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Moderation / Censorship on Dreamwidth?

I was a longtime LJ user back in the day, got sucked into the Facebook borg, and am now returning to my roots. Many thanks to the staff and volunteers for creating/maintaining Dreamwidth.

I'm still finding my bearings, so apologies if this is not the right place for this kind of question.

As y'all are probably aware, Facebook heavily censors a wide variety of topics, from porn, to vaccines, to erotic Bernie memes. (Ask me how I know about that last one). I've been banned (temporarily) and seen friends banned (temporarily and permanently), sometimes for posts they made years earlier that were consistent with Facebook's rules at the time.

As a result, I've become increasingly angry at being treated like a child by Facebook's Dolores Umbridge algorithms. One of the main reasons I've fired up my account on Dreamwidth is the founder's stated commitment to free speech:

"With servers in the US we're obliged to follow US laws, but we're serious about knowing and protecting your rights when it comes to free expression and privacy. We will never put a limit on your creativity just because it makes someone uncomfortable — even if that someone is us."

...and from the site's Operating Principles:

"We will not place limits on your expression, except as required by United States law or to protect the quality and long-term viability of the service (such as removing spam)."

While I'm heartened by the apparently vigorous commitment to free speech here, many sites that claimed to support free speech at their founding, grew to support censorship of a wide variety of topics. For example, when reddit was founded, it claimed to be a "bastion of free speech". Over the intervening years, however, it has censored or banned thousands of communities, on topics ranging from drugs to sex work to conservative politics.

The founders of Dreamwidth also don't seem very active on the site any more. denise hasn't posted publicly since 2015. mark hasn't posted publicly since 2013. Many of the founding documents are outdated with references to policies that don't exist any more (such as invite codes).

As a result, I'm hesitant to invest in a site that seems to be on autopilot, and de facto controlleded by volunteers who may not share the founder's commitment to free speech.

So, before trying to recruit my friends here, I'm trying to get a sense of the real boundaries of free speech on Dreamwidth.

To help clarify, I've made a list of topics that have been banned on other major services. Note, to be clear, I don't necessarily support the communities that were banned on other sites. For example, I'm not a Trump supporter, and I'm certainly not a Nazi. However, I'd like to occasionally be able to discuss those topics without fear of being banned.

Which of these topics, if any, is likely to put my Dreamwidth account/communities at risk of a ban/censorship?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this matter!

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As another example of cause for concern for mission drift, the last post here on getting_started was almost 2.5 ago. This during a time when many folks were getting censored heavily on many other sites. There is only one community each that has "Trump" or "covid" as a hashtag (and neither of them seem especially related to those topics). Why aren't there more FB/Twitter/Reddit refugees like me here? Is it just because folks just don't know about it? Or because they're being actively driven away somehow?

Edited 2021-05-29 03:03 (UTC)

A comment from denise in 2018 that's re-assuring:

https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/38929.html?thread=5779473#cmt5779473

I don't want to speak in absolutes, because absolutes are unrealistic and "we will never shut down or change policies!" is a promise that is so impossible to guarantee that just the mere act of someone making it is enough in my eyes to file them as making pie-in-the-sky promises and therefore untrustworthy! So instead, let me talk a bit about how we roll, which I hope will let you appropriately calibrate your risk tolerance. :) You may already know a lot of this, but I figure it's worth a repeat and it'll be good for anybody else who's reading the comments!

