Hello, Im kind of new here and trying to get used to Lemmy and I was wondering about if this is true since I am considering donating on this site to support alternative projects but wanted to hear other users before doing so. That being said, what have been your experiences?
It depends what you mean. Individual instances have their own approach to moderation, which influences what you will see and have access to. Some are more hands off than others. But if your “free speech” is really just looking for a free pass to hate on folk, then you won’t have much luck with lemmy. There are instances that allow that, but most other instances block them.
I mean if mods ban people for not agreeing with them basically.
Entirely depends on the disagreement. There are instances and communities where bigotry is tolerated. I do not frequent them. I would very much like the mods of the communities I use to continue banning people that disagree with them about things like basic human rights and hate. People are free to share their opinions on basically anything most places on the fediverse. Just don’t be a dick, you should be fine. If the “freedom of speech” you’re looking for is the freedom to be racist, homophobic, transphobic, or generally hateful, you’ll probably be disappointed.
Depends on the substance of the disagreement imo
Again, it depends on what you mean. You’re not really saying what these things are that you expect to disagree on, and that’s the important bit.
Stay free of .ml, they’re the worst of the bunch when it comes to this.
There are plenty of examples on the ye power trippin bastards community. It’s a classic tale as old as the days of IRC and ancient Greek forums. Moderation can easily be abused if unchecked.
Yeah, however they protect shitfucks like UniversalMonk and all of his sock puppets. That community is run by wannabe anarchists that give it out but ban and block when they can’t take it.
Good thing about activitypub is the power of mods and admins is always checked by the ability of others to enter the scene and create competitor communities and servers.
“Freedom of speech” is such a fraught concept. Define your terms.
This place has moderation…but it’s not the same as Reddit with their broad autoban system that the sub moderators tend to exploit. It depends on what you say.
I’m pretty new…but it’s apples and oranges. You’re a lot less likely to be baited into disingenuous arguments designed to make you angry to maximize engagement, here. People tend to post and comment in earnest.
No… thats not really a thing here anyway. But yeah. I may have been totally banned several times, hearsay. I might get banned again just for saying that. Its usually shortly after I reveal some of my awesome political opinions… /s There really is only a couple handfuls of folks posting content too. Watch for P icarrd maneuver, p ugjebus, c owbea, and some others. They post shit all hours of the day constantly, to dozens of different instances like it’s their job… but they certainly aren’t getting paid.
No, I dont care about getting banned anyway, im going to speak my mind. Unfortunately, Marxist and commies dont usually agree with me and is usually the point of contention.
You think everyone here is a marxist or communist, do you?
Everyone? Of course not Everyone
I wouldn’t even say most. The actual communists (ML or anarcho) are concentrated on lemmy.ml, hexbear and lemmygrad (the latter two being heavily defederated). Dbzer0 has many too. But I would say most users are social democrat or democratic socialist.
the most vocal people definately are. that or just believe in extreme leftist rhetoric.
very rare to see conservative/right wing opinions on here. and moderate/mainstream perspectives get labeled as fascist/right wing by the leftists. on lemmy i’m apparently a nazi-sympathizer for owning a car, for example, beacuse i’d take the bus or something if i wasn’t a nazi…
That doesn’t inherently make them communist or marxist.
Your question doesn’t make sense. “freedom of speech” is a political right to prevent government censorship. Internet forums have moderation and that’s different from censorship because it’s a private space.
If someone came to your house and started insulting you and your family would you tolerate it in the name of freedom or would you tell the jerk to shut up and get out?
I know what freedom of speech really means im a political science masters degree student at the moment. I didnt mean the constitution when i said “freedom of speech”. Im just asking if mods ban people basically for not agreeing with their opinions.
The problem is that Nazis love to appeal to some hypothetical right to freedom of speech, because they want to shift the Overton window. That is why people are being particular with the wording here and why your post is getting downvotes.
It also makes it hard to answer, because, well, if you are a Nazi, expect to be banned from various communities and instances significantly faster than on Reddit. Supporting the harm of others is not an opinion worth tolerating.
