The Lemmy.World Terms of Service now in effect
Hello World!
We've made some changes today, and we'd like to announce that our Code of Conduct is no longer in effect. We now have a new Terms of Service, in effect starting from today(October 19, 2023).
The "LAST REVISION DATE:" on the page also signifies when the page was last edited, and it is updated automatically. Details of specific edits may be viewed by following the "Page History" reference at the bottom of the page. All significant edits will also be announced to our users.
The new Terms of Service can be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/
In this post our community mods and users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World. We hope to discuss and inform constructively and in good faith.
I think that community guidelines/ code or conduct should still exist at a top level, in a digestible form, and not nested within a legal document.
They can still be part of the legal document, but should be made more accessible if said guidelines are cared about.
Otherwise you'll find that it's a set of expectations that no one reads (And likely cannot find even if they where looking for them), when those expectations are critically important to community health.
They will be a part of our support page along with other helpful content, we expect to share it widely very soon! :)
deleted by creator
The best way to fuck a democratic process up is making votes public. No one should feel like there's a "deterrent" to voting. All that does is create incentive to reward/punish people for how they vote.
Voting is what fuels the content aggregation, too. It is a very bad idea to deter people from voting how they please because it strangles the algorithm of the data it needs to sort the content. You want people voting, a lot. That's what makes the whole thing work.
Edit: which is to say nothing of how bad it will get when people make tools that help automate retaliation for downvotes. You can potentially state an opinion in a comment and set up a bot to auto block every downvoter, then share that list publicly. You may think that sounds like a great system for weeding out hate but I promise you it's going to be far messier than that, and more importantly, this kind of retaliatory shit hurts the aggregation even more.
Votes on lemmy are inherently public, due to how federation works.
The US is based on Federalism and we don’t make our votes public
Votes are public on Lemmy, in the sense that if you have admin access to an instance that is federated you will be able to find who upvoted which posts/comments in the database.
That should really be changed so that you can only see the cumulative votes from any given instance and only a user's specific instance will have records of their individual upvotes and downvotes.
That would make pushing posts to the top via botting way too easy, and far harder to detect. Federation is intentionally set up so that instances do not trust each other.
Since upvoting is most of what I do, I think it's great that people can see it was me who upvoted them.
I don't mind the accountability of a downvote at all. If I didn't craft a specific reply, it lets people know who to ask if they genuinely don't understand why their content was problematic.
Shhh dont give them ideas
You misread. What I wrote:
Voting and weaponizing downvotes are two very different things.
To be clear, I used the phrase "weaponizing downvotes" to paraphrase the intent behind the written policy I quoted in full. Here it is again:
Do not engage in content manipulation such as posting spam content, vote manipulation through using several user accounts or consistently down-voting a user. Vote for the content, not for the person.
Seems like you have a problem with the policy then, because it is requiring you to self-regulate your own voting, and to specifically NOT vote as you please, but in a way that is best for the community as a whole.
I’ve had a user disagree with me and then go through my entire post history and downvote every single one of my comments. I don’t get why someone would do that but I can see why Lemmy.world would put it against their terms of service.
I get that all the time. It amused me greatly until the day I found out I can turn off the Fantasy Internet Points entirely. Now I have no idea if my votes are up or down or sideways.
And I don't care.
Why is it necessary to count votes cast an unlimited time after posting. The best policy is to register votes in the UI for the user but silently ignore votes after max duration. So they can feel like they stuck it to you while not having an unreasonable effect. You could even detect and silently discard downvotes that matched that pattern or rate limit the downvotes against one party silently.
It happened to me, and it was the She-Ra fans who did it. They were angry that I called them monarchists.
“Not my previous updoots😭”
Then a downvote is justified, same user or not.
I think that if you access Lemmy via api, you can see who downvoted you specifically. I’d prefer it’d be turned off as I think people feel better about participation when they don’t have to go on the record to other users officially.
Just for clarity: it's not viewable through the API. As others have said, you need to spin up an instance. In contrast to the API, this means it's not free (due to server hosting and domain name costs), and it's not necessarily easy (for the non-techies).
I don't think so. I think the more likely scenario is this would lead to people weaponizing other's downvote history, and then very quickly people would stop downvoting completely. You'd have less downvotes overall, which is not always a good thing. At that point they should just remove the ability to downvote altogether, they'll be accomplishing the same thing.
Is it possible on Lemmy interface ? I thought that data required to have a look at the database
Not through the Lemmy webUI, but if you spin up an instance and subscribe to communities, the posts and comments will start getting federated to your database.
That's what I had in mind, thanks
This rule needs an exception for war reporting, and posting evidence of criminal activity or police misconduct.
Not just war reporting. There are legitmate medical discussions that can be aided by such depictions. There should be an exception made for legitimate educational images. Otherwise technically a biological textbook on dissection runs afoul of this rule.
I second this. Educational content should be an exception.
Not really tbh. We don't need to personally see that stuff — it can cause lasting trauma. Knowing it exists and who did it is enough for war reporting.
Citizens of free and democratic societies have a fundamental need to be informed of what is going on in the world and their communities, free of bias or censorship, so they can make informed, reality based decisions and instruct their representatives in government on how to carry out the will of the people. When you start filtering and curating peoples' perception of reality to fit an agenda or narrative you're talking away their agency (you tankies wouldn't understand what that word means), and interfering with their duties as a citizen.
I have to agree with Astrealix on this. Information should be free. But information and snuff videos are two different things. I want information. I don't need or want to be constantly exposed to gore content. And I don't consider myself badly informed because I didn't see one guy chopping another guy's head in 4K-HD.
A simple blurred image until clicked would prevent that, like it currently does with NSFW content.
