A shroom community was removed from lemmy.world as it was considered “illegal” content by the admins. The logic behind this is boggling, to say the least.

Marijuana is considered an illegal substance in some states in the US and is still federally illegal. /c/trees should be banned, correct?

Clown pictures of Putin are absolutely considered illegal in Russia, so that should require and immediate ban.

Freedom of speech can also be considered illegal in some places.

Incest is considered illegal so that should automatically trigger a ban on all incest porn, real or not. Hell, porn is universally taboo, so that shouldn’t have any place on this instance, I guess.

You see where I am going with this? Rule 1 is a catch-all and needs clarification. Simply saying something is illegal is not quite enough. Owning and sharing pictures of shrooms is not illegal. Trading spores or mycelium is generally not illegal either.

This is not about me being salty (which I am) about the community being removed and forced to relocate. It’s the odd bias that was applied to justify its removal.

Please note that I said fix Rule 1, not remove it. There are some really bad things on the internet that shouldn’t use lemmy as a safe haven.

    • cacheson@kbin.social
      101·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, this is why I like topic-specialized instances:

      • They have admins that are actually interested in the topic and will tailor the rules appropriately.
      • Hopefully are set up in and administered from friendly jurisdictions, to reduce legal risk.
      • Will be less likely to shy away from the risk of (possibly frivolous) legal action, whereas the admins of a general instance are more inclined to play it safe.

      We need to think of what we’re doing here less as recreating reddit, and more as linking together all those old phpBB-style enthusiast forums.

      • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
        32·
        1 year ago

        That’s an excellent way to think about it! Especially with links between forums taking you to the other site, and a lack of account sharing, this isn’t a distributed Reddit. Trying to make Lemmy into that causes all sorts of issues-- What instance do I search on to find [insert community here]? Where should I make my account? Even stuff like every community or user gravitating towards a few large instances. Each instance should be meaningfully distinct, with a set of communities related to a particular topic. This works best with the infrastructure and I feel like it would help solidify the culture as well. It would really help out the Local communities option too. Your choice of instance(s) should be meaningful, not meaningless.