Ask Lemmy

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.

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. 😅

Freedom of speech. Yeah, sorta.

Freedom from consequences of your speech. Nope.

lemmy isnt really an organization. its a platform that is then utilized by hundreds of different operators/groups implementing their own rules against much of the same content. there are many of these platforms that all offer differing capabilities and features while sharing a lot of the same content. this network is what we refer to as the fediverse.

the reddit-like side is the threadiverse and is mimicked by platforms like lemmy.

then there is the twitter-like (microblog) side i call the twitterverse and is mimicked by platforms like mastodon.

then you have platforms that can access both sides of the fediverse like piefed and mbin.

https://fedidb.com/

as for censorship...

its the beauty of this network' if one of those servers goes apeshit people can literally just move their 'subreddit' to a different server and tell the og one to fuck right off. this has happened a few times in different ways. users created new subs on other servers and effectively ignored the original, with no one having to make new accounts. it proves the idea.. no one person or company can control the content of the fediverse.

It does, outside of truly bad stuff or straight-up spam and such, you can just about say whatever here where Reddit will ding you if you sneeze wrong, seemingly, especially nowadays after they tightened up censorship over there.

Also, unlike Reddit, if you don't like a given Lemmy instance, you can either move to another or even host your own, where with Reddit, it's either their way or the highway as it's a centralized, closed platform.

Your question doesn't make sense. "freedom of speech" is a political right to prevent government censorship. Internet forums have moderation and that's different from censorship because it's a private space.

If someone came to your house and started insulting you and your family would you tolerate it in the name of freedom or would you tell the jerk to shut up and get out?

In some ways yes, and in others no. On Reddit, shitheels like UniversalMonk and all of his sock puppets, along with Dragonfuck would have been banned a long time ago.