I don't need you deciding what level of gore that I am allowed to see
More importantly, we don't need to be limiting the discussion of incredibly important political issues such as was just because the imagery is ugly. War is ugly, and reminding everyone of that is vitally important in preventing future wars. When we forget how ugly war truly is, we begin to allow for its glamorization. Much better for me to see the atrocities of war than for my children to experience them firsthand.
But they aren't. You're free to go to an instance that hosts those images.
Conversely if lemmy.world hosted gore, you'd be free to go to an instance that bans it. What a non statement.
I'm complaining about the policy. Saying I'm not allowed to complain about the policy, because that's not what the policy says, is dumb.
Let me make it clearer: I don't like this section of the terms and I'd like to hear their reasoning for why they made that policy decision.
Your reason for liking the gore ban makes no sense so I'm dismissing that as a possible reason for the admins' decision.
First of all, I am from Hong Kong and utterly hate the CCP and tankies. It's frankly insulting that you would compare me to them when they consistently fight for the complete eradication of the Hong Kong identity.
But more importantly, there's a line to be drawn there. I agree that it is important to be informed — but you don't need Israel tweeting photos of dead babies onto everyone's Twitter feeds and traumatising people to be informed that babies died. You don't need to personally witness every single gory detail of humanity's terrible sins in order to know that things have happened. That's what people do as a job in journalism, and they have lots of protection to make sure they're not traumatised by it. The average Lemming doesn't need to see that.
what's a "tankie"
Russian apologist who supports Russia in the Ukraine war is how I understand it.
Also they support the CCP
They have a veneer of communism but they really just support authoritarianism especially among geopolitical enemies of the USA.
Authoritarians of the left. For example, they support Putin because they're against NATO, and they praise Mao, Stalin and other brutal dictators.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
This is a private instance, not a government. This is so dramatic lol. You clearly disagree with the tankies and you aren't on their instance, right? So if you disagree with lemmy.world policies, you can just do the same.
I find it difficult to understand that something should be banned because some people "don't need" to see it. Then don't look at it? And I'm talking specifically for war reporting now. I'm not talking for generic gore. It is war reporting. It is something that happens. By hiding it it only helps to enlarge our safe bubble and live in it. Sorry, this is not the world. If you want to live in your safe bubble it is up to you, but making it sound like the "correct way to handle reality" is wrong imo
I agree that it’s fine to make a rule against it on a privately funded instance but definitely do not agree with your line of thinking. Sometimes you can’t understand the gravity of horror without seeing it, and sometimes you must understand it to be motivated to do something about it. A little trauma of is sometimes necessary to be an informed citizen of the world.
Get traumatized by gore for "thoughts and prayers" on
FacebookLemmyGood thing these people weren't on the internet in the early 2000's with sites like rotten.com or toxic.com. much simpler days
Idk, I preferred meatspin and lemonparty.
Bluewaffle?
You so cute
then don't look at it
It's easier not to look at when you know where it's prohibited from being posted.
We could just make it opt-in. Then it's impossible to accidentally click on it.
You can opt in by visiting a community on another instance that allows it.
That's not how opting in works, at all.
Yes we do. Gore and mutilation are part of life. It should be shown on public television and kid's shows so maybe we can finally understand the consequences of senseless warfare in future generations.
PTSD is a real thing. Trauma is a real thing. Yes, we are much too desensitised to war. Yes, we should absolutely be outraged and we need to recognise that warfare is terrible. That doesn't mean that access to traumatisation should be easy. Look at suicide rates of veterans, for example. Trauma is a real thing, and there's a reason there is so much research dedicated to protecting journalists etc. who have to look at this stuff so they can tell us the truth.
I bet this is referring to the US veterans as I doubt there are other countries with such statistic and I wanted to say that IDGAFF. They chose to go fight in the other side of earth thinking they are doing good. Going back and realizing how wrong they were and that in fact they were killing people inside their homes and who never were an actual threat. The reason of the suicides is this tragic realization.
lol there are studies on it done for Russia, Ukraine, UK, Dutch UN troops who intervened in Srebrenica...
Ukraine has been defending itself. Dutchbat we're trying and failing to maintain peace and instead watched as a massacre happened.
Yes, the US has more statistics, as it often does for psychology because many people don't treat it seriously. That doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
The people downvoting you better be as consistent when it comes to Australias tobacco packaging.
Sounds good to me, I don't know why you are getting downvoted friend
Because they don't know what they're talking about. Although neither do I tbf
I know, right? Thanks for the support.
And hobbyist
They aren't Reddit, they're an instance. There's no reason they need to allow that. That content can be for other instances.
That is bad logic and no justification.
They're an instance, they can put a rule requiring every comment to include the text "I'm a little teapot".
That doesn't imply it would be a good rule which is what we are disagreeing about. Pointing out they CAN have a rule is irrelevant.
In a federated system, the relevant part is each instance CAN have different rules. If you don't like one set, or consider it "not good", then go to an instance with a different set, or start your own.
"start your own"
"start you own!"
"Start you own start your own"
There should be a rule that allows for violence against people who say that
Are you suggesting to... "start your own", violence? 😛
And people can criticize that choice.
Sure, they can. And people can point out it's the instance owner's choice.
Libertarianism is a garbage ideology.
That's what lemmy.ml is for. This instance is too big for its own good.
I like what I see. Everything looks like a set of conditions I can support. I am not sure about the gore part, but I can understand why people wouldn't want that can of worms.
Someone's going to need a stretcher for the roblox mods.
I'm not sure if I should be angry at yet another attempt to exclude young people when the internet is already practically the last refuge in which they are allowed to exist at all...
... or laugh my ass off that literally anyone thinks this rule will be obeyed.
It’s about legal liability. The admins don’t want to have to worry about dealing with all sorts of EU and US regulation for minors so they can have an official policy that minors can’t use the site.
