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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • You might have been expecting the response you got here, or you might not have. I know I learnt more about nazi/hate speech dogwhistles in my first few weeks as a Lemmy admin than I had learnt in all my life up to that point 😅.

    I also know in those early days there were people worried my instance was a “free speech” instance because I wanted open conversations instead of bans. Mostly I think I didn’t appreciate how big of a problem it was, and for sure I had people registered on my instance expecting it was a “free speech” instance. There are people out there looking for a place to spout their hate and many think Lemmy is the place for it because it’s advertised as censorship resistant.

    Please know that there is a strong belief (among both nazis and anti-nazis) that indicating a place as being able to speak your mind is a dog whistle for allowing hate speech. Over time if you find you aren’t attracting the right kind of members, you may need to tweak your wording. But also please know that the idea of supporting people to be better community members instead of flat out banning people does work for many members, because many people just don’t realise that what they are saying is harmful. Some people will be operating in bad faith though, and it’s typically the same small number of people that keep getting banned. Because you have open registrations, these users are more likely to come to your instance.

    It’s also important to understand that the Fediverse is full of users that have felt unsafe on mainstream social media. Your rules against hate speech need to be strictly enforced, of you’ll find yourself isolated in the Fediverse as no one will want to federate with you.















  • Your instance would have private/public keys for communicating with other instances. By changing software, all that is gone, and you might find other instances rejecting your federation activities, this is doubly true if you used the same username, because they would already have a record of that user with a different public key.

    I’d suggest using a subdomain or a new domain, re-using a domain for a different Fediverse server is likely to have issues. A subdomain would be treated as a different domain so would be fine.

    This is also something to know for a different scenario: taking your lemmy instance and changing the domain but keeping the content is likely to break federation as well.