I think the way Lemmy and some other federated sites are current set up make this a rather difficult subject once you get down to the details. On other parts of the Fediverse, the fact you’re interacting first and foremost with your own home server is made a lot clearer by the website’s design.
You’re absolutely right that an unsuspecting user would expect posts submitted to a “foreign” community would be uploaded there, not locally. There’s even an NSFW toggle right next to the official instance, even when the rules say you’re never supposed to use it! I highly doubt most servers will take action against contents posted in communities outside their jurisdiction, but it’s up to the server administrators to choose how to deal with this.
The rules are just not clear enough, I think. Lemmy.ml says “no NSFW content”, but doesn’t specify whether that means uploading locally or interacting with remote sites.
The unfortunate fact is that server rules are often directly influenced by the effectiveness of moderators. The more a server allows, the harder it becomes to effectively moderate, and the higher the probability that your server ends up getting banned from everywhere else.
The mods over at beehaw wrote an excellent post about how they came to the decisions about the setup of their site. They also ban NSFW content because of moderation difficulties, and sadly they don’t say if that also involves interactions with other servers. However, I think their approach makes it pretty clear what their intentions are, even if the rules themselves are vague.
Again, you’re subject to your site owner’s restrictions. If I were to host a site that accepted sign-ups, I wouldn’t ban people for posting porn on porn sites, though I’d prefer it if they used a different hosting domain. I also probably wouldn’t take action against a user that breaks another server’s rules by doing something perfectly okay on my server. I would take action against users that are abusive on other sites, though.
Perhaps you should simply ask your moderators on their stance about this. I personally chose to self-host exactly because I don’t want to deal with account ownership issues and moderation edge cases. If you’re worried about getting kicked for SFW versus NSFW content, perhaps you should consider doing the same (assuming you have the necessary knowledge to pull that off, of course).
Yeah, I’m not sure there’s a good answer to be found here, but clearer messaging about exactly what the rules mean would help avoid confusion.
I took “no NSFW content” to mean no creating NSFW communities or posting NSFW content to any of the communities hosted there, but I had not assumed it would mean no subscribing to NSFW communities on other instances, or posting to NSFW communities on other instances. Understanding now the way that embedded media works though I’d now assume you could probably subscribe to NSFW communities on other instances, but not post to them.
Personally I have no problem with NSFW content, so I kind of regret signing up on lemmy.ml, but on the other hand there are no lemmy instances that currently allow NSFW content that I could sign up with, and there definitely weren’t any 2 years ago when I created this account.
As for self hosting, while I do have the knowledge to do so, it’s a question of motivation and priorities. I simply don’t want the headache of running a server, I’m annoyed enough as it is just keeping my home systems patched and up to date. I used to run some servers for other things, but after not even logging into one for nearly a year (yes, that’s terrible and very risky) I decided to retire them.
I don’t mind NSFW either but until the rules get made clear (or some kind of incident happens) I’d watch out with NSFW content.
For what it’s worth, setting up a home server isn’t that hard, I have a cron job that applies the Yolo upgrade method (just docker compose pull and hope it stil works when I wake up). I don’t really care if the instance goes down for a while, if I’ve got time to waste on Lemmy then I’ve got time to waste on fixing my server. However, “just host your own server” isn’t useful advice for 99.9% of the population so I’d hate that to be the mantra.
However, based on the recent things I’ve been reading, I wouldn’t really join lemmy.ml even if I hadn’t set up a server of my own. I’ve got nothing against the broader community, but despite the distinction from lemmygrad there’s still some tankie stuff on .ml that I’d rather not see too much of, and the moderators don’t seem to care (or even take part in it). So far beehaw seems to do a lot better in terms of community management but there are also other servers I had in mind before I decided to join the convoluted way.
I had considered setting up an account on beehaw, but the no downvotes thing really bothers me. Plus it still has the no NSFW problem. There’s only a couple people I’ve seen so far on lemmy.ml that post Russian and Chinese propaganda that I’ve had to block, but I also understand that they aren’t technically violating the rules of the server so there’s nothing the admins can (or should) do in those cases. I’m a strong believer in freedom of speech so I’m against censorship in general however I also feel that the corollary to that is that nobody should be subjected to something without their consent. If it becomes more of a problem I might look for a different server, but unfortunately lemmy.ml is one of the biggest instances so many of the communities I’m interested in are based out of it. Even if I registered elsewhere I think I’d still end up subscribed to several of its communities.
Longer term, I feel as if the federation model of lemmy is slightly misaligned. Like the communities and users should be more decoupled or something. I don’t know, don’t have a good solution, just a general feeling like all the pieces don’t quite fit together right currently, but they’re close.
My problem isn’t so much that the weird authoritarian communist propaganda isn’t spread there, there’s bound to be a legacy of course, but the fact the moderation team doesn’t seem to consider it an issue. It’s quite disappointing because it is indeed the biggest server with the most communities.
I think a lot of issues with how Lemmy works could’ve been avoided if it didn’t make all of your posts available to everyone on the server and if it didn’t automatically sync all communities for everyone if just one user subscribes to a foreign community. I can see why they chose this model (more transparent and more efficient, and also more compatible with the wider Fediverse) but it’ll take some getting used to.
At least Jerboa has multi user support, that makes the “multiple accounts for multiple purposes” workaround a lot easier even if it’s not exactly great.
