Hello World!
We’ve made some changes today, and we’d like to announce that our Code of Conduct is no longer in effect. We now have a new Terms of Service, in effect starting from today(October 19, 2023).
The “LAST REVISION DATE:” on the page also signifies when the page was last edited, and it is updated automatically. Details of specific edits may be viewed by following the “Page History” reference at the bottom of the page. All significant edits will also be announced to our users.
The new Terms of Service can be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/
In this post our community mods and users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World. We hope to discuss and inform constructively and in good faith.
How does a TOS work with federation??? I have no intention of breaking rules to be clear, and I assume if I did I would just get banned? I’m just curious what the legal implications are.
I can see and interact with content on lemmy.world without ever visiting it, which feels like a grey area on the “accessing or using” part right at the beginning of the TOS. Maybe include a definition for what “accessing” is and can include in the context of the fediverse?
Then again it might not matter, idk.
Lemmy.World’s Content Policy would apply to all content that is hosted by or served by us. “Served” in this case also means showing federated posts to our local users, which can indeed be moderated on our side.
When a cross-instance user posts to a lemmy.world community, or participates in a LW-hosted post, then the Terms of Service keeps its enforce-ability. You may be able to see Lemmy.World’s federated content without visiting the site, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be moderated by Lemmy.World’s admins and community moderators. We were previously having software issues where removals did not federate, but that seems to be in the past now.
tl;dr: If it is visible on Lemmy.World, then it is subject to the ToS
I get how this makes sense, but legally this seems clearly false. The end user is interacting purely with their own instance, its their instance that is pushing the content to LW servers. If we’re putting on the big boy pants, we might want to make sure they’re the right size. There probably needs to be actual legal consideration about all of this, with a particular look into the implications of federation.
Since we both know how federation works, and asking for a boost from an LW’s community user (“posting to a Lemmy.world community”) involves an active use of LW (does it?)… broadcasting up/down votes or boosts to LW, does also constitute “active use of lemmy.world”, or doesn’t constitute “access to and active use of lemmy.world”?
Can a federated user get banned for up/down voting or boosting the wrong content on LW? Can it be for interacting with wrong content hosted on a federated instance that actively forwards the interaction to LW because some other LW user happens to be subscribed to the federated community?
BTW, many legislations require an explicit acceptance of the Terms of Use as a “legal document”, making that part either meaningless or illegal. How is it in the case of LW’s “Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Republic of Finland Suomen”?
The without ever visiting is the grey area. Federated instances provide the interface to the underlying instances, so yeah you kind of are “visiting” it if you interact. But you’re right, the mods of any given instance that host the content source get to decide what happens after the fact.
But the other federated instance is essentially mirroring it. Another instances users are not using Lemmy.world directly, they are viewing mirrored content, and then if they reply, they are doing it elsewhere, and it is getting passed on to L.W.
How was this handled for Usenet? I think it was just assumed that if you were propagating Usenet Content, you knew that implied diversity positive and negative.
IANAL, but probably not, any more than reading and sending email on Gmail visits Hotmail or Proton or has to follow their terms of service. I’m using sopuli.xyz, all the content I interact comes from and goes to there, what it and lemmy.world do after that doesn’t have anything to do with me.
Exactly, this TOS probably needs consideration for instance to instance interactions, and lemmy itself should probably have granular options for federation of everything, including mod actions. Federation options seem too course as they stand.