I just hate authoritarians on either side who suppress free speech

There’s an interesting point to make about speech, moderation and social media platforms, including those that make up Lemmy.

The bottom line is, there will always be some limit to speech on platforms for them to fulfill their purpose, and you just need to figure out what limits you’re fine with. There are some “free speech extremist” platforms which allow almost everything - they’re invariably and inevitably just filled with spam-bots, literal pedophiles, neo-nazis and people unable to hold a conversation, because they get kicked off from all the other sites and no-one else can enjoy being around them for long. I say this to emphasize that a vague ideal notion of ‘free speech’ isn’t a helpful perspective to apply to a real society. Even the US legal system, famous for its First Amendment to the Constitution, has explicit suppression of speech, and other countries will have their own laws, so a platform is at legal risk for hosting any violating speech, and most admins won’t go to prison to defend some shitposters they’ve never met.

It’s also important to consider that many of these instances aren’t “general purpose” but are made for a purpose or an audience. For example, an instance or community focusing on bicycles and cycling might sometimes discuss cars but it has no pragmatic reason to tolerate repetitive time-wasting trolls yelling about how cars don’t have freedoms anymore and that bike riders are destroying their daily commute, or repeating easily-debunked misinformation like saying that adding one more lane will fix a road. These aren’t new ideas, these aren’t useful conversations to the community, so the community will moderate and censor to allow actually useful conversations to thrive. If they want to engage in a more challenging conversation, there’s plenty of neutral ground around.

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like those who overtake and control your beloved communist system

You say that as if there isn’t broad speech suppression under capitalism, even the most liberal (as in liberty) states like the USA. The bottom line is, all states work to suppress revolt. The main difference is that capitalism’s suppression is a systematic effect of the owning class exercising private and legislative power, rather than a one-party government system directly suppressing counter-ideology. For a real example, university students in my country are threatened with expulsion (a punishment with serious financial and career impacts) for speech against Israel and their university’s ties to it, and in the USA, this has already resulted in the attempted deportation of a permanent resident, not to mention constant police suppression against such protesters and university staff in plenty of countries. Look at recent (and historical) anti-protest laws in capitalist countries.

But for a more general analysis, mass media control effectively turns most significant avenues for speech into private platforms ruled by the owning class. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading Manufacturing Consent (or at the very least, skimming the Wikipedia page) which explains the main five factors which filter news and media away from ideas which benefit the worker class and towards the ideas and ideology of the owner class. This is society-wide speech suppression, just not through legal means. You mentioned how reddit is suppressive, and if the same is systematically (not coincidentally) true for reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, and all the other sites with an audience large enough to matter at scale… freedom of speech in this society is more of an idea than a reality.

Under capitalism, the ultra-rich class have similar powers to the one-party states of a Leninist states like China or Cuba or the former Soviet Union, it’s simply more indirect - the owning class own all mainstream television, film and online news companies, all mainstream social media platforms, and frankly, most federal politicians. Politicians at that level have almost no chance of election without the support of the owning class, who can give them funding, media air-time and the propaganda they need to win a national popularity contest, so make no mistake, they’re beholden to the owning class. This is one part of how companies can pressure politicians to benefit them instead of the people they’re supposed to represent.

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but hey “that’s not real communism”, right?

Haha, that’s a whole thing, and it’s not just some excuse: it’s referring to real ideological disputes, just like those who claim crony capitalism “isn’t real capitalism”, or the USA’s recent authoritarian turn “isn’t real capitalism”, or that a regulated social welfare state like the Nordic Model “isn’t real capitalism”. What the heck is “real” capitalism if capitalist economies like the USA or the Russian Federation don’t count? Same for socialism and communism, silly people claim only their school of thought is the “real” version. The classic “No true Scotsman” fallacy at work!

We’ve just been talking about Leninist states, not any of the other forms of communist ideologies such as libertarian communism aka. anarcho-communism. An anarcho-communist will sincerely claim “it’s not real communism” because it establishes a state. Like you, they hate authoritarians, and so they want to eradicate “unjust hierarchy” altogether, and the state-driven approach of China, Cuba and the Soviet Union is unacceptable to them.

As for the supporters of those Leninist states, their viewpoint is that these states are a tool to transition from a capitalist mode of production to a socialist mode of production. None of these states claim to have reached the socialist, let alone communist, mode of production yet. So while they do believe this is communism (that is, the social movement towards establishing a communist mode of production), it very obviously hasn’t established a communist society (that is, one which has obsoleted economic classes, the state and money).