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.
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.
You’d kinda be isolating yourself to what those “middle people” tell you, but I guess that’s honestly fine if you have a trustworthy social circle.
ahh but so would you. Every choice we make. Are you seeing everything on facebook. I certainly am not. Nor xitter. nor linkedin. nor reddit. nor even here. Just my choice of how I read my feed sets me on a course to see some discourse and not others.
I think I’d end up being one of those “middle people” if I’m allowed.
What if the places that ban people end up banning the “middle people” - like, “starting today, anyone who posts in the other place is banned from posting in this one”
I fear people like me being wiped out, followed by more when we’re not there to fight for the world
Thank you again for the sense of sincerity I get from your replies
well again I would like the max control to be at the individual level. Obviously in order to exist instances will have to follow the law in locality they serve from but other than that I would personally like everything at the user level.
I’ll just prefer the places with no censorship at all, not the places that “follow the law”
I mean thats great and all but they will be shut down and then there will be nothing for you. Like it or not people putting up an instance will have to follow the law.
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.
I said “something,” not “everything.”
They are approximately the same size and honestly mine is a fair amount of repetition of what I have said already but giving you new analogies to see if it makes more sense for you.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t type long replies. You’re worth people’s time. Even if my reply was short it would be fine to give a long reply.
I am just exhausted with the number of replies I’m getting that seem to ignore everything I’m saying.
I get that and no problem. I see the downvotes and honestly I don’t get why. Yeah maybe the tone is a bit aggressive and belies what I believe to be a genuine hope for improvement but I don’t think what you have is pointless.
Thank you. Took some time to calm down a bit and I read your comment to give it a reply. Hope you’re having a good one
He thinks that even CSAM should not be moderated. Click here.
I mean beyond the eww and moral issues. Well thats just not possible. Instances can’t be expected to break the law.