Sure, but in the context of this discussion I’m responding to someone claiming that Lemmy has more censorship than Reddit. That perception is completely false and detrimental to the growth of Lemmy, which is why I’m trying to clarify the truth of the matter.
I mean… I’m not so sure about that logic. Technically you aren’t wrong, but I think your point is misleading. In order for censorship to be problematic, it needs to be enforced by an entity with a significant amount of authority or control.
A communist newsletter technically engages in “censorship” against conservative viewpoints, but that’s hardly problematic, is it? Parents preventing young children from being exposed to objectionable content is technically “censorship”.
If you voluntarily choose to use a specific server when you have many other options at your fingertips, I just don’t see how the colloquial usage of censorship applies to that situation. Seems like more of a semantic quibble than an actual flaw of Lemmy as a platform.
Bottom line is that anyone can spin up a Lemmy server for free and post anything they want, and others can freely join or federate with that server and access that information without any barriers. That’s why I would argue the platform does not have any inherent censorship.
Lemmy as a platform has no censorship.
Lemmy.world is one specific server among hundreds that has a little bit of censorship.
It just happens to be the biggest as this moment in time, but that could easily change if they were actually censoring things to any significant extent. It never would have become the biggest in the first place if it were as censorship prone as you seem to believe.
Encounter censorship on Lemmy > move to a different server
Encounter censorship on reddit > nothing you can do
Community fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. Your actual complaint isn’t about censorship, but about the small size of the Lemmy userbase. If the userbase was bigger, there would be more active server options, and the moderation of each individual server (such as lemmy.world) wouldn’t matter as much. Ironically, by ignorantly claiming that Lemmy has a problem with censorship, you’re actively working against attempts to grow the userbase.
Not to mention, if your biggest complaint of censorship is that lemmy.world bans discussion of vegan cat food, let me play the world’s smallest violin for you
Instead of having one giant jerk censoring things like on Reddit, there are instead dozens of little petty ones wanting to defederate from other instances.
This false equivalency pains me to my core. I don’t really have anything to say about the rest of your comment, but ffs can people stop with this nonsense take? You’re implying that the difference between centralized corporate authoritarianism and decentralized grassroots democracy is negligible.
Lemmy is free and collaborative, reddit is censored and exploitative. The fact that people consistently try to equate two opposite paradigms is just mind-boggling to me.
Hexbear had been around for like 3 years before lemmy.world was even created, that’s why they have such high activity numbers. Most of that activity is reactionary memes and rants about the media topic of the week, and hence largely meaningless and irrelevant content several years later.
My server is defederated from hexbear as well, because they tend to disrupt discussions with their aggressive, cultlike behavior. I wanted to like them, but they quickly wore out my optimistic goodwill with their puerile immaturity and unearned self-righteousness.