Hello world!
We would like to start by saying thank you ❤, no really 🙏 THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!
Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard 📣 loud and clear📣.
So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We’ve added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.
We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that’s no fun!
Sooo…
The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.
Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.
Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.
We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!
=Sincerely,
Fedihosting Foundation
PS … also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘
There’s something about the response: “there’s nobody stopping us from being tyrants” that doesn’t sit well with me…
Any instance can be as tyrannical (or not) as they want (barring any actual laws in the country where the instance is hosted). If you don’t like it, go to another instance.
I didn’t ask.
The alternative is forcing every community to abide my the same policies regardless of what they want to build. I’m actually glad that there is a difference between shitposting and serious discussion communities.
They literally do this. Or at least, are supposed to do this. https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
I don’t think the statement “you could create a community where you just ban everyone from the community that you dislike” is compatible with a ‘welcoming environment for all’.
You are referring to the code of conduct for Lemmy contributors, i.e. developers working on Lemmy. This has nothing to do with how instances are run. The software (Lemmy) has no bearing on how it is used (by the instances).
I highly doubt developers would be working with a different ethical set than instance staff. That makes 0 sense. What would be the point of making the software inclusive if all of the instances can just ignore it and exclude?
Well despite your doubt, that is the case though. Every instance is run by different admins and thus are run by different ethics. There are plenty of examples of instances with different (some would say extreme) viewpoints. I’m an instance admin myself and have a certain ethic about Feddit.dk. That’s the whole point of the Fediverse really - users get to choose the instance with the ethics and whatnot that they want.
Lemmy is just software, it cannot control how you use it. There is no mechanism for the Lemmy developers to control any of the instances. Such a mechanism is impossible to make and the Lemmy devs are not interested in making it anyway. The Lemmy devs built Lemmy because they wanted to and donated the code to the world (via open source licenses).
The point of the code of conduct is to establish how developers work together on the software project, which is something the developers control. So it makes perfect sense for them to make a CoC for the contributors, as that CoC will set the stage for how all the contributors work together on the code.
Don’t buy it, sorry. What would be the point of applying a set of ethics to one group of people involved with a project and not another group of people involved with that same project? That doc addresses users, admins, moderators, and developers.
Edit: It literally says this in the same Code of Conduct section:
<Moderation These are the policies for upholding our community’s standards of conduct
When it says “our community” there, it refers to the developer community, not the instances. Also most of the CoC is just taken from the CoC used by the Rust language community I believe.
Nobody is applying the CoC you linked to the instances. How exactly is it that you imagine the Lemmy developers would even enforce such a CoC? They have no control over the instances.
Also the Lemmy software project is not the same project as any individual instance. They are run by different people with no relation aside from the fact that the instances use Lemmy. There is no contract or anything between the devs and the instance admins.
I’m sorry but you are misunderstanding something here.
Ideally you would enforce these policies collectively by de-federating an instance, “that’s the beauty of a decentralized system”. The problem thus far with Lemmy is how terribly it has failed this goal. Too many are nonchalant about letting autocracy fly no problem. Meanwhile the .world instance, which suffers from this problem of absolutism, is where most of the sub members flock. There’s such a tiny user base here (probably because of the tendency for staff to smother the part about social media that’s most important: inclusivity of ideas and perspectives) that I’m sort of on the fence about leaving entirely if the only populated ones are essentially closed off to me.
You better believe I’m going to criticize this terrible system. The idea of creating a place for voices, except they’re all the same voices, is a remarkable failure.
I think it’s a good thing that people can set up their communities however they wish as long as they don’t go against server rules.
That’s the thing though, it’s in direct opposition to Lemmy’s code of conduct, not to mention it’s completely off putting to be so blasé about infringements on such an inalienable concept as free speech.
Free speech is not an “inalienable” concept. To be honest, the adjective “inalienable” doesn’t well describe a “concept”, more “right” or a “privilege”. Nobody can take away a concept from you, only the exercise or realisation of that concept.
That said, the Lemmy dev’s code of conduct is not a binding document, and given their political views, I wouldn’t even bother opening it if I was adminning my own instance. And nobody owes you your freedom of speech - if an instance decides to enforce the rule “no talking about politics on Wednesdays”, nobody has any right to anything else. Preference, sure, but right? No.