comment about the Fediverse term, and I replied.
I mean unfamiliar WITH THE FEDIVERSE. Not the future. Mr. “I’m so good at English”.
So it’s yet another random subject-change that I’ve been, for hours, making it clear you should stop.
I didn’t ask if I did.
I didn’t ask if you replied.
I didn’t ask what you meant, the “what the fuck” was an expression of how bewildered I was at your mental illness.
Again, I didn’t ask.
You seem to have me confused with someone who asked what you meant. I don’t see anyone who asked what you meant. I just see me, who understood what you meant, but didn’t feel like addressing the secret meaning of your words when it seemed more enjoyable to make fun of you yet again for being bad at typing.
Did I say you did?
Did I say you did?
Did I say you did?
Did I say you did?
Should I only respond to direct questions, rather than comments and claims you make?
Replying 5 days later due to my ban -
No, why?
No, why?
No, why?
No, why?
If you can’t stop wasting the time of yourself and those around you, it would be better if you left me alone entirely.
If you can provide worthwhile replies, that’s always welcome.
Of course, at this point, if you could provide worthwhile replies, you’d probably be doing it on nostr, where I can’t be banned. Here’s the nostr copy of this thread, btw - I might not see it if you reply here, given how I’ve been banned for this post once so far.
They’re such a crybaby is it worth even engaging any further?
Replying days later because I was banned - I don’t think they’re a crybaby, I think they’re a sociopath. But it’s worth engaging for me because I feed on the suffering of liars who target me like this
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