!meta@lemmy.pineapplemachine.com
Info and announcements about the instance.
!meta
@lemmy.pineapplemachine.comIt seems like a good idea to codify something more specific than the front page summary of "Be respectful, and don't spam." That's the gist of it, but here's some specifics:
1. Be Respectful.
1.1. Don't attack or flame others. Make an effort to find civil and respectful ways to express your disapproval.
1.2 Don't be a troll. Don't post stupid things just to get a rise out of someone. Rustle jimmies somewhere else.
1.3. Don't be a bigot. Do not make offensive generalizations about groups of people. This explicitly includes, but is not limited to, racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia.
1.4. Don't use slurs. If a word is broadly considered to be very offensive, then do not use it. Allowances will be made for quotations and other appropriate uses.
1.5. Don't post explicit content to places that are not meant for it. It is not acceptable to post pornography where people would not reasonably expect to see it.
1.6. Don't upload explicit content. Link to content uploaded somewhere else, instead. Please be respectful to the instance host, by not exposing them to legal liability for hosting strictly-regulated media.
1.7. Don't abuse privileges. Moderators who are using their power maliciously or as a joke that degrades others' experience of the instance may have their privileges revoked.
1.8. Don't promote or endorse violence. Don't threaten to harm others. Don't celebrate injury or death or war. Don't encourage self-injury or suicide.
1.9. Don't post obviously illegal things. No CSAM. No drug sales. Et cetera. This is a zero-tolerance policy. Discussion of emulation and piracy is explicitly allowed, but do not upload or directly link to illicit content.
2. Don't spam.
2.1. Don't make bot accounts. Not unless you have prior approval. Ask the admins before you make a bot account of any kind.
2.2. Don't post with inhuman frequency. Otherwise you will be assumed to be a bot.
2.3. Don't post the same thing repeatedly. No one likes having to scroll through a lot of identical posts or comments.
2.4. Don't astroturf. Paid trolls and astroturfing bots are not welcome here.
2.5. Don't post machine-generated content without identifying it as such. It's okay to share generative AI content, but don't try to pass it off as having been made by a human.
2.6. Don't post surveys, adverts, or personal GoFundMes. Don't ask for people's money or information without prior approval from the admins. Sharing crowdfunding links or information about adverts, as opposed to marketing or asking for money for personal use, is allowed.
2.7. Don't promote scams or fraud. Obviously. Do not try to trick others with MLM or rug-pull crypto schemes.
Offenders may be warned and offending content may be removed, and severe or multiple offenders may be banned.
Individual communities may have their own rules that they enforce, in addition to these instance-wide rules. Moderators of individual communities are expected to enforce the instance-wide rules in addition to their own.
I'm here to create a space for discussion. I'm not here to ruthlessly moderate what you post. You're not going to be punished for letting off steam every now and then. Use your judgment, be reasonable, don't go overboard, and we should be fine.
If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to comment here or to DM an admin.
https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/26764
hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one: ##### we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary. — we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related [https://beehaw.org/post/520044?scrollToComments=true] how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below). an unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain. aside from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to: - these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior; - the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances; - our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in; - and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this: > There’s a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it’s not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can’t even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe. > > Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo. and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can at least hang with why. this is also not a permanent judgement. in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities. thanks for using our site folks.
The server that lemmy.pineapplemachine.com is hosted on became unresponsive after an increase in network traffic and CPU usage at approximately 18:10 UTC on 2023-06-08. As of approximately 19:15 UTC, an hour later, the server has been upgraded with additional CPU and RAM resources and has been brought back online. Hopefully the service will be more stable from now on.
Sorry about that!
Lemmy is federated and decentralized and that means that we can all coexist regardless of our differing political opinions. I think it's important to preface this by saying that I am not offended by or concerned with anyone's politics, and I'm certainly not here to argue with anyone about them.
My concern is that users are being banned and content is being removed on lemmy.ml citing a rule that is not publicly stated anywhere that I have seen.
Moderators of lemmy.ml are removing posts and comments which are critical of the Chinese government and are banning their authors.
This came to my attention because of how lemmy user bans are federated just like everything else, and I was confused about why my instance had logged a lemmy.ml user ban citing "orientalism" as the reason for the ban.
