I totally have to disagree. Instance owners are attacked here on Lemmy for trying to keep their instance in line with the local laws where they live. You know, which they totally have to keep free of legal trouble that might cost them a lot of time, money or even put them into jail. It’s not great when admins have to deal with utter idiots in their free time. Remember the whole Nicole fiasco where some poor girl was harassed via a spam attack? Remember that spam attack with the scat porn? All this hate going around with the war in the middle east? I can totally understand why someone burns out dealing with this crap in their free time. Come home from work after a hard day. Another scat spam attack you have to deal with. Another Hamas sympathizer calling you genocide lover because you deleted his propaganda. Someone else attacking you because you removed content that is illegal where you live and you hope that no authority saw it before you deleted it. Go to bed. Go to work. Repeat.
A bit offtopic, but why would anyone want to keep their instance in line with local laws? Aren’t internet sites operating under jurisdiction of where they are hosted? Or is it just some coincidence that those people decided to host their stuff at datacenters at their local proximity? When I’m choosing hosting the first thing I think about: “hmmm I shouldn’t host in country where I live because I don’t want to ever have any problem with local authorities, and if I host elsewhere authorities there won’t be able to reach me physically so the worst thing that could happen is the site gets shut down”.
There are multiple reasons: If you want to fund your instance by donations, you need to be able to act under your real name. You might get away with a totally anonymous instance which you are funding via cryptodonations and which you are hosting at a provider who really does not care about KYC, but that is also illegal in many jurisdictions. There is totally a case for a lemmy instance admin to be known publically, to be able to interact with the community in person, to be able to go to meetups or to be able to give talks at conventions.
And if you are not living in some country with totally crazy politics, most local laws are totally fine. Do not post hardcore pornography. Do not spread hatred or calls for murder and hate speach. Keep the piracy a little bit less obvious. Don’t allow hardcore pornography and have a solid process to keep child porn from your platform. That might be different if you’re living in Iran, Saudi-Arabia or Afghanistan, but in a western country it is totally ok to be in line with local laws.
Since you’re on the same instance as me, I assume you are a mod/admin there. Let me use this opportunity to say thank you to you and all the other mods on feddit.org for helping to keep that place one of the most pleasant online spaces I’ve come across in my years on the internet. As far as I can tell from the outside you and the others are doing a great job.
We arent really in disagreement tho. I am absolutely empathetic with their situation and their burnout. Im just saying they should have seen it coming. Those two things arent contradictory. I just find it odd how one can invest so much time into a public project, without being aware of the realities of having to moderate it. Im thankful for the people that host instances, but i will never do it, because i know how much of a pain it is.
Not sure if “they should have seen it coming” really is the way to think about this. Yes, moderation is hard. Yes, it makes sense to build a team doing moderation. But let’s be honest, Lemmy is insaner than other forums due to its federated structure.
I totally have to disagree. Instance owners are attacked here on Lemmy for trying to keep their instance in line with the local laws where they live. You know, which they totally have to keep free of legal trouble that might cost them a lot of time, money or even put them into jail. It’s not great when admins have to deal with utter idiots in their free time. Remember the whole Nicole fiasco where some poor girl was harassed via a spam attack? Remember that spam attack with the scat porn? All this hate going around with the war in the middle east? I can totally understand why someone burns out dealing with this crap in their free time. Come home from work after a hard day. Another scat spam attack you have to deal with. Another Hamas sympathizer calling you genocide lover because you deleted his propaganda. Someone else attacking you because you removed content that is illegal where you live and you hope that no authority saw it before you deleted it. Go to bed. Go to work. Repeat.
A bit offtopic, but why would anyone want to keep their instance in line with local laws? Aren’t internet sites operating under jurisdiction of where they are hosted? Or is it just some coincidence that those people decided to host their stuff at datacenters at their local proximity? When I’m choosing hosting the first thing I think about: “hmmm I shouldn’t host in country where I live because I don’t want to ever have any problem with local authorities, and if I host elsewhere authorities there won’t be able to reach me physically so the worst thing that could happen is the site gets shut down”.
There are multiple reasons: If you want to fund your instance by donations, you need to be able to act under your real name. You might get away with a totally anonymous instance which you are funding via cryptodonations and which you are hosting at a provider who really does not care about KYC, but that is also illegal in many jurisdictions. There is totally a case for a lemmy instance admin to be known publically, to be able to interact with the community in person, to be able to go to meetups or to be able to give talks at conventions.
And if you are not living in some country with totally crazy politics, most local laws are totally fine. Do not post hardcore pornography. Do not spread hatred or calls for murder and hate speach. Keep the piracy a little bit less obvious. Don’t allow hardcore pornography and have a solid process to keep child porn from your platform. That might be different if you’re living in Iran, Saudi-Arabia or Afghanistan, but in a western country it is totally ok to be in line with local laws.
Since you’re on the same instance as me, I assume you are a mod/admin there. Let me use this opportunity to say thank you to you and all the other mods on feddit.org for helping to keep that place one of the most pleasant online spaces I’ve come across in my years on the internet. As far as I can tell from the outside you and the others are doing a great job.
I’m not a mod there, but thank you :)
Oh, I totally read that as you talking from experience :)
Or do you mod somewhere else?
Post your thank you message to
!main@feddit.org
I am sure feddit.org admins/mod and other relevant people will love this.
We arent really in disagreement tho. I am absolutely empathetic with their situation and their burnout. Im just saying they should have seen it coming. Those two things arent contradictory. I just find it odd how one can invest so much time into a public project, without being aware of the realities of having to moderate it. Im thankful for the people that host instances, but i will never do it, because i know how much of a pain it is.
Not sure if “they should have seen it coming” really is the way to think about this. Yes, moderation is hard. Yes, it makes sense to build a team doing moderation. But let’s be honest, Lemmy is insaner than other forums due to its federated structure.
If you don’t want to be called a genocide lover, then don’t defend a genocide and then double down on it.
Easy.