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.
Personally my ideal thing would be an instance that does no blocking and the technology allowing me to block in all ways. I would also like to subscribe to others block lists. I also want blocking to be symetric. When I block or someone blocks me we both effectively do not exist to the other. That being said instances need to block to be in compliance with local laws. In addition I totally understand instances that are about something to block instances which are mean to them. Like if its about lgbtq and anothers about how nazism is the way and another is about christiantiy as a loving accepting faith while another is about christianity being about prosprity doctrine.
Agreement:
I’m glad you support an instance that does no blocking, and instead gives you all the tools
Disagreement:
Custom feeds and labels solve basically the same problems as block lists without being anywhere near as harmful
“Symmetric blocking” as you call it, cannot coexist with public discussion, and is not natural or appropriate for a political “town square”
Real laws are rarely localized, so saying “local laws” makes it sound like you think “laws of man” are real
I think that is bs. Blocking imitates what we do in meatspace. Avoid people we don’t like and hang out with people we do. No one would argue with getting toxic individuals in their life but blocking online is creating a bubble. We need to get back to what is natural. No one has a right for people to view their crap and its fine for them to restrict folks from hearing their crap to. custome feeds and labels do not cut it.
You cannot just make people stop being able to hear you or reply to you in a public place.
The average person could not just avoid every political opinion they disagreed with before the TV was widespread.
Stop ignoring stuff willingly.
You sure can. You avoid them. You don’t go to the places they go. The internet piles everyone together and humans can’t handle that scale. People heard other political opinion from more reasonable people who mixed with different groups that happened to intersect at a place. If the asshole showed up they would leave but the other person would not but they might catch up with the other person and hear some relevant things the asshole had to say. Given the asshole is just an asshole because it rubs the first person the wrong way. Its this middle person that enables the flow.
Avoiding people alone does not make them unable to hear you or reply to you in public places. If you meant “avoiding people and not having any public opinions” then maybe, but before TV, that would have kinda fucked up any attempt at political involvement.
Again, does nothing for the “public places” issue unless you also make sure none of your opinions are public, which is a moot point in the context of trying to make ambulances stop costing money.
Some humans can. I’m one of them, and I’m trying to help others learn to do the same, before Earth goes extinct. It’s quite urgent.
People were more reasonable, but they didn’t magically make their birthplaces match locations full of agreeable people, or have the freedom to live wherever they wanted, or even always have opinions shared by any large group of people anywhere.
This middle person has not solved the problem of people using screens to echo chamber themselves, ever since TVs became widespread.
This middle person was more of a factor back when people spent more time in public places, especially in eras where people felt safer discussing politics, like in the US when it was an anti-Nazi country.
I don’t see what you are not getting if I avoid someone and do my speaking away from them. They don’t hear me and I don’t hear them. To some degree echo chambers have always existed. You go to any random bar and it will often have somewhat of similar attitudes amont the patrons but there will still be lively discussion. One reason is some of the patrons also patronize another bar that others don’t but some of the others patronize a bar the first group does not. Anyway I don’t really care if you like blocking or not but I will be on the technology that allows it and you will be on one that does not so the really great thing is eventually it will be like we blocked each other. Even though I am not looking to block you currently even though I could. So I guess im saying your requirements for what you want your space to be will create an echo chamber for you. The federation is an echo chamber that blocks folks that are only on xitter or facebook or reddit but not necessarily completely as their are communities dedicated to postings stuff from those outside sources (which I personally block). Those people reposting from the other sources are that middle person and although I don’t want to hear the stuff they post from these other social media sites I will still hear things from them that are influenced from hanging in those spaces.
Not symmetrically though. You’ll probably still try to have public political opinions, so I’ll probably still be able to read and respond to those, it would just be you that can’t see my responses. Over time, this should drive pretty much everyone into places without symmetric blocking.
To be clear, you seem chill, so I personally do not intend to talk shit behind your back, or anything like that.
We would be theoretically different platforms though. Blocking is one of those things that cannot be done with instance level configs. It would have to be how the federation does it one way or another. So im thinking a fork where one goes one way and the other goes the other. So its like (ugh I hate using this example) one of us is on facebook and the other is on reddit. We would never see each others things (excepting some middle person reposting from the other platforms or such). If such a fork happened I would go with the one that had symmetric blocking.
The first sentence of this makes the rest of it seem too long to read.
If you want me to read this, could you give me a shorter reply to read first that just addresses something I said quickly and directly?
sorry but you need to shorten the reply I replied to for this to happen :P your funny.