Screenshot of my own instance's modlog, as viewed by an admin
I noticed that the banned user had recently commented on a post in !worldnews@lemmy.ml that had been removed with the reason "Orientalist article".
Screenshot of banned user's history on lemmy.ml
Here's the article that was removed, titled "China may face succession crisis". It was published by axios.com, which mediabiasfactcheck describes as having "a slight to moderate liberal bias" and gives its second-highest ranking for factual reporting. The article writes unfavorably of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
https://www.axios.com/2023/06/06/china-may-face-succession-crisis
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/axios/
I had not remembered seeing anything in lemmy.ml's rules that would suggest that "orientalism"—meaning, as I understand it, the depiction or discussion of Asian cultures by people in Western ones—was against the rules. So I checked, and I found that there was not. Not on the instance's front page, and not in !worldnews@lemmy.ml.
Screenshot of instance rules for lemmy.ml
Screenshot of community rules for !worldnews@lemmy.ml
There is a stated rule against xenophobia, but I think that xenophobia is not widely understood to include Westerners writing critically of the actions of an Asian government.
This is where I went from confused to concerned.
Lemmy instances have public moderation logs, which I think is a very positive thing about the platform. So I looked more closely at lemmy.ml's moderation log.
Please note that moderation logs are also federated. It's hard to be 100% sure which instance a mod action is actually associated with, looking at these logs. The previously mentioned user ban and post removal were, I think, definitely actions taken by lemmy.ml moderators. My own instance's mod log identifies the banning moderator as a lemmy.ml admin, and the removed post was submitted to a lemmy.ml community. I've done my best to verify that all of the following removals were really done by lemmy.ml moderators, but I can't be absolutely certain. Please forgive me if any of them were actually made on other instances that do have an explicitly stated rule against orientalism.
Removed Comment Ah yes. Being against China's racist genocide is racist. China, the imperialist ethno-state, is clearly innocent. by @CrimsonOnoscopy@beehaw.org reason: Orientalism
Removed Comment Lol. Thinking some countries have better governments than others is supremacist? Whatever, dude. By the way. If there are any countries with decent governments, I don't know of them. But like. If there were decent countries, they wouldn't behave like China. by @balerion@beehaw.org reason: Orientalism
These following moderator actions did not specifically cite orientalism, but did not seem to be breaking any of the instance's or community's explicitly stated rules.
Banned @0x815@feddit.de reason: Only makes anti russia and anti china, crosspostst from reddit. 2nd temp ban expires: 9d ago
Removed Comment Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet are all Colonies of China, which it treats as Colonial Territories, by - Forcibly destroying the local culture. Forcefully extracting to harm of the locals. Genocide, abuse, kidnapping, rape. But there is no point in engaging to you. You are a liar. You know you are. When you deny genocides, you put yourself on the same side as the fascists and reactionaries of the past. by @CrimsonOnoscopy@beehaw.org reason: Rule 1 and 2
I have no affection for the Chinese government and I do not call myself a communist. I would not enforce a rule against orientalism on my own instance. But I think that lemmy.ml's moderators are entitled to enforce whatever rules they please. It's only that, as the largest single lemmy instance so far, I believe that they have an obligation to disclose these rules, and an obligation to not ban users or remove content for failing to follow unobvious and unstated rules.
I'd like to raise some awareness about this, and I'd like to openly ask the moderators of lemmy.ml to state the rules that they intend to enforce clearly and explicitly.
I will be very clear and state it again: I am not asking for anyone to change their opinions or to not enforce a rule that they believe in. That is the great thing about lemmy, that we can coexist in this federated community even when we don't share the same opinions. What I am asking is for lemmy.ml's rules to be clearly stated, because I think it does not reflect well on the broader community if the predominant instance moderates its users and content according to rules that are not being explicitly disclosed.
I did not realize it, but the setup tool I ran before did not include automatically setting up SMTP to send outgoing emails...
Anyway, it's manually set up now. Users who request to register should actually receive an email letting them know when they're accepted, now, email notifications in general should work, and it should be possible to verify an account's email address.
Welcome! I'm trying out this lemmy thing. Let's see how it works out.
This is meant to be a chill place where you can post whatever you want, as long as you're not being a jerk, or spamming, or breaking any laws.
Feel free to comment here or to DM an admin if you'd like to suggest new communities, or to make other suggestions for the instance.