The moderators on my instance have banned people for repeatedly asking what exactly is allowed to be said, and I’ve come to support that decision, because yeah, Overton window and all that.
What makes Lemmy different from Reddit is that if some moderator or admin is limiting your freedom of speech, you can run your own instance with your own rules and communities and still be on Lemmy. Reddit can ban you from Reddit, but Lemmy is like a collection of “reddits” that integrate and there is no central authority. To answer your question, as a user you have more freedom to find an instance with rules that align with your values and wishes, and you always have the option to create your own instance, and no one can stop you. If you say things that other people don’t want to hear, they might block you, but that doesn’t limit your freedom of speech.
lol look at the modlog
at least lemmy makes that public
thank you so much
I would add to this that there is significant controversy around the ideological alignment of the lemmy developers, and most people would find the political leanings of the instances they’re associated with to be… unpalatable.
I’ll leave you to undertake that journey of discovery for yourself, suffice to say that freedom of speech is particularly limited on those instances.
Other software operates in the fediverse and is interoperable with lemmy. For example, myself and the commenter you replied to are registered with piefed servers, while this post is on a lemmy server.
Some instances are really not about freedom but when I had problems I just moved and here is fine! I like it more
yeah .world so far seems to have the most chill userbase.
lemmy isnt really an organization. its a platform that is then utilized by hundreds of different operators/groups implementing their own rules against much of the same content. there are many of these platforms that all offer differing capabilities and features while sharing a lot of the same content. this network is what we refer to as the fediverse.
the reddit-like side is the threadiverse and is mimicked by platforms like lemmy.
then there is the twitter-like (microblog) side i call the twitterverse and is mimicked by platforms like mastodon.
then you have platforms that can access both sides of the fediverse like piefed and mbin.
as for censorship…
its the beauty of this network’ if one of those servers goes apeshit people can literally just move their ‘subreddit’ to a different server and tell the og one to fuck right off. this has happened a few times in different ways. users created new subs on other servers and effectively ignored the original, with no one having to make new accounts. it proves the idea… no one person or company can control the content of the fediverse.
Freedom of speech. Yeah, sorta.
Freedom from consequences of your speech. Nope.
Freedom of speech. Yeah, sorta.
Freedom from consequences of your speech. Nope.
They are exactly the same thing.
A lot of people seem to be looking for safe places where they can spew whatever hate they have in their heart and not risk being criticised for it or banned for acting like a brownhole. Better make it clear for people probing the Fediverse.
The consequences are getting downvoted and ending up in ridiculous arguments sometimes, it barely counts, lol. Bans are very rare from what I’ve seen, but then again they’re rarely necessary.
You don’t have freedom of speech on any site. Freedom of speech is freedom from the government restricting your speech, not private organizations.
That said, yes. I got banned from Reddit for merely suggesting that people who harm children should face stiffer penalties. I’ve said that many times here and even pissed off some pedophiles here, but never got banned or suspended for it. I think Lemmy takes a bit more of a hands off approach.
Consider: what I say about Reddit isn’t going to affect Reddit at all. But someone like me says bad things about Lemmy, it might have more of an effect. Smaller sites pick their battles more carefully. Bigger sites don’t care.
But even more than that, Lemmy is federated. That means your instance — lemmy.org — can ban you, and you can just join another, like db0 (what I’m on) or hexbear. We’re on different instances but we’re still able to interact.
Ive made many comments that go against the general view of the user base. It gets downvoted but never deleted or banned. So I would say its pro free speech.
Not in my experience. I’ve gotten into an argument while specifically pleading against sharing screen-wide, zoomed-in images of common phobias like spiders without a spoiler/NSFW out of basic consideration.
Not only did people go out of their way to misunderstand what I was saying, but I got too many wholly nasty replies, and then got banned for reporting someone else for actually breaking the sub and site-wide rules, and was accused of being a “well-known troll” in the modlog. The fuck?
Needless to say, I got the mod to unban me when I called them out in another thread, and they eventually apologized.
But the knee-jerk reaction, close-mindedness, and immediate hate that I got felt a lot like the prejudice I’ve seen with homophobia. It’s so exhausting to see these prejudices and attitudes so readily prop up in unexpected places, especially in a forum where you’d think people know better.