Nobody really cares if kids participate but it’s not the admin’s responsibility to bend over backwards for regulations to accommodate them.
Sir, I just need you to confirm you date of birth is indeed: Jan 01 1999
But have no fear. It's not the rule people should worry about, its the punishment!
Clause 66, section 6: All ages 16 of less will be sentenced to 15 days in the meme mines. And possibly made mandatory mod of Boomer Memes for an hour. May the odds be ever in your favor.
No one wants kids shitting things up dude
I want young people being able to express themselves equally and without fear.
Remember Lemmy does not only have safe content and communities, and this includes our federated network. If you think kids should be able to view some of those, then you are free to disagree. We are happily following obligations.
An instance doesn't have to follow, or show, the content from all the instances it's federated with. If you chose to do so, that's your choice, there is likely another "kids friendly" Lemmy federation split on the horizon.
And the admins (and myself, for that matter) want to exist without the risk of doing a perp walk because Little Timmy saw a peen.
I'm on an NSFW Lemmy instance. I have multiple NSFW accounts spread over the various platforms, and my single biggest fear is that some shithead kid is going to ignore the giant "18+ only" warnings because they're so MATURE for their age, they're going to find adult content (or worse yet, try and message me and pretend they're over 18 so I don't block them), and one of their relatives find out and call the police. Intentionally done or not, I've seen exactly that scenario play out, ruining the lives of multiple people through no fault of their own.
The Lemmy admins all have to worry about this exact same thing too, except they have to worry about every kid and every NSFW account/community, unless they decide to either play whack-a-mole with the various NSFW instances, or move to default deny federation and only federate with known-SFW communities. And that's on top of the existing CSAM spam concerns that they appear to have only recently gotten under control.
I don't give a single solitary flying fuck about whether children can express themselves equally. They're NOT equal to an adult, because I don't risk jail time by showing off my [REDACTED] to them.
Let's take a look at what comments look like when you encourage kids to sign up
And who could forget this classic
Age limits are entirely self-selected. If you're dumb enough to out yourself as breaking them, you were probably not contributing to the community in the first place
I don't necessarily. I remember when I was young, and hanging around on BBS'es and forums all the time. I was a little shit.
I remember when I was young and the Internet was the only place I felt like I wasn't constantly being talked down to. It was the only emotionally safe space I had.
This sure as hell ain’t the place for them.
Said of essentially everywhere.
And then old people wonder why young people are so anxious and depressed these days...
I don't wonder. I know. It's because they're on the internet instead of going.the.fuck.outside.
There is zero wrong with putting age limits in place.
News flash, kids exist and adults already have their safe spaces.
Agreed but the puritans that have to give it up before we can expect sites like this to overexpose themselves to legal action.
I'd like to see rules for moderators, for instance they cannot ban users based on participation in other groups
This was something that caught me off guard on Reddit. I saw some edgelord in the comments of a shitpost sub roleplaying as a third reich Nazi. I commented „Halt die Fresse.“ which is German for STFU. I immediately got banned from the main BLM sub.
And it happened over and over again. Some Mods on Reddit are just full of themselves.
In reddit I questioned the logic of an anti-vax group and immediately got banned by about a dozen bots in other groups because I had commented in a "forbidden" group. There was no attention paid to the content of the comment. So much for reddit being a forum for discussion.
If you can't moderate a group without using ban bots then you shouldn't be moderating.
As a former mod, I understand why some mods used automatic bans. I modded a few moderate sized subs and noticed posting trends in other subs amongst troublemakers. "For some reason", many active posters in r/TheDonald, r/Conservative, and similar subs were far more likely to be offensive or hurtful and didn't have much that was interesting, helpful, or constructive to say. Certainly nothing valuable enough to tolerate their shit. When we'd temporarily block one of them for name calling or other personal attacks, we'd get messages ad nauseam claiming we had violated their first amendment rights, that they were going to find and harm us in some way, or just a bunch of further name calling and personal attacks. I had two try to dox me. Poorly. They weren't very bright.
With that being said, we didn't use auto bans because they're chickenshit. Yeah, they would save us a fair amount of time and aggravation, but they'd also ban people like you and me, who may have told some Nazis to fuck off or explained, line by line, how the latest thing Joe Rogan or Bench Appearo shit out their mouth was exactly that: shit. If you're going to mod a community, it's kind of what you sign up for. If you can't handle it, then quit or get more backup. Don't ruin it for others because you can't or don't want to deal with the unpleasant aspects of the job.
Ever since I heard this phrase, I occasionally like to imagine someone finding out they have magical abilities because they accidentally summoned a sex swing after saying "fuck ben shapiro"
Ban bots are the stupidest thing. I once wandered into a alt right conspiracy sub and called everyone the r-word. Got banned from there, got banned from another unrelated sub for posting there, and got an automated message from the admin team for using that word.
To be fair, using ableism that way is scummy and I won’t argue against that. But getting banned from justiceserved out of nowhere was just dumb.
If you want to ban trolls, be my guest. I am pretty triggerhappy with the block function myself. But as you said, preemptively banning people makes you look unfit for that position.
Great idea indeed. The rules for moderators have been in the works for a while, and will hopefully be published very soon.
Thanks for replying. I'd also like to suggest:
5.0.4 seems to be in conflict with the existence of !piracy. I'm not complaining about its existence, just mentioning that it seems to be a conflict.
"Illegal content of any type" is an incredibly thorny concept. Illegal where? Where the poster is? Where lemmy.world is hosted? Within some nebulous consensus of Western nations? Only the US states that matter, excluding Wyoming and Montana?
It's illegal to be gay in Saudi Arabia or Uganda. Is gay content not allowed? Switchblades are illegal in California but not in neighboring Oregon. Am I not allowed to talk about switchblades? It's illegal to export strong encryption technologies from the US. Am I not allowed to talk about encryption? Etc., etc., etc.
