Hello World,
following feedback we have received in the last few days, both from users and moderators, we are making some changes to clarify our ToS.
Before we get to the changes, we want to remind everyone that we are not a (US) free speech instance. We are not located in US, which means different laws apply. As written in our ToS, we’re primarily subject to Dutch, Finnish and German laws. Additionally, it is our discretion to further limit discussion that we don’t consider tolerable. There are plenty other websites out there hosted in US and promoting free speech on their platform. You should be aware that even free speech in US does not cover true threats of violence.
Having said that, we have seen a lot of comments removed referring to our ToS, which were not explicitly intended to be covered by our ToS. After discussion with some of our moderators we have determined there to be both an issue with the ambiguity of our ToS to some extent, but also lack of clarity on what we expect from our moderators.
We want to clarify that, when moderators believe certain parts of our ToS do not appropriately cover a specific situation, they are welcome to bring these issues up with our admin team for review, escalating the issue without taking action themselves when in doubt. We also allow for moderator discretion in a lot of cases, as we generally don’t review each individual report or moderator action unless they’re specifically brought to admin attention. This also means that content that may be permitted by ToS can at the same time be violating community rules and therefore result in moderator action. We have added a new section to our ToS to clarify what we expect from moderators.
We are generally aiming to avoid content organizing, glorifying or suggesting to harm people or animals, but we are limiting the scope of our ToS to build the minimum framework inside which we all can have discussions, leaving a broader area for moderators to decide what is and isn’t allowed in the communities they oversee. We trust the moderators judgement and in cases where we see a gross disagreement between moderatos and admins’ criteria we can have a conversation and reach an agreement, as in many cases the decision is case-specific and context matters.
We have previously asked moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification when this was suggested in context of murder or other violent crimes. Following a discussion in our team we want to clarify that we are no longer requesting moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification in the context of violent crimes when the crime in question already happened. We will still consider suggestions of jury nullification for crimes that have not (yet) happened as advocation for violence, which is violating our terms of service.
As always, if you stumble across content that appears to be violating our site or community rules, please use Lemmys report functionality. Especially when threads are very active, moderators will not be able to go through every single comment for review. Reporting content and providing accurate reasons for reports will help moderators deal with problematic content in a reasonable amount of time.
How is this not clear?
From https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
Our Governing Laws
The website and the agreement will be governed by and construed per the laws of the following countries and/or states:
The Netherlands
Republic of Finland
Federal Republic of Germany
If people are looking for US-based instances, there is https://discuss.online/
That’s at pretty much the very bottom of the TOS and given the number of people who skim or don’t even read TOS and EULA’s (and the number of jurisdictions that have ruled they aren’t a binding agreement), I’d say something directly on the sign up page is warranted. Additionally this information is not anywhere that I can find on any sidebar or about section.
People don’t often “look” for instances specific to their locale when joining Lemmy. That’s a lot of the reason this instance is so large. I would wager that most people who are users of this instance do not know that this instance is based in Scandinavia (and Germany). I bet most of them are also unfamiliar with the laws and regulations of those countries as well.
something directly on the sign up page is warranted.
The sign up page literally asks people to write "I agree to the TOS” in the form, with a link to the ToS
People don’t often “look” for instances specific to their locale when joining Lemmy.
Not so sure, lemmy.ca, feddit.org, sopuli.xyz, aussie.zone and midwest.social are in the top 20 of most active instances. If you go top 30, you find feddit.nl, feddit.uk and jlai.lu
Don’t skip the bit about how many people often do not read the TOS or EULA. That’s important to what I am saying. I was literally told when asking about Lemmy instances that lemmy.world was THE recommendation for instances specifically because it was so large and active as a result. Just because there are other instances where the users are local to the locale of the instance doesn’t necessarily undermine my point since what we’re talking about is lemmy.world specifically.
And anything with a .uk or similar is more likely to be identified at first glance as being for that locale which means more of the users would naturally gravitate towards it. Like it or not lemmy.world is a jumping off point for lots of users, plenty of whom move on to other instances (some of which may be an instance more local to them).
