At least for me its very difficult to make the line between preventing hate speech and allowing the freedom. I’m thinking to launch a lemmy instance, but the targeted audience is very sensitive to religion topics, and i’m sure if i allow it, this could lead to hate speech at some point and may fuel violence. Also, from my prospective, i just want my audience find new good things far from porn, porn sites are a lot, and i don`t want to mix it with other topics that can very constructive.
So please tell me your opinion, if banning these 2 topics can effect the freedom of speech.
lol. Thanks for reminding me about my right to grate my dick. It’s essential for a democracy. But, as to being able to decide what an instance is for (and not for), who says it’s “not recommended” to decide? Do you not recommend the norm Reddit has adopted of placing rules on the sidebars? Or the norm to have “Terms of Service” you, as a user, must abide by to use the service? Is it not recommended to do that?
I see your point regarding the clustering of email addresses around a few big players. I agree that is a reality. But what does “meaningful” mean here? Is it not meaningful for me to have the option to not use surveillance capitalist email services? Is it not meaningful for a whole community dedicated to that to not use them? Are things only ever meaningful when a great majority have adopted them? Are minorities never meaningful?
Could you explain how the Fediverse could arrive at an ‘endgame’ where it “isn’t an open system where anyone can connect anymore[, where] only gigantic companies are allowed to participate on a meaningful level”?
On the subject of reddit, I recommend burning it to the ground and salting the earth so that nothing ever grows there again.
“Terms of service” is laughable as a legal concept. If your service remains open to the person, they can use it. If you don’t want it to remain open, take technological measures to keep them out. If you’re unable or unwilling to do that, tough shit.
I think OP is putting the cart before the horse, and being a busybody. This is because he wants his forum to be full of people who are ready to discuss what he wants to discuss, but never stops to wonder if no one wants to do that (or, at least, the people he imagines as participating that they do not want to do that). So he crafts all these rules in his head, before anyone has even started to violate them. And he’s sort of cutting his nose off to spite his face, because there are almost certainly potential conversations on those subjects that he would want to read, to be part of, that he just doesn’t have the imagination to see right now. Even if he could prevent them, he’d be hurting himself.
But more likely, he’s just chasing away people he’d otherwise like to not chase away, because though he would certainly tell them they were welcome if he could know them first, they see those rules and feel uneasy about them despite the fact they would feel no impulse to violate them. You have to really wonder what goes through a rules-nazi’s head sometimes, even if it is uncouth to say aloud that you wonder what goes through their heads.
And given that forums are all about attracting a critical mass of people, such a policy just undermines that requirement. The network effect is a removed.
Go spin up an email server. It’s easy, it’s like a one-liner using docker.
You’re not allowed to meaningfully participate in email. You’re automatically blackholed out of the system. You can consume email, provided by some other company. They won’t even charge you really (just force shitty ads on you, that they won’t even try very hard to keep you from blocking!).
This is a system you are not allowed to participate in. And, if we’re talking Lemmy-like forums on the fediverse, some day that will be the case too. If we go down that route.
If I have to draw a picture, I suppose. 5 or 10 years from now (or fewer, or more), you’d have alt-righters connecting more than more instances to the fediverse. As has already happened. But instead of just a few of these, hundreds and single-digit thousands of them. Some would automate that process so that every ijit clicking on a link on Stormfront would spin up a docker image or something like that with zero effort. At some point, it becomes impossible to sniff all of them out as quickly as they come online, until one day those in charge of the largest, oldest instances just decide enough is enough, and new instances are blackholed entirely.
And sure, you can log on to those instances, and still do toots and make comments, but now you’re not really participating, you’re just consuming.
Same happened with email. Not even sure when that happened, I think the 1990s… my technical hobbyist skills weren’t quite up to it to have done that back when it was still possible, and so I’m unsure of the exact date.
You might even like this outcome. It really depends on how well you identify with the dominant faction, though if I had my guess it will be some hybrid of the typical corporate actors and the large non-profits that share their culture. Good luck.