this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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Trust me, the Lemmy devs do not support freedom of discussion.
You are confusing freedom of discussion to using an specific instance with specific rules. Lemmy is clear proof of what you say is not true, and you are incorrect in your deductions of what/why and who.
Yeah, they donated their spare time to give you a decentralized platform where you could criticize them because they want to stifle "freedom of discussion"... That the lemmy.ml instance is heavily moderated on stuff like imperialist propaganda is a non-issue for freedom of expression due to the nature of federation. The devs do not even want their instance (lemmy.ml) to be the biggest, but actively promote joining other instances.
You confuse your right to express your opinions with the privilege of someone else providing you a platform for you to express them on. The devs provide the former without obligating themselves to be the ones to give you the latter.
You'd have a better point if the rules against "imperialist propaganda" were more evenly enforced to include all forms of imperialism.
But at the end of the day, when given an opportunity to reflect their own values in the way they run their instance, they have chosen a very restrictive framework to that end. I don't know how you can come to any other conclusion. It is clear that their development effort is not done to protect any speech besides what they have deemed acceptable, and as far as I am concerned, they have repeatedly shown that they will happily keep their fingers on the scale to whatever extent possible. This is why they will ban people for commenting on other instances, and then not federate the mod logs, etc. These things should absolutely be seen as evidence that they will exert control beyond their own instance if they can.
A lot to unpack here...
Being mainly concerned with global economic imperialism does not imply acceptance for more traditional imperialism.
Instances are independent and federated, hence do not need to reflect the values of the project as a whole in any way. These properties of decentralization are the values of Lemmy.
I've seen the rest of your claims before and you have been asked to present any facts contributing to them elsewhere. Seeing that you still have not responded to them, I will refrain from discussing it in depth for the time being.
I get the impression that your bar for "evidence" are lowered due to some personal experience. To actually engage on a point you made, modlogs have been a mess for a while and there are good reasons not to federate all details of content moderated (such as child porn). It seems weird to me that you contribute this to an agenda of the devs trying to control other instances when they were the ones that gave the other instances their independence in the first place. These actions also do not further any such agenda in a meaningful way. The much simpler and probable explanation is that engineering stuff like this is hard.
It's extremely easy to see that the modlog on .ml specifically doesn't match the modlog on other instances, and for issues which have nothing to do with csam. This whole dismissal of it "being a mess" is a pretty convenient excuse for the people who are literally implementing these features. We also know that they never seem to show any admin actions, though this could be attributed to them using alts to moderate. Still kind of shady, but I guess marginally less so.
If .ml admins would care the explain why their build sure seems to behave differently in a few key areas, then it would go a long way towards assuaging these fears. Or perhaps, if they took concerns about their heavy handed moderation more seriously, they would indeed get the benefit of the doubt in regards to their broader intentions.