Ask Lemmy

It has just as much freedom as any other platform. It all depends on who the admins and moderators are. We do have better tools of keeping those in check, with the modlog being publicly available tho.

Best to donate to another project besides lemmy.

The main dev for lemmy is kind of a shitty person who is not shy about their shitty beleifs.

He supports authoritarians and dictatorships and bans anyone who doesn't excuses the human rights abuses of dictatorships.

Well lemmy hasn’t banned me for pointing out that a prisoner who is still alive hasn’t finished serving their life sentence

It depends what you mean. Individual instances have their own approach to moderation, which influences what you will see and have access to. Some are more hands off than others. But if your "free speech" is really just looking for a free pass to hate on folk, then you won't have much luck with lemmy. There are instances that allow that, but most other instances block them.

Hell yeah.

Now, will people disagree with you in very emotional ways, downvote without giving any explanation, etc etc.? Sure! But you won't get banned for opposing Western imperialism, for instance. I mean, I talk about God and give people shit for being vacuous, hedonistic and self-centered (because that's at the core of many sociocultural issues) and I haven't been banned, at most I get boo'd. 😅

short answer: yes

medium answer: depends on what instance you're on

No... thats not really a thing here anyway. But yeah. I may have been totally banned several times, hearsay. I might get banned again just for saying that. Its usually shortly after I reveal some of my awesome political opinions... /s There really is only a couple handfuls of folks posting content too. Watch for P icarrd maneuver, p ugjebus, c owbea, and some others. They post shit all hours of the day constantly, to dozens of different instances like it's their job... but they certainly aren't getting paid.

No, I dont care about getting banned anyway, im going to speak my mind. Unfortunately, Marxist and commies dont usually agree with me and is usually the point of contention.

There is nothing inherently built into Lemmy that protects freedom of speech over Reddit other that being able to host your own instance.

Moderation exists but it is built by the community at large, not corporate overlords. That may mean that harmful speech is removed more aggressively than on corporate sites. On most corporate media sites, bigotry or trolling has to be extremely overt before it is removed. On the other hand, the nature of Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) is that it's a fairly low cost of entry, so there are many different people running many different instances, each with their own governance.

Try it out for a week or two, and if you find it worthwhile enough that you check it daily, I think it's very nice donate to the person/people running your instance. It helps with the cost of running it.

There are no ads, no corporate content, no manipulative algorithm.

We are not perfect, but we're a lot better than most of what's out there. We're a little bit weird, and most of our jokes are about Star Trek or canned produce (for reasons no one understands), but it's a pretty cool place.

No, it's only on the other direction of extremism.

You don’t have freedom of speech on any site. Freedom of speech is freedom from the government restricting your speech, not private organizations.

That said, yes. I got banned from Reddit for merely suggesting that people who harm children should face stiffer penalties. I’ve said that many times here and even pissed off some pedophiles here, but never got banned or suspended for it. I think Lemmy takes a bit more of a hands off approach.

Consider: what I say about Reddit isn’t going to affect Reddit at all. But someone like me says bad things about Lemmy, it might have more of an effect. Smaller sites pick their battles more carefully. Bigger sites don’t care.

But even more than that, Lemmy is federated. That means your instance — lemmy.org — can ban you, and you can just join another, like db0 (what I’m on) or hexbear. We’re on different instances but we’re still able to interact.