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.

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    Short answer:

    It would be the same people. Changing instances is just changing your access point to lemmy. Your ‘local’ tab will change to show only communities that were created on that new instance, but your ‘all’ and ‘home’ tabs will show all the same communities and posts that you see now on lemmy.world, and all the same people will be there.

    Long answer explaining how this whole system works in detail:

    Lemmy is a federated platform, which just means each server is interconnected with each other.

    Imagine if you downloaded lemmy and installed it onto your computer directly, turning your own computer into a server/instance, just like hosting a game server for minecraft. You could send the link for your server to your friends, and they could connect to your computer and create accounts for themselves there, which would let them create communities that all your friends would see show up in their local tab view.

    But if one of your friends put a link to a lemmy.world community in the search bar of your lemmy, it would tell your server to reach out to lemmy.world across the internet and create a connection between your server and that lemmy.world community, and to keep thst connection going forever, meaning that any posts or comments that are made to that lemmy.world community will automatically send copies to your server, basically mirroring them, and allowing posts to show up in your friends ‘all’ view, or if they subscribe to that lemmy.world community, those posts will show up in their ‘home’ view as well, along with any other subscriptions they have. But their ‘local’ view will only ever show the communities that they made on your server on your computer.

    If your friends comment on those mirrored posts that were sent to your server, your server will send them to the lemmy.world community where it will then distribute out your friends comments to any other server/instance that has users subscribed to that community too, so that those servers can mirror those comments as well, thus making everyone able to communucate with eachother no matter what instance they are logging in from.

    So the only major change between instances is their local view.