we’ve not created communities such as “mental health”, “legal”

You may not have created specific communities, but both mental health advice and legal commentary are being offered in the communities already created. Does this mean those contents should be avoided and/or reported? I hope not… they’re actually interesting.

There’s an educational burden for you if you want to speak about subjects which have real world effects on others but not on you.

That gets us back to my initial question: if I speak about a subject that has direct effects on me, but only tangentially references effects on others but not on me… what’s the stance on that?

go to the library and find some reading

Fun fact: my “sexualization of minors” ban on Reddit came from citing a book… so this doesn’t seem like a safe recommendation… 😐

People […] won’t particularly like […] amateurishly […] you might find your content removed and if this becomes a repeat problem you may end up temporarily and eventually permanently banned.

I got that, don’t make people uncomfortable. I’m even fine with backing off when made aware of it, even if I actually have more than amateurish knowledge about a subject. Heck, I’m even fine with my expert knowledge getting removed (did that on Reddit myself already).

What I wouldn’t like, is to get banned because someone felt uncomfortable and I wasn’t made aware, or someone thought that someone might have felt uncomfortable by proxy, without a chance to fix it.

If a discussion ultimately questions someone else’s humanity, it’s not a great subject to discuss when those people are present.

I agree with that.

My objection was that there are people “out there” who will use any subject to dehumanize others, even when the subjects themselves are not inherently dehumanizing and can otherwise be discussed with respect. Should we let third parties guide which subjects should be banned, just because someone might have seen them use it in a dehumanizing way?

There is also the matter of which people “are present”, since the contents here are public and even federated, so technically “everyone is present”.

I don’t have the time or energy to build a list of all content in the world aimed at dehumanizing others. If you do, more power to you, I’d encourage you to make and maintain said list with my blessing.

Yeah… it’s not an attractive task. I was thinking that since mods are going to see the content anyway, you could run it as a kind of FAQ, just add items to a list when you see them appear on the instance. Kind of “I’ll know it when I see it, and now everyone else will too”.

I wonder if a list could be extracted from the modlog… I’ll look into that.