this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
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Thanks for the reply. I've been side-eyeing instances that have open community creation due to how easy it is for bad actors to come and start shit, especially if instance admins aren't constantly on top of things.
As other people in this thread have pointed out, if you allow Nazis to hang out in your bar for long enough, you become a Nazi bar. Given your instance's stated rules against bigotry, I would advocate for proactive action in cases like this. Donald Trump is a champion of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia - all the things you don't allow. I wouldn't think you'd want a community that champions him as a dogwhistle for all of those things.
Have you considered disabling open community creation and having it be a function of your Agora discussion space?
Blocking open community creation is a mistake and that will be abused down the line. It's also taking power away from users to make Lemmy their own.
First off, community creation is not the problem here. Anybody can make a community called the Donald, the problem are the people that will fill it. Those people are coming here regardless of what community they find themselves in. Blocking community creation doesn't stop them, only actual monitoring of individual users will do it.
There really has to be a line here between combating this kind of toxic hateful bullshit and completely locking down a social media platform so that everything must be pre-scanned and approved before it sees the light of day. Pre-approving content means moderation controls the site directly and obliquely. Before users can even cast a vote, mods can unilaterally and silently strike it down.
I just generally don't care for the overall notion that Lemmy needs to be carefully curated like a garden right out of the gate. Ban the obvious shit like the Donald but there has to be a fundamental acknowledgment that the users, the people, need to have the ability to make the space their own without some council pre-judging them.
I think we can handle these things on a per case bases no? That is just adding another roadblock in having someone interact with the community. If it becomes a problem where someone spams these then yeah I can see the issue.