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Which do you prefer, democracy or dictatorship?
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Asklemmy
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Lemmy is inherently democratic. If you don't like a muni, or an instance, you go to another one. Without centralization dictatorship is impossible.
That said, it's not democracy, either: It's a federation of interdependent polities, each with their own laws and administrators. Which is good, because it allows for rapid response to spam, inappropriate content, and verbal violence.
And if the admins or moderators overreach, well, back to the first paragraph: we've got open borders, go homestead your own community on another instance. You literally cannot be silenced here.
That's more like voluntarism than democracy.
Closer to anarchy, seemingly.
Inappropriate to compare with governmental organizations. Differing goals.
Democracy means that power is held by the people. It doesn't mean that if you don't like it you can leave.
It's called "voting with your feet". Being free to leave is power. Means a hell of a lot more than up- and down-doots.
In a democracy the vote determines policy.
But this is obvious. Right?
You saw the whole paragraph where I talked about how lemmy is not a democracy, right? And literally cited this as one if the reasons why?
Like I get that you're probably responding to multiple subthreads right now, but it only takes a few seconds to scroll up.
And you also stated that it is inherently democratic.
Would it kill you to stop being so coy and evasive?
It's a thousand dictatorships.
In a democracy, the community determines policy. Votes are orthogonal. If the community leaves when they disagree, by definition everyone that is remains agrees with the policy, making it a democratic policy. The friction to changing instance is very minimal, so it's a good indicator of people's opinions.
Yeah but they aren't actually determining policy. Obviously.
Why are you bullshitting?
The first sentence was a response to you asserting voting is essential to democracy, which is false. The rest of the comment was a response to you not accepting Nemo@slrpnk.net's argument.
If you can't find an instance you agree with, and you have a mass of people who agree with you but are collectively too lazy to create a new instance, you would communicate your stance with words. Lemmy has a system for leaving text statements. You seem to be familiar. But there's no mechanism to force the instance operator to obey you.
But that wasn't my question, was it?
My question was whether you prefer a democracy or a dictatorship.
The answer is clearly dictatorship.