openmic.social — a new open-discourse instance that doesn't shadowban

No definitely not trying to allow bigotry. You are definitely entitled to feel that way though.

On the reverse of that, if you want to promote the opposite you are more than welcome to, free speech is a two way street. I don't really tolerate hate though. Maybe I'll update our description.

Thanks! This is by far the most constructive comment I have gotten and truly appreciate it. I’m learning and always will adjust as needed. I’m open to constructive criticism and more importantly any insight others who have done this can provide. The immediate assumptions about me and my goals were at best amusing and not at all constructive however, somewhat unsurprising to be honest.

Lemmy most definitely has shadowbans, but they are applied at the level of whole entire communities rather than end-users. I remember being on the StarTrek.Website instance when that functionality was added to the Lemmy code, and discussing with someone my finding out that ChapoTrapHouse was no longer accessible from it, despite the fact the instance remained federated. No announcement of that fact was ever made iirc, it's just that one day poof the behavior has changed, after Lemmy deployed a version that allowed for that.

Some few instances are very open about their hiding of communities - see e.g. https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/, listing in detail every one - but most are not, and the Lemmy UI has nothing at all like the list that it shows for (de)federations.

The Lemmy admins also can remove people even from the modlogs, in cases of severe abuse. Tbf it's exceedingly rare and there is little evidence of this being abused (well there was one time, but the excuse that it was due to a bug seemed believable to me and most everyone else - Lemmy.ml quite often tests new versions of the code before they get rolled out to the rest of the Threadiverse, which is quite helpful actually).

Lemmy also fails to notify someone of their having been moderated. The various communities are FULL of stories of people asking where their posts went, or why they can no longer post to a community, or stating their discovery that they have an event in the modlog. The notification of moderation activities is exceedingly poor on the Lemmy platform.

Sadly, Reddit does a much better job at notification of an event, and also provides for a modmail to communicate with the mods to discuss the situation, e.g. to ask why, rather than leaving it to the end-user to wonder if they should DM each one listed in sequence until they find one that is even active much less responsive...

Lemmy is imperfect. At least Huffman is not in charge here, but conversely the tools have aways to go before we catch up even to what Reddit offers.

Lemmy has bans, no shadowbans.

Multiple instances and even an app has built in blocks.

Instead of looking up a profile and seeing "banned" you get an error. Instead of seeing an an entry in the modlog, it's literally baked into the code.

Fair question, and have sat thinking about answering it changed my mind about the wording I am using.

What I actually built is due process, not a speech policy — no shadowbans, you're told which rule you broke, warnings before bans, public appeals. That came from getting shadowbanned off Reddit for advertising my own business with no notice and no recourse.

"Free speech" was the wrong description for that and I've pulled it from the description. The line I'm drawing: you can argue an unpopular position here without being removed for it, but you can't dehumanize people for who they are. Bigotry isn't dissent — it drives out the people who make a place worth being in. I personally want OpenMic to be welcoming to others, with out the disenfranchising hate, or destructive speech. It'll be there, it'll happen and I'll do my best to clean it up. I can promise one thing I learned a long time ago is we can all find something to disagree about, and we can easily come up with reasons to hate one another. Thats not very interesting and makes life not fun.

So while I appreciate your question (part of me thinks it had ulterior motives and was more of a trap, this thread is full of it) I think my use of free speech may have been misguided. I also teach my kids regularly that while you have freedom of speech, you don't have freedom of consequences because of that speech.

I am human, I am learning as I go, I am definitely not perfect. I am however willing to learn and improve.

How do they square that with freedom of speech or like, defenses of fact?

Like how defense of fact is a valid defense against libel laws since the speech at issue was based on known facts or "truth"

Quit your bullshit.

Fuck Israel. Israel is a fascist state that commits a suicide in Gaza. I am a German in Germany and I just critiziced Israel. I even used bad language. That is not illegal so don't spread lies if you don't know shit about the laws a country has.

It is illegal in Australia as well, where anti-israel/anti-zionism/anti-genocide has been remarketed as anti-semitism.

Potential 2 year prison sentence for saying 'from the river to the sea' in one of the Australian states.

Regarding your "example': That's new to me, being a German. in this broad way the statement is wrong, i suppose. ChatGPT confirmed this. there is no law against denying the right of Israel to exist. It is only true that German politics has ever since Second World War felt a historical responsibility to support Israel against antisemitism.

There are development plans

Well I was able to disable it. Though I'm still curious why there's such a weird blur effect to go along with an equally-weird adult-consent thing which requires javascript. Also worth noting that removing the blur doesn't allow clicking any links. Nevermind, I was able to get that to work. But each page load/reload requires this same attention. Still weird. I've never come across a lemmy instance that's gated in this way before. Most either have a blank page or captcha. And I'm still curious about why this one is configured like this.

shaddowbanning is pathetic and lazy.

Possibly. We will see.

I’ll have to take a look and see if I can figure out why that is and resolve it.

“Free speech” here means something specific: we don’t shadowban

Shadowbanning has nothing to do with speech. I'd recommend you reconsider your verbiage.

we won’t remove you for an unpopular opinion

Most instances already don't do that. Which leads me to believe you have unpopular (hateful) opinions and want to create a community where those opinions are welcomed.

Be a good human. It isn’t hard.

No, and yet many people fail to. And these are the types who will be attracted to your community.

You can debate your point with out dehumanizing others, when you can't, you've already lost the argument.

No. You can’t. And giving a “open mic“ to the Nick Fuenteses and Stephen Millers, and Charlie Kirks of the world who will put on a suit and a tie and try to “debate” you while dehumanizing others with nice sounding words gives them a platform to spread their hate while framing it as a “civilized debate“ rather than the coded bigotry that it is, while you cast aside any responsibility for letting them do it, tossing your hands up and claiming “free speech”.

It’s plainly and obviously bullshit. It’s like inviting a vampire into the house and then being surprised when everyone turns up dead.