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?

  • OneMeaningManyNames@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    C’mon dude, they just asked you to copy a quote from the Capital, not to recite a whole brochure with the latest analysis on imperialism. And/or swear by it,

    It is the most basic common ground for every left wing person and a monumental text in modern Western literacy.

    Most people I would care to discuss with should have a basic understanding of what is written in there, and I believe it is the same for people running their own instance.

    If you take such a vehement stance against “quoting” Das Kapital, then you probably you lie so much off center that I would personally could have no productive discussion with you.

    I mean, even the notion that this is some kind of pledge of allegiance is suspicious enough in its own sake, like letting us on you believe leftists are somehow indoctrinated[^1]. I you weren’t a little removed about Das Kapital you could even subvert the text by quoting something out of context so that it says something unintended by the authors.

    But indeed, if you are turned off by this playful screening question, then it only shows that such screening serves its purpose most effectively.

    [1]: To be frank lemmy.ml does not even defederate neoliberal instances, so perhaps there is a paradigm shift for you right there.