Recently there seems to be some of misunderstanding what the lemmy.ml instance is about, especially from newer users.
Lemmy.ml has always been a niche site, and it will most likely stay this way. We don’t have any intentions to turn it into a mainstream instance, or set a goal of getting as many users as possible. Our goal is simple: make an instance that people like to use. I would say that we have been successful in this, but obviously it is impossible to satisfy everyone.
The reason for this is that @dessalines and I are paid to develop Lemmy, while donations from lemmy.ml users only make up a negligible part of our income. Besides, having more users would force us to spend more time moderating, and less time for development. Lemmy works quite differently from big tech sites like Reddit in this regard: while they get more money with each extra user through advertising, for us it is the opposite. So we would much rather have a smaller, non-toxic, and friendly userbase, than a large one.
Part of the problem might be that lemmy.ml is described as “flagship instance”, which can certainly be interpreted to mean “mainstream” or “general purpose”. I struggle to come up with a better, more accurate description. If you can think of one, please comment here.
If you dont like the way lemmy.ml works, thats okay. Federation exists exactly to solve that problem, let different groups have their own instances, with their own rules and political views. You can see the list of existing instances, and instructions for setting up a new one on join-lemmy.org.
In particular, I would like to see someone (or a group of people) create a mainstream, or liberal instance. That should help to avoid further drama, and avoid attempts to turn lemmy.ml into something that it is not. @dessalines and I would certainly be willing to help with any technical problems that such an instance runs into, and include it on join-lemmy.org (just like any other instance that meets the code of conduct).
Oh, yeah, the three tiered CoC was an idea that would be internal to the instance. It would essentially be a way to help start communities with a well thought out base that they might then tweak with amendments. I fully support the idea of having some method of categorizing instance moderation policies so that users know what to expect.
I’m not sure how federation would negatively influence lemmy.ml. I would think the worst that happens is that a lemmy.ml admin would need to block a user, which is not much different than them just registering on lemmy.ml and getting banned here. Am I totally off base? Note that I would include any sort of cross-community or cross-instance brigade as a severe site-wide CoC violation.
On lemmy.ml we just have site-wide rules which automatically apply to all communities, and then communities can define additional rules if they want. Not sure where your third tier comes in.
The question of federating with an instance without CoC has simply never come up before, because all other instances use the same one. There is probably no major problem with it, but it needs some thought and discussion first.
My wording probably wasn’t very clear. There would be a set of site-wide rules, then two or more optional suggested CoC’s depending on the desired flavor of community. So in a community that’s devoted to LGBTQ+ people or non-political topics (e.g. tea, cats), it would be appropriate to pick the more restrictive CoC to produce a softer, friendlier environment at the price of self-censorship. But in a political debate space, it would make sense to have a looser CoC to get a diverse set of opinions for the community to mull over. The optional CoC’s would purely be to facilitate creating communities.
The idea is to create some consistency across the instance without forcing a single set of rules on everyone. The /r/moderatepolitics moderators have found that people who are new to the subreddit often run afoul of our rules, particularly our interpretation of what constitutes a personal attack. Having a common set of rules would at least create some consistency from community to community.
Ah I see. For lemmy.ml the current way of doing rules works fine in my opinion, and is more flexible than your idea. But of course you are free to do things differently on your own instance.