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.

    • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
      7·
      4 days ago

      If the last criteria is defederation from hexbear.net, then there is strong hope for Discuss.Online. Though I don’t know if they would want to host a political community that would involve such controversial topics. They probably would be welcoming to like an AskUSA one.

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
          11·
          3 days ago

          Woah.

          Ofc it won’t stop alts from leaking through - nothing can stop that - but in fighting against spam, every little bit helps.

          img

          Will you now be using it as your primary instance recommendation on Reddit? There is perhaps literally nothing better for that, so this is fantastic news that may help even the non-USA parts of the Fediverse by allowing the bringing in of more users who will feel safer to talk than they would have before, due to harassment for having a USA centrist (which let’s be real translates into a global and especially from the EU perspective, right-leaning) viewpoint. Comics, memes, hardware, woodworking or more techie Maker stuff and so many other hobbies, I hope to see more discussions about them all, with this helping people on Reddit to now be less resistant to joining.

          🎉🥳💐🎇

      • Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        41·
        3 days ago

        I’m on dbzer0 which is federated with hexbear and I honestly haven’t noticed anything bad from there. I always heard horor stories about it before I signed up here but it has actually been remarkably tame. I mean, they’re obviously leftist but I’ve seen far far worse tankie shit from just lemmy.ml.

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          They can be fun to talk with. They can also be extremely harassing, though tbf more for people who don’t know what !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net is all about - i.e. who have not read its sidebar text. And yet, many apps (like Voyager, and the basic mobile browser web UI) do not show that? Like porn, it’s mainly only bad if you stumble upon it unawares - e.g. while at work - and would have to opt-out of it. Which, if Lemmy was that way, then many people would have to simply cease checking Lemmy while at work on those devices.

          Many of the users on lemmy.ml who are seen harassing people the most outside of the actual Hexbear communities are self-admittedly alts of Hexbear accounts. Consent means nothing to them, apparently, so when hexbear.net was defederated from Lemmy.World a year ago, they simply shifted over to an account that wasn’t blocked. Like an incel who will never cease telling you what a “nice man” he is, they simply WILL NOT stop.

          Which is all the more sad considering how many legitimately nice conversations go on daily inside of the many other Hexbear communities. But those conversations aren’t why Lemmy.World and so many other instances chose to defederate from them. In the post whose link I sent earlier are a bunch of other links where each instance makes its own determination and offers links to exact posts and comments that they felt justified their decision to defederate, if you want to read through some examples. Tbf many have since been deleted by their creators, though that should tell you something right there, about the transparency and integrity of Hexbear users who when blamed don’t always retort with the truth so much as do whatever they hope will work so as to be able to dunk on people (and thus when caught, lie, even the instance admins, to other instance admins even!?!?!? which I also put a link to that event as well in that post).

          TLDR: I get it, it is not literally every single comment, user, and/or community that does it, but it is there, if you spend more time looking. There are exact links there if you want help finding them.

    • xapr [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • Blaze (he/him)English
        2·
        3 days ago

        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

        • xapr [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          11·
          3 days ago

          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.

          • Blaze (he/him)English
            2·
            3 days ago

            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.

            • xapr [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
              11·
              3 days ago

              I still prefer lemmy.sdf.org. They also have an empty blocklist (from what I can tell - the version of Lemmy they’re on I don’t think splits it off into a separate tab), they’re also from Oregon from what I recall, have 2.5x more monthly active users than lemmy.today, and they’re a non-profit that’s larger than and longer than only their Lemmy instance.

              Again, I don’t get the hexbear issue. I wish someone could explain to me what the problem actually is.

                • xapr [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
                  1·
                  3 days ago

                  I was wondering the same thing about why they hadn’t upgraded, and after a little searching, I found out that there have been some bugs introduced that have not yet been completely resolved by 0.19.7. Supposedly 0.19.8 will fix them, so I’m hoping that that’s why they haven’t upgraded yet. If that’s why they haven’t upgraded yet, I appreciate the focus on stability.

                  Thanks for the links. Unfortunately, they did not answer my questions. The first link is a string of complaints without evidence. I didn’t read the entire thread but read many of the top posts. The second one is the same thing. A lot of complaints of nothing. I still have the impression that people complain about hexbear because it challenges their beliefs. What I’m really trying to understand is what’s so egregious about hexbear that would make it necessary to protect people new to Lemmy and entire major instances from them. If you could link me to specific comments with evidence and explanations of patterns, it might help me understand.