this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2022
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Asklemmy
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The documentation has some ways to contribute.
The goal of Lemmy is essentially to create/develop a free software, federated forum/link aggregator. In my opinion, its best to keep the project focused on technical work as much as possible, and not make it political in any way. Of course thats not easy because all of us have certain political views. But dont mistake the rules of lemmy.ml as anything official, its just one instance of many. The purpose of Lemmy is that everyone can create instances based on their own ideals and preferences.
Imagine someone creates a group pro-LGBT people and someone creates a group which officially calls LGBT people sinners and their lifestyle a sin. Swap 'LGBT' with any protected group you can think of. Would the anti-LGBT group stay afloat or do developers of lemmy have the power to take it down?
I am in full support of people with different sexual identities but I do believe that no social media should censor any views unless they promote active violence(hate is still ok).
The problem is even reddit allowed the subreddit r/antiislam in it's early days but when the more power they gain the more comfortable they are in suppressing views which they personally think is unacceptable. I don't want lemmy to be a second reddit.
From what I've seen the developers don't condone using the software for hateful purposes. That's why Lemmy used to have a slur filter built in to the software. That said there's nothing they can do to prevent anyone from running an instance the way they see fit, and that's a good thing, because it makes it decentralized. The code is open source under the GPL license, which means anyone could take the code and copy it to make their own version as long as that version is open source.
There are free speech Lemmy instances that exist. Most other instances block them though because most people on here don't want to see casual racism in their feed. I think most people are fine with a little moderation and don't want to give a platform to hateful communities.
It is impossible for this to happen because Lemmy is open source and federated, and Reddit isn't. Anyone can fork the source code and start a new instance if they are unhappy with the moderation of existing instances.
The developers of Lemmy the software have no power to take anything down, provided you set up your own server and host the Lemmy software yourself. Any hosted server (lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml... etc, ) can decide on their own rules they wish their users to follow though.