Haven't gotten banned yet but it's definitely gotten to the point on Reddit where you are aware that you can't discuss some topics.
Like mentioning Luigi could get you shadow-banned. Redditors acted like they were going to stand up against this and yet there's nothing. So the censorship is working - either all the comments are getting removed or people are too afraid to talk about it.
I'd argue Lemmy and other decentralized platforms are the last bastion for free speech instead of Reddit though.
Lemmy is kind of forced to be, too.
Horrific speech can be removed from the site. But if you want to see it, the admin logs are open to the public. Other instances also aren't forced to play along with the views of one instance. And each instance can choose whether they want to connect with others.
So you could create your own Christian Nationalist and White Supremacist Lemmy. But our instances don't have to federate with it. And if they choose to do so, we can leave for a different one or the users can block it entirely.
Lemmy lets anyone have a platform and, simultaneously, it doesn't force anyone to listen to you just because you have your own platform. Basically, everything that makes Lemmy a decentralized platform also makes it good for moderation without harming free speech.
There was that peak time back in the 2010s. Right after they got rid of all the worst hate communities but before they were taken over by astroturfing.
Maybe like 2014-2015ish?
I quit a long time ago without even meaning to.
There was just less and less content to keep me interested while more ads and "recommendations" kept taking their place. At some point I was just forcing myself to open the app each day and just stopped.
If an app, website, or game won't respect my time, why should I give it any?
WebRTC could be used to provide peer-to-peer streaming. The load on the servers would be very minimal since the feeds would be sent directly from the host to the viewers. A lot of live streaming and video conferencing apps already use it to keep their hosting costs down.
The downside is that the IP address of the viewers will be exposed, even over a VPN unless precautions are taken by the user or the application.
That's not even recent. Russia has been astroturfing Reddit since at least 2015.
I remember reading /r/politics pretty often back then. All of a sudden, half the posts were from RT talking about Hillary and the DNC. Yes, what they did to Bernie was bullshit but the point was clearly to either get people to vote for Trump instead or to encourage people not to vote.
Now, like you said, it's about the war. All of a sudden, every single post about the invasion has dozens of people who are totes Ukrainian and think that Zelenskyy is a monster who refuses to end the war. Yet they either have a rather bare post/comment history or never mentioned the war before.
And, if you go to the profile for any user who identified themselves as Ukrainian years ago, it's crazy but they're still in favor of the war and protecting Ukraine.
This is what propaganda is. It's not just the government putting up posters saying you should listen to them; it's convincing you that your views are extreme and unpopular.