It was quoted just a bit above you, dude:
I'd argue "transaction" implies an exchange... If you pirate content you either are giving something freely, and receiving nothing, or are receiving something while giving nothing.
If you're not a leeching piece of shit (like I am) then technically torrenting IS a transaction
Machine... I will cut you down, break you apart, splay the gore of your profane form across the STARS! I will grind you down until the very SPARKS CRY FOR MERCY! My hands shall RELISH ENDING YOU... HERE! AND! NOW!
::: spoiler * It was hard to decide whether to post this copy-pasta or just 'you fuck'
This whole comment is /j, I don't care that much :::
Heh, wait until you remember that if you block outcoming traffic it will be hard to download something at a decent speed (unless there are a lot of peers)
What you argue is less relevant than the legal definition in the Netherlands.
Does !piracy@lemmy.world exist? If it does I can't find it.
Technically exists, but has been inactive for months. The active piracy communities are !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !piracy@lemmy.ml - neither of which are hosted by lemmy.world.
Yes, it does. Click that link again now.
Those communities aren’t hosted on lemmy.world and therefore not subject to its terms.
edit: if I’m not mistaken, those communities (or the instances they’re hosted on) have been banned from lemmy.world, so if you’re logged in as a lemmy.world user, you cannot see them anyway.
I think they were recently refederated.
Correct.
huh, interesting
in my country only uploading is illegal, not downloading so not necessarily.
What matters is the laws in the location of the server and/or the person who owns the domain and runs the site.
And the terms explicitly state which location whose laws it believes they fall under:
So... does anyone know how legal/illegal piracy is in the Netherlands and Finland?
Illegal in the netherlands. Not sure about finland
Regarding Section 1.0, the portion “lemmy.world (“Lemmy.World,” “we,” “us,” or “LW”).” You may need to include the term “our” since it’s used quite frequently throughout the document.
trusting you to fairly enforce these rules since they are beyond my willingness to parse. IANAL That said, golden rule always applies. If a suspension or ban is warranted, please require a clear reference to the violation so behavior can be modified in the future. Hate getting banned with no reason or hope of avoiding future violations.
In this regard, this is pretty damning: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/554307/Just-wanted-a-warning-Lemmy-World-is-perhaps-worse-than-reddit
Also, adding having to agree to the Terms of Service when a new user creates an account is good, but does nothing when they create the user from another instance. Lemmy instances that want to implement this might want to consider forcing users coming from other instances to have to agree to general Terms of Service before they can fully participate.
That thread filled with people who got banned from Lemmy World. You think everyone there is arguing in good faith?
And some of the reactions to the new ToS have been quite aggressive towards the admin team, even though there is nothing there that changed how people can use our site. Be a decent person and you are welcome, that is the document's purpose.
We had reactions telling us "fuck off corporate shills" and "suck my balls" and publicly stating they will be a problem and then it's Shocked Pikachu when they get banned and start threads everywhere.
As you pointed out, people who sign up on Lemmy World have to agree to these terms by typing "I agree" in the sign-up form. We're looking into other options for existing users.
Part of what you are saying may be true, but what the OP is claiming definitely isn't. The Internet Wayback Machine links to the "offending" comment, which they couldn't have manipulated, and the modlog reason on lemmy.world isn't lying. Worse, it was a comment in this thread where "Users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World. We hope to discuss and inform constructively and in good faith." that got him banned with the claim that he was "disagreeing with the Terms of Service" because of it, and it does not seem that any apology or acknowledgement has been sent.
Speaking of which, you can go through OP's history in their kbin.social account and find out how he was defending your admin team from the reactions you are complaining about until he had his comment history completely deleted and his account banned on lemmy.world.
The problem isn't just with existing users, the problem is with new and existing users from other Lemmy instances who aren't going to have the same Terms of Service as you. You are basically going to have to come up with a way to get them to agree with it before they can participate in it, and given that this server seems to be within the EU, that probably also means some additional GDPR concerns when obtaining if you are trying to cover yourselves legally.
Your account is brand new, which of the banned users are you?
What do you mean? Are you suggesting new users from other servers should explicitly be asked that question? It seems like just confirming their freely given consent and acceptance of the Terms of Service would cover it. Otherwise, it just seems like you are trying to derail the intent of this community to fish for excuses.
Just pointing out that you signed up on one instance to complain about the TOS and bans of another one. And that was your first and only action. Pretty sus but I am sure you have no stakes in this
"Derail the intent of this community", what?
I signed up to use Lemmy. It's federated. I'm also free to sign up in multiple instances as well, just as I'm free to choose to sign up with a new account to discuss something that concerns me, specially when it involves getting entire accounts purged and banned for reasons that don't seem clear and for which there is evidence that it isn't just someone with a beef. Are you implying alts should be illegal?
I'm sure the admins share the same concerns as you, and will perform and act as they consider appropriate. It is absolutely none of your concern and your suspicions mean nothing, not to mention you seem to have difficulty reading the bar on the side.
I don't know...
"It is absolutely none of your concern and your suspicions mean nothing..." is a blatantly false statement. That is a community member, he has as much right to express his thoughts about the conversation as you do.
I suppose in a way you are right, as I can't really speak for anyone else's concern, but his comments are complete speculation that attempt to attack the character and not the argument of the conversation, also derailing it. There's no way for him to prove his claims, and it just acts to imply that someone could have been banned so their thoughts don't matter.
Imagine someone banned my account for these comments, would they cease to be relevant? Would they cease to be relevant if I brought my thoughts up on an alt? I guess you could question the motive, specially if the conversation was toxic, but have my questions and concerns been toxic? So even if it became applicable, would his doubts be relevant?