The site (and its associated LLC) is owned by me and [staff profile] mark -- that's it. Upside: we're the only ones who can change policies or decide to shut down and run off cackling with everyone's data trailing merrily behind us. Downside: progress/development can sometimes get slow when we're both held up. (He's got a dayjob and a young kid; I'm hella disabled.)
We have two part time contractors to back us up: Jen is my backup, and Robby is Mark's. That increases the chance that progress will not grind completely to a halt when we're both held up, and -- more importantly -- it means that there's much better chances that somebody will be available to fix an urgent problem if it happens. Or, let's face it, "when" it happens, because there's no such thing as an uncrashable system.
All of us (me and Mark, and Jen and Robby) have been working in tech for a long time. (Over twenty years in my case, actually, which blows my freaking mind sometimes.) So, even though it's just us, "it's just us" encompasses a lot of professional and technical experience, and we put that experience -- and, more importantly, the knowledge of "what not to do because it caused problems last time" -- into our work here, on both technical and social levels. In short: you can pretty much have confidence that we know what we're doing.
When Mark and I started DW, we had a number of very (very) long talks about how we wanted to run the site, what we wanted it to be like, and -- most importantly for your questions -- whether or not we were on the same page about things like content policies, development philosophy, core ethical principles, etc. We agreed then, and most importantly, we still agree even after ten years of doing this. We believe that DW should remain independent, should never accept advertising and venture capital because it changes the entire dynamic of a site and what a site's acceptable content policies should be, and should only place restrictions on what users could post if those restrictions were required by US law, and neither of us forsee those beliefs changing in the future!
Part of those pre-launch (and even pre-announcement) talks involved our commitment to radical business transparency -- that we should always explain what we're doing and why, and that anybody can ask questions and get an answer. We've tried our best to uphold that over the last decade, and while we aren't always perfect at it, we try our absolute hardest. We wrote down our guiding principles back then at the beginning, and while you'll have to check with people who've been here for a while to see how well we've been able to uphold them, they still apply today.
We do have some evidence of walking the walk, though -- back when we were first starting, PayPal suspended our ability to accept user payments until and unless we implemented additional content restrictions such as disallowing "adult content" (they meant sex, people always mean sex when they use that phrase). Instead of doing that, we went without any income at all for 3 months while we set up an alternative, and we'd be prepared to do that again if we had to.

I can't promise we'll never change policies -- we may have to, for any one of a number of reasons. I can promise that if we do, we'll tell you with as much notice as we can give, solicit feedback ahead of time if it's not an urgent change stemming from some outside factors, and tell you the reasoning behind why we have to make changes instead of waving around some bullshit like "making these changes to empower the vibrant community blah blah blah" (and that we'll listen to your feelings about the changes, carefully think about any problems that people foresee, and change anything that we can change if you convince us we got it wrong). You can read back through [site community profile] dw_news for some examples, if you want!

Likewise, I won't promise that we'll never shut down -- I can think of a few scenarios where we would have to, unlikely though they might be. Mark and I have our backups in Robby and Jen, and we discussed ahead of time what we'd do if one of us had to step back from day-to-day operations of the site for a while; we have a really strong volunteer community who helps with things like support, and we're open source and our volunteers contribute a lot to site development. But even if we've tried to reduce the chances, we are as vulnerable to the good old "what if both your company principals get hit by a bus at the same time" hypothetical as any two-person LLC would be, and progress does slow when both he and I have less time and energy to put to things.

We're also entirely user-funded, and while it hasn't been a problem in the last ten years (or rather, it was only a problem when we had three months of not being able to take payments due to PayPal fuckery), it's certainly possible that someday, we wouldn't be able to afford to keep the site running. If that should ever happen, though, we've got a number of contingency plans that we could activate, none of which involve "sell user data and/or the site to some big conglomerate". If it ever comes down to "sell out or shut down", which I fiercely hope it won't, we would choose "shut down in an orderly fashion with tons of notice and have the world's biggest farewell party with as much time as possible for people to make their plans and pack their stuff." Barring that, well, I've been saying for the last decade that we're keeping this place open until the eventual heat death of the universe, and I fully plan to be writing tl;dr news comments in another 40 years. :)

Mirroring important content or stuff you'd be devastated if you lost in multiple places is always smart, because there's always a chance of disaster, even only of the "shit I deleted the wrong post" kind. (We have backups! But our backups are server-wide and can't be used to restore individual posts or accounts.) We've planned around things like disk failure and servers suddenly deciding not to work anymore as much as we can (and y'all generally don't even notice when stuff fails unless it's a failure in one of the systems that we don't control), and we've tried to reduce single points of failure as much as possible, but there's an extent to how much we can failure-proof everything. But in terms of stuff we can control like major changes to the site philosophy or our plans for the future, I can pretty confidently assure you that we ain't going nowhere.

