Hello World,
following feedback we have received in the last few days, both from users and moderators, we are making some changes to clarify our ToS.
Before we get to the changes, we want to remind everyone that we are not a (US) free speech instance. We are not located in US, which means different laws apply. As written in our ToS, we’re primarily subject to Dutch, Finnish and German laws. Additionally, it is our discretion to further limit discussion that we don’t consider tolerable. There are plenty other websites out there hosted in US and promoting free speech on their platform. You should be aware that even free speech in US does not cover true threats of violence.
Having said that, we have seen a lot of comments removed referring to our ToS, which were not explicitly intended to be covered by our ToS. After discussion with some of our moderators we have determined there to be both an issue with the ambiguity of our ToS to some extent, but also lack of clarity on what we expect from our moderators.
We want to clarify that, when moderators believe certain parts of our ToS do not appropriately cover a specific situation, they are welcome to bring these issues up with our admin team for review, escalating the issue without taking action themselves when in doubt. We also allow for moderator discretion in a lot of cases, as we generally don’t review each individual report or moderator action unless they’re specifically brought to admin attention. This also means that content that may be permitted by ToS can at the same time be violating community rules and therefore result in moderator action. We have added a new section to our ToS to clarify what we expect from moderators.
We are generally aiming to avoid content organizing, glorifying or suggesting to harm people or animals, but we are limiting the scope of our ToS to build the minimum framework inside which we all can have discussions, leaving a broader area for moderators to decide what is and isn’t allowed in the communities they oversee. We trust the moderators judgement and in cases where we see a gross disagreement between moderatos and admins’ criteria we can have a conversation and reach an agreement, as in many cases the decision is case-specific and context matters.
We have previously asked moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification when this was suggested in context of murder or other violent crimes. Following a discussion in our team we want to clarify that we are no longer requesting moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification in the context of violent crimes when the crime in question already happened. We will still consider suggestions of jury nullification for crimes that have not (yet) happened as advocation for violence, which is violating our terms of service.
As always, if you stumble across content that appears to be violating our site or community rules, please use Lemmys report functionality. Especially when threads are very active, moderators will not be able to go through every single comment for review. Reporting content and providing accurate reasons for reports will help moderators deal with problematic content in a reasonable amount of time.
Look through this list and sort by monthly active users (MAU): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
The server location info doesn’t seem 100% accurate, but it should still help. I would suggest either the instance I use, lemmy.sdf.org (run by an American, technology-oriented non-profit org), or perhaps lemmy.zip, which also looks good - I started looking into it but haven’t fully vetted it yet.
By the way, I don’t think that being in a larger instance has much benefit, by the way. In fact, I tried one of the larger ones and found that it suffered performance-wise, so I went back. You can get pretty much everything from every other Lemmy instance, especially one that doesn’t block and is not blocked by other instances (lemmy.sdf.org also applies here).
Edit: lemmy.zip seems to be subject to the laws of the UK, according to their code of conduct.
https://legal.lemmy.zip/docs/terms_of_service/
The website and the agreement will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the United Kingdom and the European Union.
https://discuss.online/ is US based and just defederated hexbear
By the way, I don’t think that being in a larger instance has much benefit, by the way.
Content accessibility can be an issue due to the way instances only fetch remote communities if a local user is subscribed. Also, having a larger userbase usually means that the instance has been around long enough to show some good track record for the instance
Thanks, I edited the post and noted that lemmy.zip was UK-based after I originally posted.
https://discuss.online/ is US based and just defederated hexbear
That’s a negative for me. I don’t want anyone blocking instances on my behalf unless those instances are doing blatantly illegal stuff.
Content accessibility can be an issue due to the way instances only fetch remote communities if a local user is subscribed. Also, having a larger userbase usually means that the instance has been around long enough to show some good track record for the instance
Yeah, that’s true. I did use some of the great Lemmy community directory sites to find some communities that weren’t already subscribed from my instance. I understand that better community discoverability is planned for upcoming Lemmy versions.
That’s a negative for me. I don’t want anyone blocking instances on my behalf unless those instances are doing blatantly illegal stuff.
In that case, there’s https://lemmy.today/ . Their blocklist is empty, and they’re from Oregon.
We prefer to recommend https://discuss.online/ for new joiners, so that they don’t have to stumble upon hexbear from their very first minutes on the platform. For more advanced users, it’s a different story.