Unfortunately, credibility does need to be earned, ideas do not exist in a vacuum, nor should they. This is a necessary adaptation to the quantity of information presented to us in the modern day, every day. This is why pure rhetoric and rationality cannot be used to understand the world around us, it's simply impractical to do that much processing every day.
Calling a person's credibility into question is thus very valid, as it implies debate is not being entered into in good faith. If you wish this resolved, you will have to earn your right to be listened to by anyone who has any significant amount of experience with online communities. It's just too easy to spout fancy sounding bullshit like some kind of firehose, manufacture evidence in a variety of ways, and just generally waste people's time. It happens all the time.
Far enough, but that just goes back to the original problem that the OP ran up against. If they had earned that credibility, if they had built up months of history of comments that proved it, what would it matter if they could be purged instantly? If I linked my main alt, and it got a purge and a ban because someone on the admin team doesn't like me bringing this up, then I would lose all the credibility I had, if I didn't back it up in the Internet Wayback Machine like the kbin.social OP did.
So I understand why you might question my credibility, but at the same time, you seem to be bolstering the merit of discussing the issue.
You ban people for disagreeing with you no matter if they're in good faith or bad. I'm going to assume everyone you banned is in good faith until proven otherwise due to your track record.
You anal?
We.
This seems to bring LW closer to Reddit. /s
But seriously, what is the point of all of this? It only seems to overcomplicate things. Now a user will have to:
In that order, or any other order? I see nothing about protesting the breach of the ToS by either the CoC or some community, or some community's mod... so which supersedes which?
How is this going to be communicated to users commenting/posting from other instances? Or is this only applicable to users registered on this instance? In which case, what is going to be applicable to federated users?
What are the user's rights?
If you want to establish this as a legal document, then you're missing at least a section.
If this is about giving as many reasons as possible to remove/ban content/users, it's all unnecessary, just say "mods can remove/ban whatever"; it's a private instance, you can do that.
If this is about having a ruleset that protects the users from arbitrary mod decisions... I see none of that in there.
Ultimately it's just "we're gonna act like how reddit admins act".
Simplified version: Dont be an asshole.
FIN
Using a free service is not a right, it's a privilege. Which can be revoked at any time for any reason. Grow up.
It seems like simply reading the post and having an understanding of how federation works would address most of the points you've made.
The remaining:
Anything that's not restricted? That's why we have rules and not an allowances list.
And if you have an issue with humans moderating, oh well, good luck.
I know perfectly well how federation works. The core of my questions have nothing to do with federation, they're about people and how they'll #### rules to death.
But since you brought it up: you may want to also consider the implications of mods from federated instances making decisions about content on LW communities.
As I said, if you want to establish this as a legal document (often called "Terms of Service")... then you may really want to check with a lawyer on that.
Maybe I wasn't clear; this isn't about me having an issue, this is about you missing a few issues. Take it or leave it, I have no stake in this.
Allowances? They're talking about guarantees.
A lemmy bill of rights? Interesting... what kind of stuff would you expect to see on such a document?
Not my idea, but let's make it a Constitution while we're at it. Dibs on the first Supreme Court seat.
You really expect me, your average idiot, to read a legal document to learn the rules and abide by them?
It’s not hard to read and it’s pretty clear. IMHO it’s better than most ELUA text I’ve seen.
Besides with the scale at which this site is growing it would be STUPID of them NOT to put up something like this. At the bare minimum it’s protecting their asses from liability if/when someone decides to sue them. They can’t point to that text and say this is what/why we took the actions we did.
I trust in the Golden Rule, and my behavior within carries me to victory!
I trust that the Golden Rule will be "enough the same" - compared to the given rules here - so that I will not break any rules!
Yes! Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Thanks for being upfront and clear about things. I know it’s not easy.
If you don’t have anyone on the team who has great soft skills I’d suggest you put out a call for “community managers.” Mostly for things like this.
Keep up the great work! I’m glad to see how everything is coming together. 🍻
Thank you! But funny you bring this up..
Because that's exactly what we are working on. Community Management and Engagement Management teams are being formed. Community managers will be checking up on moderation and are about keeping communities healthy. Community Engagement team will be responsible to help provide content, putting community's in the spotlight and more.
Formation of these teams is ongoing, if anyone reads this and is interested contact me or @clueless_stoner@lemmy.world
Anyway, more on that in a different thread soon!
Oh, does that mean there will be a place to appeal moderation? The only issue I've had so far is on lemmy.ml, but it'd be nice to know there's some recourse to mods pushing an agenda or propaganda.
Yes, it will be possible to report abusive moderation with your own input, hopefully very soon.
oh ok, some operational details make more sense now
How does a TOS work with federation??? I have no intention of breaking rules to be clear, and I assume if I did I would just get banned? I'm just curious what the legal implications are.
I can see and interact with content on lemmy.world without ever visiting it, which feels like a grey area on the "accessing or using" part right at the beginning of the TOS. Maybe include a definition for what "accessing" is and can include in the context of the fediverse?
Then again it might not matter, idk.
Lemmy.World's Content Policy would apply to all content that is hosted by or served by us. "Served" in this case also means showing federated posts to our local users, which can indeed be moderated on our side.
When a cross-instance user posts to a lemmy.world community, or participates in a LW-hosted post, then the Terms of Service keeps its enforce-ability. You may be able to see Lemmy.World's federated content without visiting the site, but that doesn't mean it can't be moderated by Lemmy.World's admins and community moderators. We were previously having software issues where removals did not federate, but that seems to be in the past now.
tl;dr: If it is visible on Lemmy.World, then it is subject to the ToS
I get how this makes sense, but legally this seems clearly false. The end user is interacting purely with their own instance, its their instance that is pushing the content to LW servers. If we're putting on the big boy pants, we might want to make sure they're the right size. There probably needs to be actual legal consideration about all of this, with a particular look into the implications of federation.