Edited 2021-05-29 03:11 (UTC)

The most common method of getting banned from the site seems to be: be a bot and/or spam other people's journals.

I think there are aren't a ton of refugees because we are small and most people aren't doing long-form blogging as much. Also, the built in audience isn't really there for (some of) the more controversial stuff. There's a pretty strong social code toward civility. Historically the user base hasn't been terribly interested in the more video based pornography (and porn-bots, like other spam, are ruthlessly squashed), more in the artistic or written erotica type. (visual media support also isn't terribly strong, you cannot host pics natively).

The community also tends to skew female, liberalish, geeky, and I would bet mid 20s-mid 40s. Not really the target audience for most mainstream porn, or most severely conservative politics.

I think there was a code-push not that long ago, so development isn't abandoned, just v. v. slow. :P

you cannot host pics natively.

Not true, you can host photos, just not use them elsewhere.

ish? I probably should've said can't do it for most practical uses :P.

I've had a looooot of people who didn't even know there was photo hosting, so I do want to make sure it's know that there is.

I am a spamwhacker, and can confirm that spamming gets people banned from the site. (In the sense of commercial advertisement and SEO and bot-testing preparatory to an actual spam campaign. Being merely obnoxious to others sometimes collects a personal ban from a community or specific other user, but that's not antispam's lookout. Terms of Service might not have much to say about it unless it rises to the level of harassment, and since I'm not in ToS I don't know where the lines are drawn.)

Linkblogging, as in the collection and discussion of fascinating links, is an honorable tradition and it is very hard to mistake linkblogging for spam.

In my opinion,

changelog is the best place to look for confirmed development activity. The code tours in

dw_dev can lag a little, but Changelog is automated. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that's visible offsite, on Github, but some projects over there have been in progress for years and there's not necessarily a clear date when they'll be ready.

Edited (woops, syntax) 2021-05-29 06:09 (UTC)

Thank you! I have no plans or interest in spamming, harassing anyone, or even communicating with people who don't want to see what I have to say. However, some people think the mere act of allowing "Nazis" to speak their mind is harmful, and they have a very expansive definition of "Nazi" that includes everyone from actual Nazis to nativists/Trump supporters. (Neither of whom I like or support in any fashion, but whose views I want to be able to discuss freely.) On other sites, this "punch a Nazi" crowd has infested the staff and moderation teams, and vigorously tried to drive out anyone whose politics they dislike.

I am curious about how you are coming up with your age estimates. I think that my own circle goes from probably thirties to probably up close to seventy, but that may reflect my own age.

It's mostly a guess. My entire rlist is pretty much in their 30 and 40s and when I expand that out to my network, it also tends to be people in their 30s and 40s with the occasional venture up or down (which could certainly be all of us compounding selection bias). On top of that, my observation of the initial user base often came from a part of livejournal fandom 10 years ago, which was mostly late teens to 30s or earlyish 40s and the tumblrers I've seen migrate also seem to be more 30s with a smattering of 20s. It's very non-scientific.

Sorry if this is butting in, but DW does have a stats page that seems to back up your anecdotal impression of the age distribution of accounts--mostly people in their 20s to 40s. ^^

Thanks!

Two major things, I think.

a) People don't know about it, and/or burned out on long-form before the effective death of LiveJournal.
b) When Dreamwidth started up, there was a major schism in the people who were making the jump to Dreamwidth and the people who were not. Some of the Dreamwidth early adopters made themselves so obnoxious to people who were on the fence that they decided strongly against Dreamwidth.

I observed a small but noticeable reactivation of friends' journals that had been dusty for a while in 2020-ish, who would have been people who signed up on or around the founding, drifted away, but who came back thanks to covid/other things. So they would have had less reason to look for new user resources.

That sounds plausible. I made my DW account in 2018, but didn't fire it up again until now when FB's censorship became intolerable.

Edited 2021-05-29 06:38 (UTC)

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