From: https://forum.hackliberty.org/t/the-future-of-hack-liberty-and-the-death-of-federation/224
Problems with Lemmy
Data Replication, Moderation, and Abuse
All the data replication and moderation issues from Matrix also apply to Lemmy. This one of the underlying flaws of all federated services. Lemmy admins can be held liable for hosting illegal content that is being replicated over the federation. It also makes Lemmy servers easy targets to be taken down by malicious adversaries.
deFederation
Despite being “de-centralized”, there is censorship in the form of “de-federation”, which effectively removes “wrong-think” servers from the global audience on Lemmy. Even though there is claimed decentralization, a large majority of users congregate on the same few servers.
Censorship is hard, let the community do it!
Any posts that don’t adhere to the Lemmy hive mind are immediately down voted, which is effectively a shadow ban that anyone can do by clicking the down vote button. Post that have any kind of negative score (two down votes) will be removed from the default post feed filters. (Active, Hot). This “shadowban” works to make it so 90% of the Lemmy population doesn’t see your post unless they are filtered specifically for “new” posts.
Reddit and Lemmy are one big Psyop
The entire framework of both Reddit and Lemmy do nothing but help to promote group think and propaganda. Any posts that don’t adhere to group think will be shunned and hidden. Post “scores” are a manipulation tactic used to influence (you) into being biased before you’ve even looked at the post. Manipulating upvotes and downvotes is trivially easy for really anyone, and it’s abused by governments and corporations to create manufactured consensus and trick you into believing that the “herd” thinks a certain way. Of course, having a lot of upvotes appeals to the most pathetic of egos, and the psyop continues with more incentivized group-think posts in a never ending cycle of garbage user generated content.
That’s why I’ve basically never trusted anything except for the chronological new algorithm. Or every once in a while, after I have finished reading everything from new, I will go to all posts and read from top in past six hours. But that’s only after I’m done with my main feed.
Same, this is sad news. I’ll probably end up hosting an instance myself on 1984.is but I wasn’t wanting to deal with the hassle.
I access everything over VPN and access Lemmy primarily through Mlem — I’d forgotten that the “Hot” sorting even existed.
Oh well, what else is new? Better to self-host your own services.
To be fair, I definitely do see where they are coming from and can understand why they are going with SimpleX for chatting instead of matrix. I am slowly using matrix less and less for the exact reasons put out in the forum post and am considering killing my matrix account entirely in favor of SimpleX.
It’s been a ride, and thanks for hosting for as long as you had.
I have only been haunting lemmy as a holdover until proper forums get their federation support straightened out. Lemmy inherits the same flaws that other link aggregators suffer from, much like how Mastodon suffers from the inherited design flaws of microblogs.
I tried doing my self ascribed duty to introduce ideas into lemmy that fall outside of the group consensus. But it is as you say, deviating from the accepted lines of thought just gets you disappeared.