Since we both know how federation works, and asking for a boost from an LW's community user ("posting to a Lemmy.world community") involves an active use of LW (does it?)... broadcasting up/down votes or boosts to LW, does also constitute "active use of lemmy.world", or doesn't constitute "access to and active use of lemmy.world"?
Can a federated user get banned for up/down voting or boosting the wrong content on LW? Can it be for interacting with wrong content hosted on a federated instance that actively forwards the interaction to LW because some other LW user happens to be subscribed to the federated community?
BTW, many legislations require an explicit acceptance of the Terms of Use as a "legal document", making that part either meaningless or illegal. How is it in the case of LW's "Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Republic of Finland Suomen"?
The without ever visiting is the grey area. Federated instances provide the interface to the underlying instances, so yeah you kind of are "visiting" it if you interact. But you're right, the mods of any given instance that host the content source get to decide what happens after the fact.
But the other federated instance is essentially mirroring it. Another instances users are not using Lemmy.world directly, they are viewing mirrored content, and then if they reply, they are doing it elsewhere, and it is getting passed on to L.W.
How was this handled for Usenet? I think it was just assumed that if you were propagating Usenet Content, you knew that implied diversity positive and negative.
IANAL, but probably not, any more than reading and sending email on Gmail visits Hotmail or Proton or has to follow their terms of service. I'm using sopuli.xyz, all the content I interact comes from and goes to there, what it and lemmy.world do after that doesn't have anything to do with me.
Exactly, this TOS probably needs consideration for instance to instance interactions, and lemmy itself should probably have granular options for federation of everything, including mod actions. Federation options seem too course as they stand.
I assume the privacy policy is under construction?
Yes!
Correct! It is still in the works and will be coming out in the future.
#todo: Privacy policy
Feels kind of wrong that that isn't done in tandem with this.
In miscellaneous:
Which section is this referring to exactly?
Not on the same page?
Oops, that's supposed to be referencing to section 7. Fixed, haha.
Minor correction, “4.0.3” is used twice:
Ahhh, very good point!! Fixed, lol. Should be visible in 2-3 minutes.
Also, Section 5 seems to skip from 5.0 to 5.2, there’s no 5.1
Hmm, I am seeing the 5.0.1 on the page. Wondering if it might be a browser issue?
Not 5.0.1… beneath that section, missing 5.1 before 5.2
Ahhhh. True. Fixed
Where are you guys based? Ultimately there is only one legal jurisdiction that applies here
The domain is registered in Netherlands, but all the server IPs seem to be located in the US. Not that IP localization is always accurate (I'm actually not sure how it works at all)
Could be Cloudflare?
Hmm... I wonder if cloudflare servers in the US would subject a website to US laws. Maybe for only certain types of content? Or does any content passing through the.... well any country... subject it to that lands laws.
I believe it transpired awhile ago that the servers are physically located in Finland but they do use CloudFlare. As such, I would assume (as oppose to know) that the legality rests on Finnish law. CloudFlare's responsibilities are often tested but there does seem to be a large grey area. This is an interesting read concerning German law on DNS resolvers in general and CloudFlare in particular.
Yeah, it is an interesting legal topic. I saw this case where cloudflare was deemed not responsible in an instance of copyright infringement. I guess ultimately that's up to cloudflare and the countries they operate in to deal with.
It does feel like DNS resolvers are the next battleground. I can't remember the provider (NextDNS maybe?) but a DNS resolver was threatened by several very large media companies that they would sue if the provider didn't block resolution to pirate sites. The provider caved IIRC.
CloudFlare might have deep enough pockets to take on Sony/Disney or even EU law but the smaller providers certainly don't.
Thank you for asking this, the part about users not using LW for illegal activities is also unclear to me, is it an illegal activity in my country where I'm posting from, or an illegal activity where LW is registered. For example, being gay might be illegal where I live, it won't stop me accessing queer communities online.
That's an obvious situation for me, because it's such an unjust law, but a more vague example might be an 18 year old in the USA and and 18 year old in Australia discussing the consumption of alcohol and how to make homebrew. One of those people are breaking local laws. In the grand scheme of things this is a relatively harmless situation, but would this technology be a violation of the T&S?
Accept
Is commercial splatter horror fine? What about a bit of good old eldrich horror?
This sentence is a little unclear to a native speaker. Maybe change "leading" to "constituting".
I also suggest that maybe an extra clause could be added to pick up CP related content that may not be illegal, such as drawings, hentai and AI generated content that depicts minors involved in sexual or other inappropriate acts. It doesn't quite fit into 5.04 as it may not necessarily be illegal (IDK) , or 5.06 as it may not necessarily involve gore or violence.
Well good luck in defining what constitutes “a minor” in a drawing.
I think it’s fine like this, most openly loli/shota-friendly instances are defederated anyway, I don’t think the “gray area” where most hentai falls is bothering anyone.
It’s not about defining it, it’s about giving yourself a pre communicated basis to remove content that may be disagreeable but not strictly illegal.
I see you removed the rules against transphobia and clarified that content can't be reported if it's not against the new rules. That sucks
Why would we need to spell out every form of these acts? Curious.
For what I expect are similar reasons the list of forbidden image and text content gets so detailed:
I now know from this list that posting Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" would be problematic even though it wouldn't occur to me that medieval illustrations of fictional torture would break the rules. And I now no longer know whether this instance considers the usage of variously themed slurs as against the rules, especially in contexts where they're not direct personal user attacks.
What is socially acceptable obviously varies widely from culture to culture, and definitely instance to instance. The brief list from the previous version helped me to identify the overall culture of the instance to figure out if I would be welcome here. Now instead I'm just not sure if a sweet Aztec decorated human skull from c. 1350CE is allowed because it is half literal human remains, half turquoise, haematite and gold mosaic.
