Comment on Potential Decentralized Fediverse Alternative to Ko-fi, Patreon, etc.?
queermunist@lemmy.ml 1 week agoDefederation is censorship. It’s part of the platform.
Don’t get me wrong, I support defederating from shitty instances, but it’s still a censor deciding what members see.
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I mean… I’m not so sure about that logic. Technically you aren’t wrong, but I think your point is misleading. In order for censorship to be problematic, it needs to be enforced by an entity with a significant amount of authority or control.
A communist newsletter technically engages in “censorship” against conservative viewpoints, but that’s hardly problematic, is it? Parents preventing young children from being exposed to objectionable content is technically “censorship”.
If you voluntarily choose to use a specific server when you have many other options at your fingertips, I just don’t see how the colloquial usage of censorship applies to that situation. Seems like more of a semantic quibble than an actual flaw of Lemmy as a platform.
Bottom line is that anyone can spin up a Lemmy server for free and post anything they want, and others can freely join or federate with that server and access that information without any barriers. That’s why I would argue the platform does not have any inherent censorship.
queermunist@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
I didn’t say censorship is problematic? In fact, I completely support it.
I’m just pointing out that defederation functions as censorship. Lemmy.world refused to federate with hexbear.net and that was when I moved to lemmy.ml
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Sure, but in the context of this discussion I’m responding to someone claiming that Lemmy has more censorship than Reddit. That perception is completely false and detrimental to the growth of Lemmy, which is why I’m trying to clarify the truth of the matter.
queermunist@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
It certainly doesn’t have more. Hexbear came from r/chapotraphouse being banned, after all.
But hexbear has 4.4 million comments, whereas .world has 4 million comments. By not federating, they’ve effectively removed more comments from their member’s feeds than .world has ever had on its own servers. That’s pretty huge.