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How good is Lemmy dealing with censorship and why does the sign-up process on lemmy.ml involve having to copy a sentence from "The Principles of Communism"? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey everyone, I'm new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn't publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says "Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.").

The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the "lemmy.ml" server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers".

So I thought I try that one when it's from Lemmy's own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called "The Principles of Communism" which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I've never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it's part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?

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[–] emergencyfood 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I wonder if it will be somewhat better here.

If you host your own instance, you have complete control over what gets posted. If not, you have to follow your instance's rules.

one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called "The Principles of Communism" which I thought was very odd for a site to do.

That's just basic bot detection, like a captcha. Karl Marx's works are out of copyright, and Lemmy's lead developer is a communist, hence the choice.

it's part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

In general, instances don't expect you to agree with their mods on politics or religion, but the content hosted on that instance would be somewhat biased towards the mods' tastes. So you go from lemmygrad (far-left) to lemmy.ml (centre-left) to lemm.ee (centrist) to shitjustworks (centre-right) to lemmy.world (right-wing). Personally I'd avoid the first and last, but it's up to each person to decide what's right for them.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Is lemmy.world particularly right-wing? It seemed mostly shitty liberal from what I'd noticed, thought admittedly I don't actually pay much attention to people's instances

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They referred to ML as "centre-left", so their perception is obviously very skewed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

...fair enough, missed that

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Liberals are pro-capitalist, which inherently makes them right wing. American politics would have you believe otherwise, but American politics are severely skewed to make the populace accept the dominance and power of capital as an unassailable truth.

.world also makes a habit of denying ongoing genocides and shutting down any criticism of the parties involved in said genocides. Many of their users go out of their way to shit on left-wing instances and deride anyone left of them as a tankie.

Not to mention the sheer volume of woman bashing I've witnessed in gender-related threads.

So, all that considered, I think it's perfectly fair to consider them right wing.

[–] emergencyfood 1 points 1 month ago

The admins seem to not crack down on misogyny, transphobia and so on. If they're doing it on principle - refusing to censor and letting the bigots make fools of themselves in public - then I guess I can respect that. But on the other hand, sometimes silence can be seen as approval.