I appreciate that finding the balance here is very difficult. It may just be because it's late and I'm tired, but I feel less certain about what the expectations are with this version than I did the previous. I hope you will consider returning a bit more detail to section 5.
That statement is a bit like someone saying 'all lives matter' in response to people saying 'black lives matter' after another black person is gunned down.
Did you guys talk to a lawyer before doing this? Cause I think a lawyer would explain to you exactly why.
You probably should have talked to a lawyer before trying to draft up a legal document.
Should there also be entries to cover Ginger, Blonde, Black, or a million other specific labels which could be targeted?
Isn't singling out Transphobia a form of predjudice? Shouild we also add to the list a few thousand other terms which some people find 'edgy'?
There are very obviously groups of people who are targeted for violence, threats, harassment and abuse based solely on who they are. Ginger, blonde and black haired people don't experience this.
By making it explicit in a ToS or set of rules that attacking these groups of people is against the rules, the Admins could've made those users feel just a little bit safer and welcome on their server. Removing those explicit rules makes them, by contrast, feel unsafer and less welcome. That's one of things .world admin team have achieved with this change.
This is an understandable concern and was certainly not the intent to make users feel unsafe or less welcome. We are going to look at adding something to cover this.
I'm not subscribed to lemmy.world but I got a proposal on a way to handle this. Here it is:
I believe that this should be enough to clarify to those most people that no, bigotry is not allowed in your instance.
I think that's good but protecting religion is questionable to me. I'm not saying its OK to attack people based on their religion but religion isn't a property of a person in the way their ethnicity or sexuality is, it's merely an opinion someone holds. If your wording is adopted, it'd be nice to see the difference between attacking who someone is and an opinion someone holds made clear.
Also needs to reference (dis)ability IMO.
The groups listed as example (notice the "etc.") are up to the admins, I'm suggesting mostly how to word it. It's easy to include/exclude one if they so desire.
That said, I do think that "religious affiliation or lack of" should be included. It might boil down to opinions + a bunch of epistemic statements, but it's consistently a source of persecution.
Personally I believe that this is usually easy - you look at the target of the claim. For example:
This is also up to the admins here though, not me.
I understand where you're coming from with this, but note that complains about ableism, in social media, are often shielding abled people against criticism, not disabled people from prejudice. Stuff like:
That's good to hear.
Is there significant and active discrimination happening to those "millions" of other specific labels where people show up dead on the news in the majority of countries and that exhibit targeted hatred online? Can you point out a single example for a ginger or a blonde being killed because of the color of their hair? Are there statistics about this from various countries?
No, that's very disingenuous and sounds like rhetoric someone would use to ease up the rules about transphobia. I'd argue that what you're doing is a form of semantic manipulation.
I hope this is better than reddit😅
Your post has been removed by Reddit.
Reason: threatening violence
Your first post and already 5 upvotes.
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
Did you use the mastodon.world Terms of service as a base?
Thanks for your inquiry. It was not used as a base.
No problem. 👍
How many people were in charge of writing this, and manage Lemmy.world more generally?
I wrote this, since this constitutes our Terms of Service and that is more my field in Lemmy.World.
For an organization chart of lemmy.world and to have a good view of the team structure, please visit team.lemmy.world
That org chart is neat 👌
Great job! 💪
I appreciate that this information can be tracked with git.
How do you fit in? You’re not listed on team.lemmy.world. At least the mobile view. Or do you fall under
?in community_team on the org chart?Hmm, I am able to see myself in the "Site Group" tree when I check. May it be a configuration issue? Try refreshing.
Also, the graph will be updated very soon, haha.
Maybe a CDN thing? Even viewing the GitHub repo source code I’m not seeing clueless_stoner. Eve…. Oh wait.. there you kind of are. If I go to my computer and hover over
@AvaddonLFCor view the markdown I see it links tohttps://lemmy.world/u/clueless_stonerwhereas everyone else is a 1:1 mapping.Maybe it’s how my Lemmy client operates, but I see all your posts as clueless_stoner, even your profile page. The team page is the only occurrence I see of AvaddonLFC
Hahaha yes, that's me. clueless_stoner is my username while AvaddonLFC is my display name. It can be confusing.
I don’t see you either. Opera iOS.
That might be because my username and display name are different.
Ahhh I see now. :)
Doesn't this imply that only having a temporary ban allows you to keep going on some other account? Seems like quite the loophole.
Idk, it seems pretty clear.
If you got a permaban then you’re not welcome.
The world temporary isn’t used there. There would be nothing to stop someone from just making a new account in either case. But if it were obvious someone was trying to get around that clause then it would be more than enough of a reason to swing the ban hammer.
I don't think a TTL of 5 minutes is typical, also, if the servers are all located in the US, wouldn't US law apply?
Only if they were.
literally (jokingly) 1984
Literally 1984
Love it, glad to be here on .World.
joke's on you. i can't read
Is there any chance of going back to pure and enlightened Anarchism?
Lots of people think anarchy is what they want, until they get it.
no rules sounds pretty good, maybe there's even an instance for it. but i guarantee that there will be a LOT of nazis and queerphobes. and that's not why i am here.
Community is vital for anarchy to work. It's hard to do that in an open online community tbh.
Not to put your point down, but to enritch it.
This phrase was said about ideologies like capitolism, communism, liberalism, conservitism, anarchism (like tou did) and likely more.
each time I pose a question, was the pure vision an evil one, or did it get twisted apon or after implementation
I argue that, in the specific problem space of Internet discussion communities, the absence of central guidance has been shown again and again to result in a race to the bottom.
