Administration and defederation policy for lemmy.zip

This post aims to clarify principles for how administration and federation is done on lemmy.zip. It is intended to be an overview of general guidelines, not a formal set of rules.

Instance rules

This instance has a set of rules which are always visible on the sidebar of the front page. All users of this instance are expected to follow these rules in all of their activities, including:

  • Community moderation
  • Posting
  • Commenting

⚠️ Our rules apply even when you’re posting in a community on another instance. For example, this means that you’re not allowed to post advertisement spam using your lemmy.zip account on any other instance (even if that other instance has no rules).

Each community hosted on lemmy.zip is free to have additional rules in addition to our instance wide rules, but instance rules supercede any community rules and must always be enforced.

Responsibilities

Admins

  • Ensure that there are no communities on lemmy.zip which break lemmy.zip rules
  • Ban lemmy.zip users who break our rules on other instances
  • Ban users who consistently break rules across multiple communities
  • Purge illegal content from lemmy.zip

Moderators

  • Ensure that posts and comments in their communities don’t break rules
  • Ban users from their communities for consistently breaking rules

Users

  • Downvote low quality content
  • Report rule violations
⚠️ Admins are not responsible for censoring content from other instances.

In exceptional cases (illegal or extremely disturbing content), admins will step in and purge the content from lemmy.zip servers, but in general it is understood that our instance rules do not apply to external users on other instances, and censoring and curating external instances for our users is not a function for lemmy.zip admins.

Defederation

Lemmy is a federated network, so a lot of content will be posted on other instances. It is possible to limit which instances lemmy.zip is federated with, this is called defederation.

Defederating another instance has the following effects:

  • Our users will stop seeing new posts and comments from users of the defederated instance (on all instances)
  • Users of the defederated instance will stop seeing new posts and comments from our users
  • Users of the defederated instance will be prevented from participating in communities hosted on lemmy.zip

As mentioned above, it is not a goal for lemmy.zip to censor and curate external instances. While there are certainly instances which contain content that wouldn’t be allowed on this instance, breaking our rules outside of this instance is not by itself enough of a reason for us to defederate other instances.

We absolutely will defederate any instance which is posting illegal or extremely questionable content. This is up to the discretion of our admins. Some concrete examples of instances which we would defederate:

  • An instance which is focused on creating spam in the network
  • An instance which systematically allows large groups of users to break lemmy.zip rules in communities hosted on lemmy.zip
  • An instance which is knowingly spreading CSAM into the federated network

Where an instance is dedicated to creating questionable content, we won’t immediately defederate but will instead ask the community to vote on what they would like to happen next. We will announce these votes in advance, and users can place their vote during the stated time period.

It is important to note that while a vote is driving factor in the choice to defederate, there may be cases where the admins will decide to defederate anyway, against the outcome of a community vote, if remaining federated would jeopardise the lemmy.zip instance.

Users of lemmy.zip can request a vote at any time by sending a message to an admin, preferably with evidence of the instance’s questionable content, and the administration team will discuss taking it forward to public vote.

What should I do if I see content I don’t like on another instance?
  • If it’s low quality content, you should always downvote ⬇️
  • If you think it breaks local rules for the community or instance, then report it and local admins/mods will deal with it
    • Your reports will also reach lemmy.zip admins, so if it’s about illegal content, then we can purge it from lemmy.zip servers
  • If it’s just some user being an idiot, then you can block that specific user (lemmy.zip admins will not take action in case of external users posting on external communities)
  • If it’s a community dedicated to being awful in some way, then you can block that specific community in your user settings.

Defederated Instances

This is a list of the Defederated Instances and the reasons behind the defederation. We will also link to the related discussions.

(Thanks to lemm.ee for the original version of this)