You know, it’s like you’re walking through the forest, enjoying its beauty, and then you don’t notice how a hungry bear attacks you, even though you were warned about it.
What a shame, when the trap snaps it will be very painful…
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I don’t feel this analogy works, when you think about it. What’s the “trap”? People trying to control what others say? That’s always been the case. And if I knew about it decades ago, I should have… what? Not expressed myself freely? Nah, fuck that.
my interpretation, at least:
the trap is the government (the US’ in this example, perhaps) promising freedom of speech/unlawful search and seizure; but then terrorizing and inflicting violence upon those whose opinions they disagree with, but much more regularly and openly.
Those trapped think they are protected from such retaliation because they have ignored/permitted/trivialized the systemic violence against marginalized groups that has been prevalent for centuries. They ignore the signs of their country’s propensity for fascism, and its intentional increase of brazenly hateful rhetoric and policies.
But they are by no means exempt, and many won’t realize that until it’s too late.
It’s fine, they can always chew their foot off.
It’s an allusion to chat control, banning books, etc. No good person wants that kind of control or power. But they are always misled into thinking that it’s necessary somehow to protect the public or protect the children. The sort of people, they think such control and legislation would be levied against. Actively seek it out, to wield it against the people who would hinder them.
All the people who trusted a social media company with their govt ID ^
I feel like the Fediverse has even more thought police than regular social media.
…yeah, because you’re on .ml, lol.
Your instance is the one censoring words like b#tch and more. So if you feel that way thats why.
That’s not fair. Tankies also censor anything even slightly critical of authoritarianism.
Unless it occurs within a “western” sphere of influence. You can do the same or worse in the east. Because they’re hypocrites.
New to lemmy, is there a way to change instance, and can you recommend one?
It depends on what you’re after from a server.
There’s region specific ones, like the server I’m on just now (feddit.uk) being UK themed. That means when I look at my “Local” feed it’s generally filled with content specific to the UK. There’s others for Canada, Netherlands, Denmark, etc, probably US states as well I would assume.
Or maybe you’re after a server with a political ideology. Lemmy.ml is for Marxist-Leninists, dbzer0 and slrpnk.net are for anarchists, and there’s even a MAGA themed server but I forget its name just now and don’t care to go searching.
There’s also servers that aim to be just a general purpose, jack of all trades master of none kind of place. Your server, Lemmy.world probably being the biggest of those. It has a bit of everything and doesn’t really specialise in one particular topic. Probably the closest to a clone of Reddit.
There’s also servers that are supposed to be safe spaces for particular groups of people. For example, blahaj.zone is for LGBTQ+ people (or those just fans of cuddly shark toys).
As markz said, have a browse of this site to see all the servers and see which fits best with what you want from a link aggregator site. There’s nothing stopping you having accounts on different servers for different purposes either. They all have different rules, content, and block lists so the experience on each is unique.
Good luck exploring, welcome to the Fediverse, and have fun!
You’ve explained it pretty well. Is there something I’m missing by being on current server? Are they not all connected? Just random differences like mods, and which words are censored and the like. And it sounds like I would have to create a new account if I went to another server? Though you can apparently import/export settings?
Basically “yes” to all of the above, including “not all connected”: Most of them are connected to each other, but some are “defederated”, for example there’s one called Beehaw that isn’t connected to lemmy.world and some of them have chosen not to connect to lemmynsfw.com for reasons.
I see. So instead of muting a single person, it would be like a way to mute whole communities?
Yeah - in the terminology here it would be more like a whole group of communities (since we call each “topic” on an instance a community) but yes.
Admins can (and do) also block individual communities on an instance that is still federated, such as lemmy.world blocking [email protected] but leaving most of the rest of dbzer0 connected.
You’te probably not missing much since lw is the single largest instance and therefore should have lots of users subscribing to almost everything. Many other instances use a bot that trades subs so everything gets federated.
And yeah, you need a new account, but there are tools to copy your settings and subscriptions.
Correction – SLRPNK.net’s admins are all anarchists, but the server is not ‘for’ anarchists. Limiting our membership to anarchists for one means we would have to precisely define what an anarchist is, and then enforce that definition on our membership. In spaces where someone can be ejected for not being anarchist, this leads to attempts by people to censor others by trying to narrow the definition so the people they argue with fall on the wrong side of the line.
