I think it's a common misconception that Lemmy is about privacy or free speech. It's more social media and there are other platforms to cater for anonymous conversations or spreading unpopular or illegal content. This platform isn't designed with that in mind...
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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If Lemmy isn't made with (improved) privacy or free speech in mind, what's it made for? What incentive do people have to switch to it?
When a site tries to become profitable it often becomes worse. I am on lemmy to have somewhere to go when that other site is no longer usable.
I think it's mainly about freedom. And having a platform that we (the users) control.
It's still social media. So we're limited in what we can do. And federation, transparency etc also mean we're spreading information across various servers and making them available. That might clash with privacy at times. But I mean posting content to the public and at the same time wanting it to be hidden is contradictory anyways?!
And free spech is difficult. We had some people try to invent platforms that cater for this. They usually get filled with trolls and nazis and die quickly. So I'd say "free speech" is undesirable anyways.
Federated systems handle free speech very well; you can run your own server and post anything you want there without interference from other server admins. You have 100% freedom of speech with Lemmy.
You do not, however have 100% freedom of reach. If your server is a frequent source of content or behavior other admins find unacceptable, most of them will block it.
If this platform isn't about freedom of (more) speech, what freedom is it about?
I can't think of a single reason anybody's ever given to use Lemmy besides referencing either privacy from something, or increased freedom over other platforms.
I think Zak has a better take on that than me. I mean ultimately we have all freedom one level further down. We can use this software for pretty much anything. And even modify it. Whatever we like. We can choose to implement total free speech. Or we can decide to moderate. We can talk about privacy, or all kinds of things.
And it's not some company who makes the rules and says we can't share illegal content (for example) or hate on each other...
That's our freedom to decide. But we implicitly agree on something. I for example don't like hate, misinformation, fascists etc. I block them. And I remove that content. So I technically I take away other people's freedom to say whatever they want in my communities and on my instance. And a lot of other admins and moderators do, too. And since this network is made up of individuals... That leads to a certain agreement... Otherwise you'd force me to hang out with people I absolutely don't like, and that cuts into my freedom.
So you can say anything you want. But I can exclude you from parts of the network that I control. But you can do the same.
And since it's federated: we can have one instance doing one thing and another one doing something else. I've not seen any true free speech instance yet. But you could start one. And that's freedom.
And related to privacy: Here, your data isn't used for advertising, sold to third-party companies etc.
There's an inherent tradeoff between pseudonymous reputation and privacy, though usually not a very severe one if you minimize what private information you share.
Reputation is important for healthy online communities. If I post something that seems suspicious based on its content, people can look at my account's history to see if it looks like a real person with varied interests and opinions. I think mine does; someone who looks at it will probably conclude that I am a single person posting in good faith of my own accord rather than a bot, an account run by an organization, or an influencer for hire.
If you don't want to have that kind of history, that's fine, but it does diminish your credibility if you're posting on topics where influence operations are known to be taking place, or where there's an obvious incentive for someone to do so.
Have you heard of the word "their"?