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How good is Lemmy dealing with censorship and why does the sign-up process on lemmy.ml involve having to copy a sentence from "The Principles of Communism"? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Social_Discussion@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Hey everyone, I'm new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn't publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says "Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.").

The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the "lemmy.ml" server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers".

So I thought I try that one when it's from Lemmy's own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called "The Principles of Communism" which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I've never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it's part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?

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[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Why do people keep repeating this? Every time they do someone corrects them but they seem to just assume that's what .ml is without so much as a google search about it.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

To be fair, it is a large coincidence. I get that it's wrong, but it's widespread because the dots are close enough the brain closes the gap by itself.

[–] SolOrion@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's not exactly wrong, though. It's clearly intentionally chosen because people are gonna connect these dots.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've been told directly by the admins that it was picked because it was free. I don't doubt that the reference wasn't thought of, but the driving factor was that the domain is free.

[–] SolOrion@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Fair enough, then.

[–] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

So .ml isn’t an intentional reference to communism?

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The domain was initially managed by Sotelma, a Malian telecommunications company. After Sotelma was privatised in 2009, the .ml zone was redelegated by IANA to the Agence des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (AGETIC), a Malian government agency, and the process completed in 2013.[1] The agency then announced that it would give away .ml domains for free in partnership with Freenom with a view to improve the usage and the knowledge of the IT industry in Mali. It was the first African nation to start giving away domains for free.[2][3][4] The ten-year contract with Freenom expired on 17 July 2023. Since then the registry is operated by AGETIC itself and the free domain offer was discontinued. All paid Freenom .ml domains were migrated to the new system.

[–] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 days ago

I understand that, but I’m asking whether a .ml domain was chosen as a quirky little reference to communism? Like, I can start selling contacts on contacts.contact. I’m curious about the intent

[–] Incandemon@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I've got no skin in this game, but i thought you could register a site on a TLD for a country other than the one you live in? That you can hunt around for one that matches whatever backronym your looking for now. From what other posters have said it sounds like the craters of lemmy .ml may have chosen the Mali domain because it was also a communist call.

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 days ago

It was free making .ml domains good for web development.

I'm sure @dessalines and @nutomic has a chuckle about it. Definitely a fitting TLD to use, especially for lemmygrad.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 2 days ago

So, there are a few different categories of TLDs. com, net, and org are among the original generic TLDs, which had the ideas of being for specific types of site, but in practice have always been available for pretty much any purpose.

Then there are country-code TLDs, your au, ca, and tv domains. In these, the registrar of that particular country sets the rules. au domains require some specific connection to Australia, while Tuvalu has seen it as a good source of income for the country to sell .tv domains to sites that want to have a domain that recognises their primary purpose as relating to video.

In 2012, ICANN opened up the ability to buy new TLDs with almost no restrictions beyond the minimum 3 character length. Though technically com, net, org, etc. are considered generic TLDs, when you see people say gTLD they almost always mean those created under this new scheme. Examples include zone (which my instance runs on), new (owned by Google and restricted to people who use it to perform "new" actions, like Google's own docs.new which creates a new Google Doc), and tokyo (intended for use by things related to Tokyo, but not restricted to such. Other city gTLDs also exist, like melbourne which restricts to businesses and citizens of Victoria). gTLDs are very expensive to create, but whoever owns the gTLD can choose what rules it applies to domains registered under it.

So if you want a domain name that calls to a particular thing, you can find a gTLD that matches that thing and is open for registration for your purpose, or you can spend big to register a gTLD for yourself, or find a ccTLD that's open to those outside the actual country and which fits your purpose.

Mali's a weird one because the reports were that .ml domains not related to Mali were being restricted last year, and fmhy.ml lost their domain over that. So it's weird that lemmy.ml did not.