What’s the point of federation, when we will end up having large clumps of users in specific communites under instances, where the owners of the instance can censor information, and enforce their political ideological false authory over everyone. If somebody doesn’t agree they can be banned without any valid reason. Federation is censorship resistant only to large government entities. We fail to realise that the issue with censorship is the owners and admins.
And yes, we can meke new instances that support our beliefs and that doesnt censor our speech, but then again we dont have an evenly distributed userbase. Having duplicate communities is cojnter intuitive anyways because it will confuse users. Lemmy is a failed project in my eyes unless they find a way to resolve these issues somehow.
Bad example but if i start a torrent, then the people who seed will own just as much of the torrent as i do. I’ll be equal with the peers without any upper hand. It cant be taken down or censored. Thats the idea i had.
the torrent analogy is pretty good actually, ISPs can block certain connections so a good chunk of users miss out on the swarm, and the swarm misses out on them. where federation differs from choosing an ISP is it’s far easier to switch your provider to this service than it is an ISP.
and where a given instance draws the line on censorship isn’t the be all and end all of whether other instances federate with them. as i see it, though my understanding of this comes from mastodon, even if one server decides to properly block another, a third server might chose to limit instead, if at all. there are block lists but that requires a very obvious and widely shared red line on freedom of expression, where there are very few places on the open web where you’ll see less censorship than that.
in the end, wherever a given instance draws the line, is far more democratic than other social media sites. it’s easier to think that twitter, or reddit, or facebook, is more accountable, because there’s at least one guy everybody can point to to blame when something goes wrong, and sure, there’d be something in that, if the scrutiny they get actually changed anything.
Thanks! Makes much more sense like this.
glad to help. i’ve had all the same worries myself. it’s different, and far from perfect, but the average user is more empowered in where exactly that line is drawn.