I agree. It also works the other way in terms of censorship.

My original account was on an instance that once censored one of my comments. I don’t remember if they deleted my comment or banned me from the community.

On reddit, I had come to just accept that as a fact of life and every few years I would delete my old account and register a new one.

On Lemmy, I just switched to a different instance which is much more tolerant of free speech and I haven’t had issues since.

The irony is, my comments on the old instance can still be deleted, but only for users from that instance.

I don’t know the full details, but Lemmy definitely has the more 2000-2010 type of culture that allows people to speak their mind freely.

You are right, but you are just missing an important ingredient: a physical community.

It’s quite easy for autocrats and gangs to isolate and eliminate loners.

And as for the communities, there is a hierarchy. Police officers and soldiers have no hesitation to eliminate gangs and terrorists. That’s their job.

They will have a little more hesitation to attack civil organisations, e.g. sports clubs, political parties and trade union places. But eventually, if someone tells them that terrorist activities were being undertaken, they’ll just follow orders. The way this is done is by getting people unfamiliar with the community to come in and do the dirty job.

They will have the most hesitation to attack religious places of their own religion. Many of the grunts tend to still be religious/superstitious.

You are missing the point.

Those days might be numbered, but these places are the last bastion.

They will invade private homes, businesses and offices with impunity first.

Churches in particular have a long history of being relatively safe in (civil) war.

Not immune, just relatively.

The next step, in my opinion, is strong privacy and decentralized organization that fully leverages constitutional rights.

I.e. a privacy preserving social media where labour unions, political parties and religious groups can federate with each other. Servers hosted on their premises and members register through an on-premise process.

A church in a foreign country could generate a thousand aliases and distribute them to their federated sister organizations in a privacy preserving way. Only the church knows which organizations got which aliases and they protect this information.

Your local labour union chapter picks up 20 of those aliases and distributes them to members. They are the only one who knows the person behind the alias.

An observer in this private fediverse trying to obtain the identity would first need to approach the church. The church can stall them and warn downstream through a canary.

The labour union chapter observes the canary and immediately wipes all information.

And if that fails, then full I2P and Tor, with nodes hosted on-premise of churches, political parties and labour unions.