Hello everyone,
Following the recent discussions on [email protected] and [email protected] , 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 [email protected]
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?
For anyone wondering what this means, my own take is:
Everyone can still read hexbear’s content in read-only mode, it is now only the interactions that have been severed, due to too many bad-faith occurrences (many links given in this post, or rather in posts linked to from that post, offered as justification by the various instance admins for why they too defederated from HB) where the HB admins have not upheld their own promises regarding the shared codes of conduct nor their own instructions to their userbase (to constrain the trolling to only inside of communities hosted there, where it is more expected and unfortunately for everyone else even outright encouraged by the admin team).
There are many many instances that still remain federated with HB for those that want that. Especially lemm.ee as the #3 Lemmy instance (after #1 which is Lemmy.World with ~80% of the entire Lemmy userbase, and #2 is lemmynsfw.com), or sh.itjust.works as the #4 instance, but also another USA-based one is lemmy.today - see https://lemmy.today/c/[email protected]. This defederation will help keep Discuss.Online true to its own motto of facilitating friendly discussions without that source of trolling spamming us constantly. Conversely, other USA-based instances that defederate not only from HB but also from lemmy.ml is lemmy.cafe and dubvee.org, and both of those are great options as well (though each quite a bit smaller than DO, and the latter has a significantly more narrow on-ramp to the Fediverse that is more akin to Beehaw that is heavily curated to avoid toxicity - which ofc some people will absolutely love, even as others absolutely will hate:-D).
And before someone mentions midwest.social, there seems to be some controversy surrounding claims of abusive moderation practices on that one. It does have some cool communities such as [email protected] and [email protected] but you don’t need an account on that instance to interact with those.
Anyway it is fantastic to have so many options available! In particular, while the worst excesses of HB are easily avoidable by those of us who are already aware, new users will not know, and many are turned away from the entire concept of the Fediverse to come here and see such, and then leave as a result rather than learn how to block them. i.e., HB having been “opt-out” rather than “opt-in” was hurting us, so I am glad to see that trend reversed. You can always find HB content - nobody has taken that away, though indeed you can no longer interact with it using a DO account, due to the limitations of the tools that we have been provided with.
And this in turn makes the Fediverse friendly - again not so much for us who already knew about HB, but for new users who will not know, yet now have a greater chance of sticking around (rather than be intimidated out) in order to find out how great we are:-).
I am excited to see what will come of this:-).
I guess my question was more about “why we think a US-focused instance is needed”, I wasn’t even thinking that much about the HB defederation in this case
I thought you mentioned they were related as in the presence of HB trolling would turn away too many Redditors from wanting to stay on Lemmy (it almost did me), so while definitely the defederation is a different topic, yet it is related as in a necessary precondition even if not sufficient on its own.
And I put so much material about other instances in case for some people the defederation of HB was a dealbreaker, now they know what options there are moving forward. Although personally I’m very happy with this outcome:-).
Would you be interested to mod communities here?
Not as the main driving force but I’d help out sure (I’d have to learn the tools, I’ve never done it on Lemmy before). Do you have ideas for a team yet?
As a non US citizen, I would rather not become a mod on for instance a “AskUSA” community, but I can create threads to try to find candidates on [email protected] or elsewhere
@[email protected] @[email protected] would you be interested in helping to create + moderate an AskUSA community, perhaps on Discuss.Online? I ask b/c I value your judgement:-).
The goal would not be for it to be big & fancy so much as to help make Americans feel more welcomed onto this international space and have a place to ask questions related to the great US of A.
I’ve never modded anything on Lemmy before, so I am unfamiliar with these tools, though I did mod two small gaming communities on Reddit. I was never very good at it tho:-P.