Hello World!
We’ve made some changes today, and we’d like to announce that our Code of Conduct is no longer in effect. We now have a new Terms of Service, in effect starting from today(October 19, 2023).
The “LAST REVISION DATE:” on the page also signifies when the page was last edited, and it is updated automatically. Details of specific edits may be viewed by following the “Page History” reference at the bottom of the page. All significant edits will also be announced to our users.
The new Terms of Service can be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/
In this post our community mods and users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World. We hope to discuss and inform constructively and in good faith.
These rules just make lemmy.world to be a poor man’s substitute to reddit, and seems to go against what the fediverse was all about.
First of all, permanent bans. These are great when you deal with people who are never going to change and who are clearly breaking the ToS. The problem is, people change, and admin moderation never is 100% right because no one is 100% right all the time, especially when having to deal with a massive scale of users. Considering how integral social networks are to people’s lives, and that some people are literally children who are growing up, we really should be given a remediational system with them rather than simply “instaban” if this is supposed to be a better social network than the commercial fast buck alternatives.
Second, if you permanently ban users, you run into the same problems as reddit. What happens to all of their previous comments? Do you clear them out from the system even though they had nothing to do with the ban? Do you give users the option to delete it? Do you keep in on the platform without their consent? Do you allow banned users the possibility to export their comment onto other fediverse hosts who might not have the same opinion in regards to a ban as you? How are you complying with the GDPR?
Third, if you try to suggest that a banned user can’t come back and use your platform, what about when they comment from another lemmy host account? Are you going to break the fediverse to enforce bans, or is it local account based only? Are you going to ban lemmy hosts if they refuse to permaban the same people you pemaban?
Fourth, this sort of seems like a three strike system. So, like a “look, I got two strikes way back and suddenly now twenty years after I get a strike, and because of those two, I get banned”.
Overall, it’s very, very vague. Attacking and harrassing groups sounds pretty clear, until you consider how easily it could be applied to mere criticism about a group someone doesn’t like. “participation in individual communities will only be acceptable on the condition that you abide by their rules” seems pretty clear, except when you consider communities whose moderators remove comments under false premises of rule breaking without any explanation. “You waive Lemmy.World … from any claims resulting from any action taken by Lemmy.World, and any of the foregoing parties relating to any investigations by either us or by law enforcement authorities.” - I see many lawyers try to sneak this one, but there are very few courts that wouldn’t allow me to file a claim even with this under a Terms of Service I haven’t even had to explicitly indicate I agree with if, say, lemmy.world decided to violate my GDPR protections because censors in China didn’t like a comment I made about Tiananmen Square, requested my personal private data lemmy.world has on me, and they decided to give it to them.