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.
You need to connect to the tor binary to make .onions work. It doesn’t just work like any other uri.
What about Lemmy makes it work that way and why did it even need to be designed that way (other than to block Tor federation)?
Also, why are you trying to make it sound like this is a universal thing that applies to all apps?
Because it is. This is how Tor works. Do you not understand how Tor works?
Now you’re just lying, and the upvotes reveal the community is full of either liars or gullible lazy people.
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You owned 'em, lmao!
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Didn’t ask. I pointed out that you were lying, and that the thread’s current vote scores reveal a community with a prevalence of either liars, or gullible/lazy people. I also hinted that people who find this confusing should try looking up how Tor works for apps that don’t integrate it (or its “binary”)
I’m not lying. I am stating the facts.
You run the tor binary and connect to it over socks5 and make connections to places (onion or not) through that socks5. If the app doesn’t support socks5 you need to bodge it and redirect connections from the app into socks5 through some other means.
(At least that is the old way, with arti things are changing, but it’s still in development, and when we are talking about onion services the old tor binary is still necessary)
You are lying about your previous lies, and then stating unrelated facts to confuse people.
To be clear for others reading this: “you run the tor binary” doesn’t mean “the app runs the tor binary” it means you, the user on the system. Lemmy doesn’t need Tor built-in to use Tor, and while the user I’m replying to is trying to confuse you, their explanation in this comment does match that reality
I am not.
I never meant that the app has to, the user can too.
No, but then the individual lemmy instances would have to bodge tor support, as I have been trying to say. And since they very likely don’t, tor based federation wouldn’t work with those instances.
It does.