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What exactly is the point of lemmy? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So I get you are making a distributed reddit alternative. I read that most of you are left politically. You also view reddit as right politically. Which is interesting because I view reddit as left politically in fact extreme left but not as extreme as you are here. Given that reddit has purged many right people and those people have now attempted to also make reddit alternatives like ruqqus, saidit, .win, I get from their perspective they want more freedom which is to basically not have their speech deleted. Then on the left there seems an obsession to silence anyone or thing they don't like, which I feel I am running that risk just typing this. So if lemmy feels reddit is not left enough as in the words of your comrade nutomic "reddit is far right", to which i completely disagree but lets play with it, if reddit is not left enough I take it you mean it is not deleting and censoring enough? To which if lemmy is being created as a solution to that then I think the point of lemmy is to allow and enable even more censorship? I have to say if this is the point of lemmy that is both scary and stupid, scary that people think more censorship is in fact needed and stupid in that people would think more censorship is in fact needed, no well I just wanted to type that but stupid in that they need to make a new platform to enable more censorship, like wow.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

It's worth distinguishing between:

Lemmy, the software project, which is a federated alternative to Reddit written in Rust
Lemmy, this specific instance of the Lemmy software, which for all intents and purposes is the flagship instance
Lemmy, the federation of all instances of the Lemmy software (which, to clarify, does not exist yet - it is on the roadmap)

Yes, the developers of 1) (who also run 2)) are leftists, and so the software is written through that lens. However, the moderation policies of this instance are completely separate from any other instance using this software, and you could start up an instance with a different moderation policy.

Moderation under a federated model (federation -> instance -> user) is completely different than under a centralized model (website -> user), because of that extra layer. Instances can ban specific users and block other instances from federating. It is to be expected, then, that instances will be much smaller and can have varying moderation policies, because any user that disagrees with those policies can find or start their own instance. Because of this, I don't think we will know what the common ground of Lemmy moderation policy is until the Lemmy federation is established. You could look to Mastodon (federated Twitter alternative) for an already established example.

All in all, I would say that "the point" of Lemmy (as a project) is to establish a federated alternative to reddit. This particular instance is only part of that.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 years ago

Can't login to my original account so I made another. Thank you for your reply it's quite clean. I would like to learn more how federation will work and I guess you aren't fully decided though. I will do some searching here on it. I am interested in how users will exist from instance to instance, if they could somehow be universal that would be great but I guess that may either cause security issues or a point of centralization..

The issues I have with the left are censorship which they strangely try to deny while being blatantly obvious about it. I am somewhat fine with you censoring what ever instance you run I guess if it is small, but my main concern is that you won't code with an eye against censorship and so the platform may not be all it could possibly be.