Hello everyone,

Following the recent discussions on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !lemmyworld@lemmy.world , it seems that people realize that Lemmy.world is subject to European laws, and not the US ones.

This is another event where US citizens seem to be looking for an instance that would adhere to their “legal culture”, the previous one being the US elections, where the topic was discussed everywhere, before getting channeled into !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world

I don’t know anything about Dutch or Finnish laws, but I’ve seen many recent articles about people arrested in Germany for their social media posts that were considered hateful or violent (which is frankly a culture shock to me as an American), so I can see why some of the posts on Lemmy in the past week would be concerning.

https://lemmy.world/comment/13870047

So, the question is: could Discuss.online become that instance? And host US-focused communities like “AskUSA”, “USPolitics”, “USFinance”, this kind of things?

I am mostly asking because there’s no secret that the DO admins aren’t the biggest Lemmy fans, so would you guys be okay if your instance would get promoted, potentially causing an influx of users and communities, some requiring moderation?

  • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Discuss.Online is nowhere close to a complete free speech instance, as I see it. It is about fostering nice, safe conversations about cute things like bunny rabbits.

    4chan is more where people are completely free to say whatever they want - and we know how that turns out.

    Generally I find that people discussing things entirely in good faith can do so almost anywhere and with anyone? But social media gets tricky bc it also invites people in who refuse to abide by those rules, and then we end up all having to play by the rules of the lowest common denominator.

    Actually Beehaw is an interesting place where they really do put in the effort to curate the precise experience that they wish. Yet there is no way they could keep up with tens of thousands of people all clamoring for attention, yet refusing to abide themselves by any rules.

    The practical reality of social media precludes such discussions as you seem to want to have. Someone is going to have to expend the effort to curate the stuff, or else it ends up being mostly uncurated. Lemmy.World has already stepped up to provide the rules by which they will offer to curate the stuff. If someone does not like that, they can spin up an instance and do better, or find an already existing one that is amenable.

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

      Discuss.Online is nowhere close to a complete free speech instance, as I see it.

      I just had a look at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html to check

      We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.

      So if people say “CEOs of private healthcare companies who cause the deaths of thousands of citizens for profit should face the same fate as the United Healthcare CEO”, is it acceptable or no? Real question, I don’t think it’s that clear from the rules.

      Also, as those are the rules created by the Lemmy devs, I would really surprised if they prevented any action against CEOs

      • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        jgrim is the moderator of this community as well as an admin of this instance, so I suppose it is entirely up to him. Though while not wanting to put words into his mouth, that sounds neither “safe” nor “welcoming” to me at all, to discuss murder.

        To be clear, if that were in !AskUSA@discuss.online though, then I would say no myself as moderator of the community, even if the instance rules themselves allowed it. On a personal level it might be fodder for an interesting philosophical discussion, so long as it remained entirely theoretical, but I would not like to see the slippery slope that such discussions would attract, in a place meant more for light-hearted fun & cutesy stuff.

        And isn’t social media supposed to be “fun”? I am getting nervous here even just meta-discussing the topic of discussing such controversial topics! I am saying that to help explain why this topic isn’t “welcoming” - if it puts people off, then isn’t that by definition not entirely welcoming?

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

          I feel like we are having the same discussion in two different threads, but just to reply to this with a quote from another comment

          And telling people that murder is okay - regardless of the rightness or wrongness of such (e.g. even if not serious but merely to lay off some steam) - seems to fall into that category?

          That’s probably the core of the question. People in the LW thread were advocating that jury nullification for future crimes is legal in the USA. If it is, and if there is no clear rule on DO to prevent those (as far as I’ve checked, there aren’t, but happy to be wrong on this), there are two options

          • add a rule similar to the LW one
          • accept that people talk about jury nullification for future crimes

          And isn’t social media supposed to be “fun”?

          I would say it depends. I myself prefer casual communities, like !casualconversation@lemm.ee, !movies@lemm.ee etc. But I also know that some people are going to want to discuss “serious” topics, and that those also deserve their communities.

          You might want to distinguish between AskUSA and a potential new CasualUSA, as in general, if you keep both content in AskUSA, the serious content will overwhelm the casual content.