I think the way Lemmy and some other federated sites are current set up make this a rather difficult subject once you get down to the details. On other parts of the Fediverse, the fact you’re interacting first and foremost with your own home server is made a lot clearer by the website’s design.
You’re absolutely right that an unsuspecting user would expect posts submitted to a “foreign” community would be uploaded there, not locally. There’s even an NSFW toggle right next to the official instance, even when the rules say you’re never supposed to use it! I highly doubt most servers will take action against contents posted in communities outside their jurisdiction, but it’s up to the server administrators to choose how to deal with this.
The rules are just not clear enough, I think. Lemmy.ml says “no NSFW content”, but doesn’t specify whether that means uploading locally or interacting with remote sites.
The unfortunate fact is that server rules are often directly influenced by the effectiveness of moderators. The more a server allows, the harder it becomes to effectively moderate, and the higher the probability that your server ends up getting banned from everywhere else.
The mods over at beehaw wrote an excellent post about how they came to the decisions about the setup of their site. They also ban NSFW content because of moderation difficulties, and sadly they don’t say if that also involves interactions with other servers. However, I think their approach makes it pretty clear what their intentions are, even if the rules themselves are vague.
Again, you’re subject to your site owner’s restrictions. If I were to host a site that accepted sign-ups, I wouldn’t ban people for posting porn on porn sites, though I’d prefer it if they used a different hosting domain. I also probably wouldn’t take action against a user that breaks another server’s rules by doing something perfectly okay on my server. I would take action against users that are abusive on other sites, though.
Perhaps you should simply ask your moderators on their stance about this. I personally chose to self-host exactly because I don’t want to deal with account ownership issues and moderation edge cases. If you’re worried about getting kicked for SFW versus NSFW content, perhaps you should consider doing the same (assuming you have the necessary knowledge to pull that off, of course).
Yeah, I’m not sure there’s a good answer to be found here, but clearer messaging about exactly what the rules mean would help avoid confusion.
I took “no NSFW content” to mean no creating NSFW communities or posting NSFW content to any of the communities hosted there, but I had not assumed it would mean no subscribing to NSFW communities on other instances, or posting to NSFW communities on other instances. Understanding now the way that embedded media works though I’d now assume you could probably subscribe to NSFW communities on other instances, but not post to them.
Personally I have no problem with NSFW content, so I kind of regret signing up on lemmy.ml, but on the other hand there are no lemmy instances that currently allow NSFW content that I could sign up with, and there definitely weren’t any 2 years ago when I created this account.
As for self hosting, while I do have the knowledge to do so, it’s a question of motivation and priorities. I simply don’t want the headache of running a server, I’m annoyed enough as it is just keeping my home systems patched and up to date. I used to run some servers for other things, but after not even logging into one for nearly a year (yes, that’s terrible and very risky) I decided to retire them.
I don’t mind NSFW either but until the rules get made clear (or some kind of incident happens) I’d watch out with NSFW content.
For what it’s worth, setting up a home server isn’t that hard, I have a cron job that applies the Yolo upgrade method (just docker compose pull and hope it stil works when I wake up). I don’t really care if the instance goes down for a while, if I’ve got time to waste on Lemmy then I’ve got time to waste on fixing my server. However, “just host your own server” isn’t useful advice for 99.9% of the population so I’d hate that to be the mantra.
However, based on the recent things I’ve been reading, I wouldn’t really join lemmy.ml even if I hadn’t set up a server of my own. I’ve got nothing against the broader community, but despite the distinction from lemmygrad there’s still some tankie stuff on .ml that I’d rather not see too much of, and the moderators don’t seem to care (or even take part in it). So far beehaw seems to do a lot better in terms of community management but there are also other servers I had in mind before I decided to join the convoluted way.
I had considered setting up an account on beehaw, but the no downvotes thing really bothers me. Plus it still has the no NSFW problem. There’s only a couple people I’ve seen so far on lemmy.ml that post Russian and Chinese propaganda that I’ve had to block, but I also understand that they aren’t technically violating the rules of the server so there’s nothing the admins can (or should) do in those cases. I’m a strong believer in freedom of speech so I’m against censorship in general however I also feel that the corollary to that is that nobody should be subjected to something without their consent. If it becomes more of a problem I might look for a different server, but unfortunately lemmy.ml is one of the biggest instances so many of the communities I’m interested in are based out of it. Even if I registered elsewhere I think I’d still end up subscribed to several of its communities.
Longer term, I feel as if the federation model of lemmy is slightly misaligned. Like the communities and users should be more decoupled or something. I don’t know, don’t have a good solution, just a general feeling like all the pieces don’t quite fit together right currently, but they’re close.
My problem isn’t so much that the weird authoritarian communist propaganda isn’t spread there, there’s bound to be a legacy of course, but the fact the moderation team doesn’t seem to consider it an issue. It’s quite disappointing because it is indeed the biggest server with the most communities.
I think a lot of issues with how Lemmy works could’ve been avoided if it didn’t make all of your posts available to everyone on the server and if it didn’t automatically sync all communities for everyone if just one user subscribes to a foreign community. I can see why they chose this model (more transparent and more efficient, and also more compatible with the wider Fediverse) but it’ll take some getting used to.
At least Jerboa has multi user support, that makes the “multiple accounts for multiple purposes” workaround a lot easier even if it’s not exactly great.
Just chiming in to thank both of you for that interesting discussion