I'm looking for ways federation provides unique censorship prevention, because the documentation mentions this but doesn't usually go into detail.
An example where Lemmy is not unique:
If you are banned from a server or community, you can go to a different server/community or make your own
Why: On a centralized platform like Reddit, if you get banned from a subreddit, you can make your own. And on a centralized but open source platform, you can take the software and run it on your own server too.
Potential example where Lemmy is unique:
If one Lemmy server is banned in your country, you can go to a different one.
This might not be the best example, because if a country censors one server it will probably censor the others, and newly created servers don't federate backwards in history (AFAIK). But this example does demonstrate censorship resistance without having to resort to a third party application, like a VPN.
Potential second example:
If a server gets shut down, every community create it on it (that has moderators on different servers), can continue functioning.
I haven't verified this one myself. The community !moviesandtv@lemmy.film continued limping on after it's server was shut down, but there was only one moderator, and that moderator was from the downed server.
On a centralized platform like Reddit, if you get banned from a subreddit, you can make your own.
There have been plenty of cases where entire subreddits get removed and many people get banned from the website itself. Subreddits to instances aren't comparable because Reddit has its own rules you can't break, but each instance here has its own rules with no overarching "Lemmy" admins.
And on a centralized but open source platform, you can take the software and run it on your own server too.
Yes, but you'll be cut off from everyone in other servers. Think old school forums, if you got banned from one big forum you're not likely to ever get people to sign up to your own platform. Federation yields major benefits and people can just jump around from instance to instance without being afraid they won't be able to access content.
How does subverting a community/server ban on Lemmy change the way moderators censor things?
The idea is that every instance can only moderate content in their instance. For example if I got banned from lemmy.world, I can make an account and post on lemm.ee communities and lemmy.world users will still be able to see my posts but the lemmy.world admins won't be able to remove my content or ban me. That makes censoring content much more difficult on Lemmy, which is also a problem because there's a few hate speech instances.
Now yes, you can defederate (i.e completely hide another instance's content from your own) you will be able to censor to some extent, but only for the users in your instance. So if Lemmy.world defederates from lemm.ee for example, everyone other than Lemmy.world users will still be able to see lemm.ee content
Compare that to Reddit. If you get banned from Reddit, that's that. They can remove your content from anywhere on the website and can control all content. On Lemmy, nobody controls all content.
