this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2023
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Asklemmy
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Here's what Lemmy does for you. There are no corporate and political mods banning you or controlling the feed for their own self aggrandizement or PR. There is no faked voting algorithm. There is no gaslighting, which is central to the reddit business model.
Lemmy doesn't have the audience (yet). But in every way reddit is infuriating, Lemmy is not.
There are definitely political mods. Many instances are explicitly political in nature.
That's not my point. Reddit intentionally creates social media bubbles for audience accumulation, and in the process mods ban any and every account that speaks against a mod (or admin) driven narrative.
Hell, they'll autoban you just for commenting in opposing subs, even when you're just countering a nonsense statement there. They also coordinate voting off site (Discord/telegram), to fake comment and post scores.
It's gamed in every way imaginable to manipulate your biases and gaslight you.
I mean, I ban whole instances from the lemmy instance I run.
I think the things you're seeing are issues of size and scale rather than inherent differences between the platforms
I disagree. I think it's policy straight from the top leadership at Reddit. Mastodon scales, and it's not as abusive or controlling as Reddit.
Finally, on banning whole instances, this is common in the Fediverse. The question of bans is why. Intent and purpose matters.
Right, but what I'm saying is that as an instance admin, I can and do block other instances for the reasons you outline. If someone posts in a hate sub, they're getting banned from my instance. If an instance is explicitly right wing, it's getting defederated from my instance. If someone does "what about"ism or otherwise excuses transphobia, racism, sexism or the like, they're getting banned from my instance.
I'm explicitly biased towards communities and people that align with my beliefs, and will happily ban anyone that is actively opposed to them. I have zero interest in "free speech" as a guiding policy that I should be aiming for.
Which is to say, I am many of the things you say reddit is, but lemmy isn't, and yet here I am on lemmy.
The difference is federation vs centralisation. On reddit, if you don't like it, you're out of luck. On lemmy, if you don't like an instance, you can find another or even create your own. But both of those versions can and do have humans with bias pushing ban buttons
Again, intent matters. If you ban a site because the admins intentionally platform hatespeech, that's within federation policy. The same for users. You also own the hardware. You can do whatever you want with it.
But suppose you organized a ban across the entire federation of users who happened to be on a problematic instance but who themselves did not engage in abusive conduct. I mean, you made a list and every instance admin banned them.
That's what these automod autoban scripts do. They ban by association. Even when the association doesn't exist.
There is a difference between banning because of promoting violence or engaging in abusive and hateful conduct versus banning because someone espoused a generic political view. And that's happening on Reddit. For PR.
EDIT: I think your argument is build upon a foundation of false equivalency. That is, you argue your bans are the same as how bans are used on Reddit. And I'm countering, no I think not. There are genuine differences in the weeds of why. Or, similar outcomes (ban) based on different circumstances (reasons why) are not the same. Context matters.
The thing is, the wider Fediverse works the way you describe, with imported defederation lists etc.
Most people setting up new Mastodon instances start with a standard block list with all of the usual suspects on it.
This is the future of Lemmy too as it gets bigger and as integration with non Lemmy instance becomes more common.
I agree. And I think that's the difference. Fundamentally, Lemmy isn't that much different to Reddit, in so far as all of the issues you highlight there exist here too.
The only difference is context.