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 “federation” where each instance can fetch posts from other instances, and it doesn’t actually work. 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 different people feels fundamentally different from a big reddit that censors everyone the authorities don’t want to give a mainstream audience. But it’s the exact same thing.

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 at a different time and then match the present in the future, which feels like a whole different thing to some of in this brief period of time.

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.

So you want to censor 99% of speech, leaving only people who agree with you on only hearing speech from people that post in your mkni community? I feel like that’s counter-productive.

Sometimes people say Lemmy.ml is “high censorship,” but I’ve never been censored here. People sort themselves into instances that generally align with what they want to post and comment, it isn’t that there are censorship regimes going on.

As for Lemmy “failing,” it already does what it needs to do, it provides a good platform. Reddit went downhill because of the profit motive, Lemmy doesn’t have that.

Sometimes people say Lemmy.ml is “high censorship,” but I’ve never been censored here.

My train of thought today started from people on lemmy.world talking about defederating lemmy.ml for being “tankies” - then I ended up here because the Lemmy community here seems to be the main one anywhere for discussing Lemmy

If you want an instance that doesn’t defederate from any other instance, you’re going to be left with very few options, and those are going to be the ones hosting some incredibly, incredibly questionable content.

There are 2 options:

Don’t defederate from any other instance, but keep a list of censored instances and an easy way for users to block that full list

Just make the list of defederated instances the list of censored instances

Anything else is useless

Anything designed by people who think “questionable” is a bad trait and “censored” is a good trait, is useless

Sounds like the solution is for you to just start your own instance, create your own ‘free speech zone’ communities, and engage in a ‘censorship-free’ policy there. Personally, I prefer to stay as far away from instances hosting, for example, CSAM and unbridled hate-speech as I can, and the current federation system handles that quite well.

Again, can’t.

That’s the whole point of my original post. Don’t know how many times I have to repeat it. Lemmy uses DNS / IP addresses, stops Tor from being used, can’t have free speech instances under this configuration. Needs new code, not new instance

Do you consider taking down CSAM as censorship?

Why are you asking me if I recognize a valid dictionary definition I’ve said nothing to indicate I wouldn’t recognize?

Bad faith, that’s why.

Let me rephrase. Do you think sites should be forced to take down CSAM?