There’s a few discussions happening right now because one Lemmy instance is hosting a community for supporters of a certain ex US president which I don’t want to name.
In view of this I wanted to share a few thoughts regarding remote content moderation and my thoughts on how to handle complicated scenarios.
I’ll be brief and expand on this when I do a proper update of the rules, but here’s the gist of it.
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This instance does not condone any sort of race, gender, ethnic, sexual orientation, language, etc… discrimination. While our “no politics” rule does not apply in remote communities and local Yiffit users are free to engage in political debate in remote communities, it is not allowed to use a Yiffit account to campaign or advocate for harmful discriminatory politics.
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Likewise it’s not allowed to use a Yiffit account to engage in harassment, brigading, raiding or similar aggressive and non-constructive behavior, especially if it’s related to flooding, spamming, disrupting remote communities, etc…
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If two or more users of remote instances are having a toxic argument in a remote community (ie. Non of the variables are related to our instance), I’m inclined to give the remote admins and moderators time to solve things. We wouldn’t be able to keep up if we had to immediately act on every remote conflict. That is to say that my / our limited energies will be focused on keeping our spaces safe and I expect remote admins to do the same for theirs.
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If remote content is seriously distributing and very illegal (CSAM distribution, for example) that remote instance will probably be blocked ASAP.
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If remote content is controversial but not illegal, I am inclined to give remote admins to handle the situation. If that remote content is disturbing to our users, I am inclined to choose one of the following:
A) silence the remote community (not yet implemented).
B) block the remote community.
C) silence the remote instance (not yet implemented).
D) block the remote instance (last ressort).
Options A to D will depend on the type of content and the purpose of the remote instance. If it’s merely annoying content, a silence might suffice. If the whole instance is dedicated to systematically attacking human rights and I see 0 or negative value in federating with them, I might consider an instance block even though I hate that option because of my fear that by doing so we are crippling the fediverse. For example, an instance dedicated to doxxing will probably get the axe.
That said, please be prepared to block offensive or controversial remote content first. If the remote content can be avoided by not visiting a certain community or by simply having it blocked, then please allow up to three months for me and any future moderation staff to make a decision. Unless it’s disruptive and urgent, there needs to be a cooldown period before replying to any such request for several reasons:
- To allow remote admins to deal with the situation
- To collect more reports and opinions
- To analyze the situation
As I said before, I’m very worried about the negative impact of snap decisions. If I were to make impulsive and careless bans, users would see being part of a smaller instance with a hot-headed admin as a liability and potentially flock over to larger instances, making the whole point of a distributed network a bit moot.
If a remote anti-furry community were to exist, as much as it would pain me I would have to take things equally as slow.
That said, there are three exceptions:
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Remote content that requires urgent action to prevent harm or avoid very illegal or very disturbing material.
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Remote users interact in a toxic and unsolicited way with our users or communities.
Eg. If that remote anti-furry community I used as an example were to start harassing, doxxing, causing disruption, etc… to Yiffit users or communities I that changes things drastically. That said, if such a community existed I would expect Yiffit users to stay clear from it. Block, report and carry on.
- Temporarily because Lemmy doesn’t have better moderation tools I might have to use a block for remote communities that would otherwise warrant a silence.
That said, please don’t expect the ALL timeline to always catering to your needs and learn to block anything you don’t like as it’ll be much quicker.
In summary: if negative actions or content like harassment or discrimination involves our instance, either users or communities, I’ll do my best to step in as quickly as possible and prevent any sort of negative consequences.
If a controversy involves remote communities and remote users, feel free to report it and please allow time for remote admins and moderators to handle the situation. If the situation is not solved by remote moderation and there’s no urgent need to step in to prevent harm, allow for myself and any future staff to analyze the situation and make a well-thought decision that could take months.
This are my current thoughts on how a small instance can survive in a much larger sea of content and how smaller instances can prove their utility by not taking impulsive and hot-headed decisions which could negatively impact the usefulness and viability of the instance and of federated platforms as a whole. I will keep refining these thoughts and eventually consolidate them into the rules.
Thank you! Any feedback is welcome!
Thank you for posting this, it’s nice to see an official well measured response post.
Honestly, the parts I’m frustrated with are threads and comments being created which are basically “rage bait” which fester an unhealthy “us vs them” mentality between instances. I was optimistic about Lemmy in the starting days of this “migration”, but all of this inter-instance drama and just general vitrol between people are making me uncertain about Lemmy’s future.
I wonder if instances should just have a rule against “instance XYZ is doing Y” type rage bait. It isn’t helpful to anyone, usually massively overblown and IMO matters like this are better served by PM conversations to instance admins.
On Reddit, all this was mostly fine because you could largely ignore the more political and drama oriented subreddits. But here, now that defederation is being thrown around way more than it should, it’s starting to get to the point where it feels like you have to pick an instance where the community isn’t going to witchhunt or get witchhunted by other instances you want to subscribe to.
Can an instance block/“defederate” only a single community yet? I think it is becoming obvious based on the posts in the community in question that it’s not gonna take 3 months to figure this one out. If the remote admin refuses to do anything about that community themselves that’s also a bit troubling.
I appreciate the thoughtful strategy though - kneejerk defederating an entire instance should be avoided at all costs. I suspect this current situation is a troll’s attempt to get that instance defederated from everyone else.
Yes. Admins can remove remote communities from their instance. In this case I’ll wait for sh.itjust.works to deal with it and observe how other instances handle the scenario. I have no sympathies for that community, but unless its users come here to stir up shit, I’ll let others handle this one first. As a small instance we can’t moderate everything that happens remotely, and even though I have the power to nuke that community right now, I feel like its wiser to put the burden on the admins of that instance first and foremost. This whole federation thing can only work if everyone keeps their own turf clean.
