Hello,
I just wanted to let you all know that, due to potential legal issues arising from caching content from a few questionable smaller instances, we are defederating them based on our policy against illegal and sexually explicit material. While we generally adopt a policy of letting users on our instance do as they please, several smaller instances are venturing dangerously close to allowing CSAM material on their instances, which we’d like to distance ourselves from for legal and ethical reasons.
We won’t mention the instances here by name to avoid sending them traffic, but they are fairly small, with <5k members. We may defederate other instances of this nature in the future, although this is something we will only do if it’s deemed absolutely necessary. We only defederate instances based on exceptional cases that run counter to our instance-wide rules. We do not defederate instances for superficial reasons, like qualms with moderation practices or for mere political content. Our goal is and will always be to stay as fully connected to the rest of Lemmy as we can.
- EuphoricPenguin22
As we are a general Lemmy instance in the context of federated content, it is our goal to promote a “vanilla” experience when browsing the rest of Lemmy. If we were to pick and choose which content to federate based on subject matter, it would ultimately destroy the utility of using a single account to access all of Lemmy. We host a particular kind of content locally, but only apply our general instance-wide rules to remote content. In other words, we’re hosting specific content here, but we want people to be able to use an account here like they would on any other instance to access the rest of the Lemmy federation. Our front page is essentially identical to any other instence’s front page in the context of the “all” tab; it’s the same as the “popular” section of Reddit. The real solution is to subscribe to communities that you are interested in, and then use the “subscribed” sort instead. This is inherently user-specific, and something you have to explore yourself. We have a guide on how to subscribe to remote communities, which will probably answer your questions.
As for political content on Lemmy as a whole, it has a noticable strong left-leaning slant that tends to bowl over any semblance of centrism. It’s also oddly persistent, to such an extent that the main memes community on lemmy.ml feels more like a political humor community than anything else. There’s also a problematic tie to Marxism-Leninism (“tankies”) though the main Lemmy developers, which run Lemmy.ml. They’re already censoring oppositional speech against the CCP on Lemmy.ml as a quick example. Perhaps not so ironically, strong tankie communities, like Lemmygrad, are being defederated by many of the other instances. Even dbzer0, the closest neighbor in terms of focus (tech and creativity) to this instance, has a pervasive left-anarchist agenda that influences admin-level moderation.
I don’t know about you, but I really dislike admins that moderate based on what political speech is and isn’t allowed. I think community moderators can and should be able to moderate based on political grounds, but administrators should refrain from doing so. I think rules are a legal and ethical requirement for administrators to enforce, like our rule against hateful content sent between users, but mere expression of political ideas in a non-hostile manner should not be the subject of censorship. I also think, on the other hand, that a lot of disruptive and controversial content derives itself from communities with an overt political focus. Communities here are allowed to host discussions on political topics and moderate based on political viewpoints, but the communities themselves cannot be overtly focused on a political ideology for no other major reason than to promote it. It’s a fine line to walk, but I’m committed to both retraining impartial moderation on an admin level and keeping politics as far away as we can without restricting people’s expression like the fanatics already have. We still have moderator and administrator disgression here, and support your interpretation of the rules as they are written.
About time I subscribed to some communities then! :D It would be nice to sticky or link to said guide (or any other relevant guides) on the front page so newcomers know exactly where to look.
100% agreed on moderating without political bias, and I personally think this should apply to both admins and mods. Communities that politically lean only one way tend to devolve into extreme echo chambers very quickly, which can be seen all over Reddit and now several Lemmy instances as well. An ideal community for me is one where discussion of even the most controversial topics can be held in a completely civilized manner while representing all sides equally… I hope NCL remains impartial and neutral in its moderation, while still removing illegal extremist content.
I think, first and foremost, that administrators should focus on providing a minimalist yet effective set of rules that are easy to understand and follow. I think we have this at the moment, although for legal reasons, a proper ToS is in the works (it will be freely-licensed and also as simplistic as possible). I’m a bit nervous justifying exactly how far to go with the apolitical administration/moderation, as I do want to make sure people who create communities here have the flexibility to remove content that they dislike. For example, we remove music links on r/vaporwareart or ! vaporwaveart@normalcity.life, because it undermines the purpose of the community. A political example might be a LGBTQ+ art community removing “hateful” content, regardless of how that is defined. I’ve made other posts about this, but we currently allow any community that is topical and relatively apoliticaI to mostly do their own thing here. I think it would be easy to take the “apolitical” bit too far and drive certain groups off of our instance, which would very quickly taint our reputation. For that reason, while I’d like to enforce apolitical moderation against everyone, I’m not really sure how far we could take that while still being reasonable. So we’d either get stuck explicitly writing clauses for a billion individual edge-cases to keep administrator disgression alive, or we’d have to constrain our administrative efforts to keep the rules simple. I think somewhere in the middle is acceptable, which is why I’m trying to keep the rules as basic as I can while allowing administrators (you and me) to have a certain level of flexibility in interpreting the rules. All this to say that, while I think it would be great to make everyone avoid political moderation, it’s a real pain-in-the-ass to draw lines in the sand without letting your own political bias tell you what is and isn’t “political.” I mean, to some people, a community that caters to a certain ethnic or racial group might be “political,” but so long as they don’t heavily advocate for a certain ideology, is it really fair to ban them? I certainly don’t think so.