Hello, Im kind of new here and trying to get used to Lemmy and I was wondering about if this is true since I am considering donating on this site to support alternative projects but wanted to hear other users before doing so. That being said, what have been your experiences?
short answer: yes
medium answer: depends on what instance you’re on
It does, outside of truly bad stuff or straight-up spam and such, you can just about say whatever here where Reddit will ding you if you sneeze wrong, seemingly, especially nowadays after they tightened up censorship over there.
Also, unlike Reddit, if you don’t like a given Lemmy instance, you can either move to another or even host your own, where with Reddit, it’s either their way or the highway as it’s a centralized, closed platform.
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.
There are no ads, no corporate content
I wish that were true, but if you haven’t seen any, thank your moderators.
And if you have seen any, you can block them and they actually go away.
Instead of a placebo “stop seeing this ad” button.
Absolutely! It’s not that corpos don’t try. It’s just not endorsed or supported by the community and is usually removed swiftly.
Well hey, that’s why I report any I see to the moderators :D
(And unlike corporate platforms they’ll actually parse it lol)
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.
thank you so much
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.
I mean if mods ban people for not agreeing with them basically.
Entirely depends on the disagreement. There are instances and communities where bigotry is tolerated. I do not frequent them. I would very much like the mods of the communities I use to continue banning people that disagree with them about things like basic human rights and hate. People are free to share their opinions on basically anything most places on the fediverse. Just don’t be a dick, you should be fine. If the “freedom of speech” you’re looking for is the freedom to be racist, homophobic, transphobic, or generally hateful, you’ll probably be disappointed.
Depends on the substance of the disagreement imo
There are plenty of examples on the ye power trippin bastards community. It’s a classic tale as old as the days of IRC and ancient Greek forums. Moderation can easily be abused if unchecked.
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.
lemmy isnt really an organization. its a platform that is then utilized by hundreds of different operators/groups implementing their own rules against much of the same content. there are many of these platforms that all offer differing capabilities and features while sharing a lot of the same content. this network is what we refer to as the fediverse.
the reddit-like side is the threadiverse and is mimicked by platforms like lemmy.
then there is the twitter-like (microblog) side i call the twitterverse and is mimicked by platforms like mastodon.
then you have platforms that can access both sides of the fediverse like piefed and mbin.
as for censorship…
its the beauty of this network’ if one of those servers goes apeshit people can literally just move their ‘subreddit’ to a different server and tell the og one to fuck right off. this has happened a few times in different ways. users created new subs on other servers and effectively ignored the original, with no one having to make new accounts. it proves the idea… no one person or company can control the content of the fediverse.
Your question doesn’t make sense. “freedom of speech” is a political right to prevent government censorship. Internet forums have moderation and that’s different from censorship because it’s a private space.
If someone came to your house and started insulting you and your family would you tolerate it in the name of freedom or would you tell the jerk to shut up and get out?
I know what freedom of speech really means im a political science masters degree student at the moment. I didnt mean the constitution when i said “freedom of speech”. Im just asking if mods ban people basically for not agreeing with their opinions.
