I don't want Lemmy to be zero censorship.

In every case I've known, anywhere claiming "zero censorship" either adopts it sooner or later, or disappears - and in every one of those cases, it was a godawful place to be 100% of the time. IME, those who do say they want this tend to be either edgy teenagers, crackpot conspiracy theorists or psychopaths.

Sure, you can say "well, zero censorship except bots" - well that's censorship, isn't it? And given no anti-bot tactic is reliable, you'll be blocking humans. Or you can say, "zero censorship except CSAM, or extreme pornography, or anti-terrorist" and you're either applying societal laws or your own morality on others. You can't use "no censor" and "except" in a sentence without contradiction.

If you want zero censorship, I don't think Lemmy is for you. I don't think the fediverse is for you. But if you disagree, then run your own instance and put it on an onion address, please stop trying to rant at us for not sharing your views.

I wanted to start blocking the most high-censorship instances until I could find a fully zero-censorship instance and simply block all the ones with censorship. [...] I found out there are no zero-censorship instances

Unless you're using a zero-censorship instance it likely will block zero-censorship instances. So it's not a surprise you couldn't find one.

Lemmy relies on a broken "federation" system where each instance is supposed to be able to fetch posts from other instances, but it's never been finished to reach a fully working state.

You need to define "fully working state".

Lemmy's official docs say you can't even do federation over Tor at all. This means it uses DNS

Not necessarily. It could be possible to use standard IP addresses directly instead of domain names. In fact odds are good that would work already.

So you can only ever have the "average joe lemmy" and "average joe reddit" with everything approved by the authorities, and then "tor copies of lemmy" and "tor copies of reddit" where you have free speech but you can only reach other nerds.

That's overly simplistic. Under a substantially sensorial authority the "average joe" would out of necessity, become such a nerd.

People seem to think Lemmy is different because this weird censorship fetish is extremely popular and most of you are happy to see bans happen to certain people, not just bots, so a small Lemmy that censors certain people feels fundamentally different from a big reddit that censors more people. But it's the exact same thing, it's reddit.

It's not Reddit. The difference is, democratic censorship vs corporate censorship. Reddit users have no real power over what gets censored or not. On Lemmy they do. If your instance censors something you want to see, there's little friction in moving to another one.

That's a big difference.
Unless you think people are owed reach and exposure to a broad platform. In that case yes all censorship is suppressing your right to be heard by everyone in the world.

To be clear you don't have that right.

It's not actually a solution to reddit. It's not designed to be different

Censorship isn't the only way to differentiate from Reddit. Lemmy is also different in countless other ways; Algorithms and advertising to begin with. It's myopic and supremely egotistical to think your one idea is the only difference that matters.

The no-censorship crowd is funny. "I wanted to block everyone whose admins block someone, in order to find the people whose admins block anyone, so I could talk to the few people I hadn't blocked because they don't block people."(And that's ignoring the traditional entitlement in that people somewhere else deciding not to listen to you somehow means you're censored locally.)Hypocracy -- and conspiracy-level rambling -- aside, there's actually an interesting kernel of commentary here on how we talk about joining and administering Fedi. On the one hand, we say that newcomers shouldn't worry about which instance to start out on, because every one connects to every other, but on the other we celebrate how the instanced architecture allows admins control over which other instances to connect to. And then you have the deeper issue of the vast majority of the software assuming DNS, so even if admins want to connect to Tor instances, they can't feasably do so without a fair bit of host-system tweaking. Yeah, those mixed messages are just the emergent result of which layer of abstraction we're talking about in any given conversation, but it would be nice if we could find language that doesn't take literally the opposite tack on each successive layer.

Lemmy urgently needs federation between onion service instances and DNS addresses in order to actually do what most users seem to wish it would do: allow discussion outside what the corporate authorities allow, while outgrowing reddit & helping undo the damage social media has done to human communication.

"allow discussion outside what the corporate authorities allow" apparently meaning "Allow CSAM"