I find it ironic on a free speech platform that access to a community about censorship is censored https://exploding-heads.com/c/censorship
What exactly is wrong with this instance to be defederated? In browsing it, I see nothing hateful
Or did they defederate from this instance, so you cant view/post on it. Not sure if I completely understand how that works yet
The Lemmy software is intended to be somewhat censorship resistant, but that does not mean that lemmy.ml is a “free speech platform”.
Like most instances, lemmy.ml has rules (they’re in the sidebar on the front page) and we regularly delete posts and comments which violate them.
That instance you’re talking about is intended to be a “free speech platform”, which in modern internet parlance is a synonym for “nazi bar”. One of the two admins of that instance says explicitly: “racism, bigotry, sexism is allowed".
Most Lemmy users aren’t into racism, bigotry, sexism, and the other things people there are into, so, most Lemmy instances have defederated them.
I hope this answers your question!
So essentially it’s highly censored to defederate them. Not only you can’t view them using a different instance and post, but registering there, you can only interact with their instance. Lemmy needs a better method. I was thinking about this the other day, why is something as simple as blocking content on the users end or blocking x type of content not an option, even on registration. Even if there’s hate speech mixed in, freedom of speech should exist, but freedom to not hear it, should also exist. Essentially shadow banning, but done by choice of those who don’t want to hear said content.
Racism, bigotry, and sexism, exist in everyone. Maybe there’s just better ways to express it, or not to. But it’s cultural, people want to be with their culture, their people. When you force people to ‘accept’ everyone, they lose their Identity.
I really don’t think Lemmy will survive as everyone will be afraid of getting cancelled and defederated.
An environment where anyone can spin up an instance where they control member accounts and then post on other instances with impunity would obviously be an unusable hellscape of griefing and abuse. The only, ONLY, ONLY way a community can survive in these conditions is if they have power to censor the content that they syndicate. Indeed, that is the whole point of community groups vs just consuming raw Internet; the content has been curated (aka censored) according to some set of rules.
There are pure P2P networks that function the way you want. Go take a look and discover why no one is there.
Freenet still seems to be around. As I posted in my other comment here, I think Lemmy needs a client side censorship instead, giving users the option to hide what they don’t want. Eventually this will become a mess of instances doing anything to prevent getting canceled, thus increasing censorship.
