

The Nazi symbol laws were one of the ones that came to mind. Strangely, that’s not even consistent among European countries - Austria and Germany will strictly enforce swastika display (although they may provide exceptions for limited artistic and educational use?). But as far as I can tell, it’s legal in Denmark, Italy and possibly Finland. I suspect that legal status would not be so clear if actively being used to promote hate, understandably.
The laws of my region I’m largely familiar with, so I’m not too concerned about abiding by those. But I noticed many instances have in their Terms of Service or Code of Conduct that the user is responsible for ensuring their content complies with the instance’s regional laws - that’s what sparked my curiosity. Other instances like lemmy.world have an oddly unbounded position like “Do not post illegal content of any type”, but I assume is implicitly scoped to their “governing laws” section which lists Netherlands, Germany and Finland - and I’m unsure which would take precedence if there were conflicting laws.
Edit: Another part of the curiosity came from the recent stories about the US taking Reddit to court to compel turnover of information about the person who criticized ICE.









There’s a lot to unpack here. For the sake of convenience, I’m going to assume that what Luminous said was a legitimate call for violence and was therefore not complying with the Lemmy.world code of conduct.
If we assume that, then the Lemmy.world terms say that they can:
I have no idea how many of those had already happened, I’m going to assume for convenience again that some of it did. The site bylaws also say that for community bans and content removal:
I note that all of Luminous’ content was removed, and while the “Our Rights” section says this can happen, it somewhat contrasts with the guidelines for documenting content removal. But there’s still nothing in any of this that suggests defederating from the entire instance is warranted or an appropriate course of action. If community bans are considered a last resort, then it seems logical that defederating has at the bare minimum the same threshold of seriousness.
Let’s assume for convenience again that the comments from one admin can be sufficient cause for defederation, and its absence from the ToS is an oversight. If that’s the case, then the bylaws and prior defederation examples (eg. lemmygrad) suggest that this should be adequately explained. But that didn’t happen, and it’s not clear whether the other admins were involved in the decision.
Even if all of the above reactions to Luminous’ comment were justified and proper, the actions afterwards by lemmy.world admins / mods don’t inspire my confidence. I can see there has been:
Very little here seems to align with the by laws and expectations for proportionate community moderator conduct.
The situation looks to me like it has been poorly handled, and there is no sign of any compromise or admission that any of the events that up to now could have been handled differently, or a process for how it might be handled in the future. I just don’t see much in the way of community building or good will, but I do see the same patterns that have inspired other lemmy.world drama over the years.
If one admin’s comments or actions aren’t sufficient for justifying defederation, then it’s unclear why dbzer0 is being considered for defederation at all. But, if one admin’s comments or actions are sufficient justification, then the situation in this thread opens the door for other instances to defederate from Lemmy.world.