Ask Lemmy

Best to donate to another project besides lemmy.

The main dev for lemmy is kind of a shitty person who is not shy about their shitty beleifs.

He supports authoritarians and dictatorships and bans anyone who doesn't excuses the human rights abuses of dictatorships.

There is three questions to consider.

One is the site itself. Reddit inc has their own policies that apply site-wide no matter what. Lemmy has no central organization like that, although each individual server operator has their own acceptable use policy for what they allow on their server. This means it is both more free and more confusing- if you want to post potentially objectionable content like porn, there are plenty of servers that allow it or you can always run your own, but you have to make sure you are on one.

Next is individual group moderation. Both Reddit and Lemmy have this, community level moderators that apply whatever standards particular community requires. There is much less of the 'power mod on a power trip' situation than on Reddit currently, at least in my experience. I think some of that is because the overall traffic level is less, so it will be interesting to see what happens as Lemmy grows.

Finally there is culture and self-moderation. You see this on mass market platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where someone will say like they were roped at a party and want to buy a pewpew to unalive themself or some other such bullshit. Unfortunately that brain rot is spreading into Reddit, even though it is not at all required. Fortunately Lemmy seems pretty free of that so far.

It has just as much freedom as any other platform. It all depends on who the admins and moderators are. We do have better tools of keeping those in check, with the modlog being publicly available tho.

Technically, yeah. Some instances are run by tin-pot dictators with delusions of godhood, but if you get banned from one of those just switch to another one.

The communities tend to be bubblier, though, since they're small. So if your opinions don't match you'll get shouted down harder.

It depends on which instance are you using.

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.

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. 😅

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.

short answer: yes

medium answer: depends on what instance you're on

Yes. Reddit is now beholden to corporate interest, and posts comments that go against those interest get deleted and users get banned. Once you're banned, there's no creating a new account because they IP block. Fuck reddit, long live lemmy.

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.

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.

In some ways yes, and in others no. On Reddit, shitheels like UniversalMonk and all of his sock puppets, along with Dragonfuck would have been banned a long time ago.