I am thinking about creating an outpost in Lemmy for Reddit’s r/moderatepolitics subreddit. Briefly, the goal of the subreddit is to bring together a variety of viewpoints with rules that are mostly limited to not attacking other users and some operational rules (e.g. no editorialized headlines). These loose rules have allowed us to bring together voices from across the political spectrum for discussions that usually get stuck in echo chambers.
When I was looking through the Code of Conduct for the lemmy.ml instance, I noticed that it bans “oppressive” speech. That raised an immediate red flag for me. That term is so vague and broad as to leave an immense amount of discretionary power to an admin making a moderation decision. I know several of the admins on this instance are very left wing. Nothing wrong with that, but many on the left hold a rather expansive view of what oppressive speech is that includes even moderate or center-right discourse, never mind further right.
Is there any room to build this type of community on lemmy.ml? Or will we be forced to choose between our own instance or living with the threat of intervention that labels some elements of community discourse as oppressive?
I think your community will not fit well on lemmy.ml, but not necessarily because of the code if conduct. The thing is that this site is still relatively small, and every thread shows up on the frontpage at one time or another. Because this community is quite leftist, you can expect comments from these people, and probably some kind of conflict.
Luckily there is a solution for that. Lemmy uses federation, which means that anyone can start their own instance, with their own rules. Users on different instances can communicate with each other very easily. You could consider putting your on one of the existing instances, but /r/moderatepolitics is quote big, so you probably want your own instance sooner or later. Hosting an instance is relatively easy, and I’m sure you can find someone in your community who can do that.
Info about existing instances and hosting a new one
Yeah, that’s a good point. Fortunately I have the technical know how to get an instance up and running. Unfortunately, I am not so familiar with community management when it comes to server-wide rules. I’ve only been a subreddit-level moderator, which is much narrower in scope. But hey, it’ll just be an adventure.