Comment on Has Reddit acknowledged the existence of Lemmy?
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 6 days agoNo, they will just make server operators liable for obeying any conservative who has an issue with any content there and can make the right format of complaint.
I suspect that instances outside the US will simply be too small a factor to bother with. Small, scattered opposition that is subject to deliberate trolling and disruption at any scale anyone feels like deploying will simply not be worth bothering with.
This is all assuming if a big internet-censorship operation starts (which it seems likely that it will). I think it will mainly focus on large based-in-the-US companies which host large services. Notably among them will be Bluesky. The only impact it will have on anything ActivityPub-based is that they will shut down or muzzle some big instances inside the US, and then, the point being made, they will probably move on, leaving instances outside the US to do whatever they want. That’s my prediction.
Oh, also, Palantir’s surveillance will incorporate people’s comments into their overall dossier on the person, regardless of where their instance is, which means that anyone who maintains a big presence on an ActivityPub network will be putting themselves at person risk of neo-deportation to somewhere they can never get free from. It will still be legal to do, though. Sure.
I suspect that instances outside the US will simply be too small a factor to bother with.
Aren’t the largest (by user population) Lemmy instances already located outside of the USA? .world is in the Netherlands, I believe. Sopuli.xyz in Finland, etc. Even Midwest.social is not hosted in the USA.
See my other comment. I wasn’t saying at all that Lemmy was a US-only thing, I was just trying to say that that the whole network is probably enough of a niche platform that it’s not worth the substantial effort that would be involved in trying to interfere too much with US users on non-US instances. Big instances in the US, they can fuck with, and so why not (and especially since the Take it Down act is structured to empower individuals to go after them without the government needing to spend resources on it.) Instances outside the US, never mind, we have bigger fish to fry.
gigachad@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
You overestimate the Lemmy US userbase. Only because we speak English doesn’t mean we’re all from the US. Language-based instances like feddit.org for example may be small, but its users engage in the whole lemmyverse.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 6 days ago
Oh, I am sure most of Lemmy is outside the US. I was saying that, in general, Lemmy (and even Mastodon) is probably too small and difficult a problem for them to want to attack through any systematic method. I think, if anything, they’ll just surveil and punish individual US-based users as opposed to trying to shut down or block instances outside the US.
It’s one of the advantages of ActivityPub services. Bluesky will be easy for them to attack at the root and I fully expect them to do so, whereas for truly federated services I think the reaction will be “ah what the hell too much trouble, how much harm can they really do.”