That's why computer networks have struggled with the problem for literally decades, since before http was a glimmer in the mind of Tim Berners-Lee. I well remember early USENET node providers claiming "completely uncensored" access to all newsgroups, only to find within 6 months or a year that they had to dramatically scale back on that promise by restricting the newsgroup list, or cancel certain customers, due to lawbreaking behavior. The problems of discussion forum moderation gave us Section 230, which grants immunity to site moderators for good-faith actions to restrict distribution of information which is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable".
Section 230 is pretty much an acknowledgment that without moderation, forums will almost inevitably descend into threats and harassment. And if you think that surely even a non-controversial forum could survive without moderation, look at what happened to Ravelry.
I miss the high technical bar to entry. Was great.
Having lived through the "Eternal September" beginnings, I'm sorry but you've got very strongly rose-tinted glasses on.
(Ref)USENET was a cesspool on the order of any modern *chan board or their ilk both before and after the Eternal September. Having a high technical bar to entry just meant most participants were obsessive lunatics with poor socialization (instead of merely half).
this comment smells like a windows irc client
A Windows IRC client ... to access Lemmy?
That would be a high technical bar to entry!
Umm
Sure seems like a lazy way to dismiss the argument, just saying that he actually doesn't know what he wants.
My detailed response
Lemmy.world getting increasingly like Beehaw on steroids. Ironically, for their anti-authoritarian editorial policies, they're increasingly stomping down what is and isn't acceptable. Most people who like to be treated like adults fortunately have lemm.ee or Lemmy.ml
Signed, former Lemmy.world resident
Tell me you didn't read the TOS without telling me you didn't read the TOS.
Whats your complaint? You can't:
Can you specify which of the above you take issue with? If I missed something in the TOS that you're taking issue with, I'm curious what it is.
Otherwise I think you're lost and looking for a different thread.
My response was here: https://lemm.ee/comment/5092425
I'll save retyping.
You know you can search for your username and see all your accounts right? Your Lemmy.World one is far from the most active.
Yes most people want to be treated like adults and there is nothing in the ToS that prevents them from doing so. Which of the terms do you have a problem with?
Firstly, I have more than one account for different purposes. These were created when performance problems were rampant, and my view was always to return, and then the Hexbear defederation happened before even federation occurred based on speculation. It was much quicker than Exploding Heads defederation was. Based on that decision and the way it was worded in the announcement, which failed to be impartial, detached, or hiding in personal intent, I was hesitant to return fully. See the lemm.ee announcement taken for contrast which was done by someone with more than enough reason to defederate, but they approached it in a balanced and mature manner. In line with that, this can become quite sinister:
"Always post compliant content that upholds the rules of the individual community and the website, and is of personal interest to you."
"uphold the rules of the website" and ensure posts are "compliant". It very much comes across as though world is a political site, and has taken a clear editorial line. Anyone from the left isn't welcome... and steps will be taken if it makes anyone feel any cognitive dissonance. lemmy.ml, lemm.ee and shit.just.works are far superior general purpose instances.
Interestingly enough, you have the following:
"Vote for the content, not for the person."
and yet you decided to search me, and go for the ad hominem. Playing the person and not the point. I'm getting the anyone that disagrees is a problem vibe here.
Ok
who asked nerd
Ok
Ok
So Lemmy.world is just as good as Lemmy.ml & Lemmygrad etc?
Just that lemmy.world can't have a team of full time fact checkers, so we have to be adults and do our own research.
That sounds more like a cop out though. Like not having to moderate blatant disinformation, which is exactly what happens on the mentioned instances.
As a community moderator (c/games) we try to.
Not so long ago we got a topic on Chinese games that ended up in a cesspool of sinophobia.
I did what I could to clean up the blatant insults from both side while mostly keeping the interesting part, but spent probably two days keeping an eye on it to prevent it from degenerating again 😅.
The problem is in such a case that both sides believe in their side of the truth and refuse to acknowledge that the other side got some good points too.
By keeping moderation from having to be the judge, jury, and executioner, we hope to provide a common ground on which all parties can debate. Moderation is here to keep baseless insults somewhat at bay, and keep illegal content out of our instance.
Examples like this are of course hard for me to judge from the outside. Is boycotting China as much as possible because of their government sinophobic already?
I'm talking about proper disinformation & extremistic comments, like genocide apologists, calls for violence and such. I think there's things we can agree to disagree on, and things that just shouldn't have a place at all on any sort of social media, because of their fundamentally destructive nature to our societies.
You got terms of service, now. Looks sketchy. The yee old code of conduct was a good way to go. This here is a terms of service. The kind you click on to agree to most of the time. So sketchy it makes me think oh yeah, I haven’t agreed to them yet. Never going to. At least for noe I can say no and continue onward. You really want to enslave me but I’m not going to be your slave. Your terms of service can suck my balls.
You are free to delete your account.
Yeah under the terms of service I’m also free to be a pain in the ass.
Let me show you how freely you can be a pain in the ass.
Classic mod.
enslavement?
bruh really forgot that there's other instances
I'm here from kbin and having a good laugh at people who are truly upset. This is one of the great things about the fediverse.
My god just go to 4chan and disappear from this site please.
As I said before, lemmy.world is now a corporate whore. They deleted my account instantly when I said so from my lemmy.world account. Now I can say so and it’s more difficult. Go suck my balls, lemmy world. Having a code of conduct was good. Having a terms of service is corporate shill terrritory and you’ll suck my balls forever.
They deleted your account because you said you were going to cause trouble for them.
What did you expect to happen? Maybe you should read the terms again haha.
"Damn fascists!"
you seem like a reasonable person
lol or…or…they aren’t corporate since none of this is profitable, and you’re just an asshole
People like you are why Lemmy will never take off. Take your meds.
If this is what it turns into, i hope it never takes off