Administration, moderation, and federation policy for lemm.ee

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

Instance rules

This instance (like most others) 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 lemm.ee account on any other instance (even if that other instance has no rules).

Each community hosted on lemm.ee 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 lemm.ee which break lemm.ee rules
• Ban lemm.ee users who break our rules on other instances
• Ban users who consistently break rules across multiple communities
• Purge illegal content from lemm.ee

Moderators

• Ensure that posts and comments in their communities don’t break rules
• Ban users from their communities for consistently breaking rules
• Ensure that they only provide accurate and clear reasons for mod actions

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 lemm.ee servers, but in general it is undestood 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 general goal for lemm.ee admins.

Federation

Lemmy is a federated network, so a lot of content will be posted on other instances. It is possible to limit which instances lemm.ee 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 lemm.ee

As mentioned above, it is not a goal for lemm.ee 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.

As a result, defederation is relatively rare on lemm.ee. You can read a more about our approach to defederation in this post.

That being said, we will defederate any instance which is directly harming lemm.ee users. This is up to the discretion of our admins. Some concrete examples of instances which we would defederate:

• An instance which has a 2:1 ratio of bots to users 🤖
• An instance which is focused on creating spam in the network
• An instance which systematically allows large groups of users to break lemm.ee rules in communities hosted on lemm.ee
• An instance which is knowingly spreading CSAM into the federated network

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 lemm.ee admins, so if it’s about illegal content, then we can purge it from lemm.ee servers
• If it’s just some user being a prick, then you can block that specific user (lemm.ee 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