No, it’s only on the other direction of extremism.
I’d actually consider Lemmy’s freedom of speech to be very similar to the US. Nobody on the network can limit your speech in your own instance but nobody has to platform your terrible speech and everyone is free to ignore your speech and exclude you to just participating on your own instance.
I’d say yes, reddit is overmoderated
Hell yeah.
Now, will people disagree with you in very emotional ways, downvote without giving any explanation, etc etc.? Sure! But you won’t get banned for opposing Western imperialism, for instance. I mean, I talk about God and give people shit for being vacuous, hedonistic and self-centered (because that’s at the core of many sociocultural issues) and I haven’t been banned, at most I get boo’d. 😅
opposing Western imperialism
I get the sentiment, but this usually boils down to blaming everyone on the Western hemisphere for what the US is doing.
I really wish these attitudes would take into account the other dozen countries like my own that largely keep to themselves.
So yeah, boo!
It’s a free universe!
dozen countries like my own
I’m gonna guess… Portugal! I can’t think of anything they’ve done -recently- that’s overtly imperialistic? Ireland?
You’d best not be British, German, French, Italian, Romanian, Czech, Hungarian, Austrian, Polish or Israeli, though.Lol I wasn’t expecting people to guess. But it’s just little old Mexico.
Oh shit! Mexico is indeed pretty blameless, except for the apparent heinous crime of existing next to the USA.
Tell me though, is it true that everything is in sepia there? I only have US-made movies and TV to go off, so of course I’m assuming that’s 100% accurate. Is it still sepia at night? If you fly into Mexico does it flick to sepia instantly or is it more like a slow transition that you hardly notice? Who pays for all the yellow pigment?Yes! Everything’s sepia. If your filter is malfunctioning, you’re required to wear your government-sponsored filter glasses instead.
Sent to you from
Androidunder a cactus, cozied up in a zarape.I knew it!
Thanks amigo/a
There is nothing inherently built into Lemmy that protects freedom of speech over Reddit other that being able to host your own instance.
I agree, but I do think that’s the most important thing.
I don’t think it is. Unless you are the host of a major instance, most of your interactions are going to be on other instances; these instances can do whatever mod actions they want against you.
If there are people interact on your instance, then you have the ability to restrict their speech.
Yes. And why is this wrong? You can also kick someone out of your house if they say crap you don’t want to hear. This is not the government, there can still be consequences to what you say.
You are free to still use Lemmy though, which is infinitely better than a site-wide reddit ban. You are free to say what you want and individual instances can decide whether they want to platform you. I don’t see any issues with this.
And if you really get banned from so many instances that using Lemmy becomes impossible, then might I suggest a fucking mirror so you can see the irredeemable asshole looking back?
I’m defining how a system functions; I’m not judging it.
Moderation exists but it is built by the community at large, not corporate overlords. That may mean that harmful speech is removed more aggressively than on corporate sites. On most corporate media sites, bigotry or trolling has to be extremely overt before it is removed. On the other hand, the nature of Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) is that it’s a fairly low cost of entry, so there are many different people running many different instances, each with their own governance.
Try it out for a week or two, and if you find it worthwhile enough that you check it daily, I think it’s very nice donate to the person/people running your instance. It helps with the cost of running it.
There are no ads, no corporate content, no manipulative algorithm.
We are not perfect, but we’re a lot better than most of what’s out there. We’re a little bit weird, and most of our jokes are about Star Trek or canned produce (for reasons no one understands), but it’s a pretty cool place.
or canned produce (for reasons no one understands)
I think the beans speak for themselves, as does the corn. Does it need any more explaining?
There are no ads, no corporate content
I wish that were true, but if you haven’t seen any, thank your moderators.
Well hey, that’s why I report any I see to the moderators :D
(And unlike corporate platforms they’ll actually parse it lol)
Absolutely! It’s not that corpos don’t try. It’s just not endorsed or supported by the community and is usually removed swiftly.
And if you have seen any, you can block them and they actually go away.
Instead of a placebo “stop seeing this ad” button.
