Being an old grandpa not that adept at tech, I don’t know how Lemmy works. I mean, I know it’s decentralized and it’s supposed to be better than reddit, but still, how vulnerable is this platform from censors looking to block anything in here?

Are we invincible like those thepiratebay.org instances which jump up the more you try to censor them or are we basically like reddit. In other words, can I reliably access lemmy in China?

  • A close cousin of Lemmy is Mastodon. If you consider Lemmy a federated version of Reddit, then Mastodon is a federated version of Twitter.

    The largest Mastodon server is probably Truth Social, on which former president Trump posts his messages after being banned from Twitter.

    Truth Social uses the same protocol as Mastodon of Lemmy: ActivityPub. The difference: the Truth Social administrators blocked the Truth Social server from sending out messages to or receiving messages from other servers. So it’s a private Mastodon.

    Bottom line: if you run your own Lemmy server you can block whatever server you want or none at all. And others can block your server if they want. If you create ab account at somebody else’s Lemmy server, the administrator can decide to block other Lemmy servers.

    If you use a Mastodon account, it’s very easy to migrate to another server including your followers. Lemmy accounts do not appear to offer that functionality (yet?), but I expect a migration tool will be created in the future. So if an administrator decides to block another Lemmy server, but you don’t like that, you might easily move to another server. As of yet, you can’t however and need to create an account on another Lemmy server.

  • I don’t think lemmy is made to circumvent censorships. There are other platforms for that. This is okay because sometimes this and being easy to use contradict each other.

    However. I think it’s doing a decent job. But admins of the individual instances will probably censor things that are against the law, because they are liable for that.

  •  iso   ( @iso@lemmy.com.tr ) 
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    1 year ago

    To block a specific content from an instance, they have to block all instances because your instance is going to get that content from other instance instead of you. You are not even going to connect to that instance.

    But if they want to completely block the federation, they can.