We’re looking for people who believe in the value of scientific consensus. We’re building a community that wants society to change to better meet the challenges of resource scarcity, ecological collapse, and increasing authoritarian influence in politics. We celebrate good faith discussion, and discourage trolling and bad rhetoric. We don’t tolerate hate speech and spamming. We believe a diverse set of ideas and approaches are more likely to solve complex problems than adhering to a strict party line. As anarchists and adminstrators, we approach revolution through prefiguration, believe that means and ends are inseparable, and want our server to reflect the society of the future we’d like to live in – one where diversity of thought is foundational in finding creative answers, and people with varying goals and ideals are able to work together to solve shared problems.
Wait… that’s what ml stands for??? I got here because it advertised itself as being for opensource software enthusiasts haha
Yup, Marxist-Leninist.
Unfortunately it’s also home to the largest OSS communities
Unfortunately the only way to change instance is to make a new account there.
For example, sopuli.xyz is relatively large, uncontroversial, and well maintained. https://join-lemmy.org/ has a list of all(?) instances and a thing that lets you filter them by topic and language.
There’s option to export your config and import it to another instance, that lessens the burden somewhat, but yeah it is still a new account.
Well yeah, you picked the most thought-policey instance.
I wouldn’t say most. But if a competition was held they’d definitely be a contender for sure.
Yeah that’s true, I guess .grad is worse lol.
I mean, kinda. in the Fediverse anyone can set up a town and appoint themselves sheriff. More towns (instances) -> more sheriffs. And because the power is more distributed, there are more checks, which has a side effect of making discussions about power (and the abuse thereof) noisier. If it makes you feel any more at peace with it, the perpetual argument about norms and rules is the only alternative to having a single faction seize control and enforce their rules, so anything that is being argued about in public (and not censored) hasn’t been fully captured by a single thought-policing entity.
100% It’s why I avoid communities on your instance. No instance is perfect. Certainly not the one I’m on. But because AP is decentralized and democratized. We can associate with whomever we consent. Don’t have to be subject to authoritarians right(Reddit) or left(ML). And that’s wonderful.
I don’t know much about Lemmy and I’m new here, but on Mastodon there seem to be just an illusion of federation because it’s actually ruled by peer-pressure. Instance A doesn’t like instance B so it defederates from it (absolutely fair), then it goes and tell instance C to also defederate from B else its going to tell instance D, E and F to defederate from C, and so on… remember when people bullied mastodon.lol admin into closing his 18k members instance just because he didn’t want to ban users for liking the Harry Potter game?
I’ve never used mastodon and I’m not familiar with mastodon.lol. I’m fairly new to federated platforms in general tbh just figuring it out as I go along. I tend to browse all instances but I made an account on lemmy.ml because that was the one that was recommended to me on reddit. might join a different instance at some point if I find lemmy.ml to be unsatisfactory at some point e.g. if I find out they defederated from some instance I am interested in.
The peer pressure thing… I mean yeah, people voice their opinions, disagree, and if they can’t reconcile they defederate. It’s messy but I think that’s kind of the point. The only alternative to peer relationships is some kind of asymmetry.
dot ml was the first sort of the original hub of the content aggregator part of the Fediverse. Designed and populated initially by political hypocrites who’s behavior and unpopular opinions saw them banned from everywhere else. But that hasn’t really been the case anymore for a while now.
Better part of a decade on and there are a number of other software stacks doing the same thing. And plenty more instances outside ML serving content to the larger Fediverse. Put it this way. If you avoid politics like the plague and only use communities on ML for extremely niche, tech, or fandom like things. You’ll probably have an okay experience. However, if you ever have a moment where you are forced to shore up your reality and beliefs against theirs. They’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks and most likely ban you. No matter the evidence you have or your good faith. Their reality is tenuous, and can not stand scrutiny.
The problem being that it isn’t even the mods over there. It’s the admins ruling with an iron fist in favour of their ideology. Contrasted with dot world, recently there was a broughaha about a moderator of a large community there, being reactionary and immature. When someone pressed the admins of the instance, whether or not they agreed with it or supported it. They said no. And left it at that. Because the individual hadn’t violated the rules and their fellow moderators hadn’t asked for it. It wasn’t their place to remove them for being unpopular. Conversely if you persist in disagreeing with CCP, FSB, or DPRK propaganda. No matter how civil or polite you are ml admins WILL find a reason to ban.
Interesting. Didn’t know that this instance had that reputation. Is there anyone out there archiving and cataloguing removed posts / comments across instances? I’d be curious to see some data around this. Would be a fun NLP project to try to identify who might be running certain instances based on the ideological bent of their censorship interests. Could be fun to try to parse out state propagandists from the religious extremists, from the single-issue warriors, from the non-ideological power-trippers, etc.
