Remember when the whole point of leaving Reddit was escaping heavy-handed moderation and echo chambers? Yeah, about that.
I've been banned more times in the fediverse in a few months than I ever was in years on Reddit. At least on Reddit, the rules exist and you can see them—even if enforcement is spotty, you know what you're supposedly violating. Here, it's whatever mood the local mod is in that day.
Got banned today from lemmy.ca for "AI slop." There's no such rule anywhere on the instance. The real reason? My post didn't fit their narrow ideological box. No debate, no warning, no discussion—just the banhammer.
The fediverse promised freedom from corporate censorship. What we got instead is a bunch of small fiefdoms run by virtue-signaling mods who silence anyone who steps one toe outside their approved narrative. It's more fragmented, more arbitrary, and honestly more authoritarian than the platform we all supposedly fled.
Decentralization without a real commitment to free expression is just decentralization of censorship.
edit: I've written an article with my opinions on the topic.
The Opium of the Labels: How Woke Moralism Serves Capital
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