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?
I’ve been sick with the stomach flu for several days and haven’t had a chance to catch up.
I’m not against being a home for any community that follows our rules. I don’t feel a need to be officially considered the instance of the USA. All are welcome.
Edit: I should add that other languages make it difficult for me to moderate. I’m not against foreign languages on Discuss.Online; however, I do have concerns for moderation. I speak English and know some conversational French. My wife is fluent in French. That’s just a little fyi.
Thank you so much for yourself and lazyguru (not tagging since he indicated a desire not to be involved in the discussion anymore) offering to clarify your vision on your instance. It definitely makes it easier for us all:-).
And I hope you feel better soon!
Rather than reply in the deeply nested thread we are in, I’m going to make this a new comment.
I’m also going to say this again as a preface: I am not a lawyer. None of this should be considered legal advice. Seek your own legal counsel.
I think you might be misunderstanding what “free speech” means in the US. The First Amendment protects us from the government making laws restricting what we can and cannot say. For example, I can say “the President is a moron” and face no criminal consequences for doing so.
However, that freedom is not a blanket immunity—it does not protect us from the consequences of our words. Context is everything.
For instance, while no government agency can make a law preventing you from yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theater, if you do so and someone gets injured or killed in the resulting panic, there will likely be legal consequences. You wouldn’t be charged with saying “fire” itself, but rather with knowingly causing a panic that any reasonable person would expect to lead to injuries. Victims or their families could also sue you in civil court.
The First Amendment doesn’t protect anyone not physically located inside the borders of the US or a US-controlled territory. For example, a US citizen vacationing in China wouldn’t be protected for speaking out against the Chinese government.
For those outside the US, it’s also important to note that hosting an instance in the US doesn’t shield you from your own country’s laws, which might differ significantly.
Interestingly, you might find that an instance in another country, such as Germany, would provide stronger data privacy protections. Given how little many US citizens seem to value privacy—continuing to allow our federal government to pass laws enabling warrantless surveillance—other countries may have an edge. (No, I’m not a tinfoil hat wearer. Besides, everyone knows tinfoil is reflective and would just make it easier for them to spot you from satellites.)
That’s my long-winded, sometimes whimsical but mostly serious way of saying: Please stop looking for the line that isn’t okay to cross. This instance exists to foster welcoming, friendly conversations. If you make an honest mistake, you’ll get a warning so you know where the line is.
If you want an instance where you can say whatever you want without any moderation, this isn’t the place.
With that, I’m going to lock this post from further replies because I don’t see how the conversation can continue constructively. If you believe the thread should be reopened, feel free to DM me, and I’ll consider it. Please note that this is for discussing whether to reopen the thread, not for continuing the debate in private.
I won’t speak for @jgrim@discuss.online (he’s the primary admin, I just pretend to help out 😉), but I see no reason to be a “USA focused instance”. We are open to anyone, anywhere as long as they are interested in open, respectful discourse staying within the code of conduct. Additionally, IMO having instances be “go to” instances kind of goes against a core concept of the fediverse. Anyone can run their own instance and get content from other instances (I don’t recommend it though 😱). Themed instances are fine, but they don’t advertise themselves as the “go to” for that theme, they just simply cater more to that style of communities. And with that description, Discuss.Online’s only “theme” is that you discuss… things, online 😜
Also, IANAL and neither is @jgrim@discuss.online. We are not about to say this instance allows you to comply with all legal obligations for your geographical location in the world - that’s up to you as an individual.
I agree.
Thanks!
After today learning that Lemmy.World is European run and does not support American-style free speech in quite interested in finding a new, American instance. However I DO NOT want to move to hex or some other instance affiliated with pro-fascist, religious, or right-wing propaganda or similar. If such exists I’d love to know which one it is.
If your chief goal is to get away from “tankies”, then I would say Lemmy.cafe or dubvee.org (which uses the Tesseract alternative Lemmy UI), b/c they are the only ones in America (and then there’s https://quokk.au/ in Australia being only the 3rd in the entire world iirc) that defederate from all of the big 3 tankie instances (lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml).
Note there is also PieFed, e.g. the flagship https://piefed.social/, which offers a number of features including the ability to as a non-admin user block all users from any instance of your choice. It also offers things like categories of communities, hashtag support, an embedded YouTube video playing, etc. Though its basic UI is crude and notifications are still wonky, so it’s simultaneously more advanced than Lemmy in some ways while less so in others, and like Tesseract (or Lemmy for that matter:-D), not for everyone (although I do have an alt there and use it daily, so it is usable…mostly).
Though there are a lot of communities on lemmy.ml that some people like, e.g. !firefox@lemmy.ml. Do as you wish ofc.
Personally I have enjoyed Discuss.Online greatly over the past year, due to its fantastic admin support - i.e. superb uptime, quick updates, and especially extremely high reliability of the federation of posts & comments compared to other alts I have had in the same time-period. Its chief drawback - which almost caused me to quit Lemmy altogether early on - was that it federated with hexbear.net and that was getting too annoying to read those. But now that it has defederated from it, that is removed as a detraction.
Read the sidebar text at https://discuss.online/ and see if it might be a good fit for you?
@OpenStars@discuss.online you’ll probably be interested
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/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net. 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 !theonion@midwest.social and !lotrmemes@midwest.social 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:-).
As someone who doesn’t know too much about US politics, and haven’t delved deep in the issue, it seems that the main issue is about “jury nullification for crimes that haven’t happened yet”, which LW considers “advocation to violence”. Is that correct?
If yes, and you are looking for complete free speech, that can include things that can advocate violence (at least for some people), what would remain the difference between this and other instances like hexbear etc?
