getting_started | 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 Many of the founding documents are outdated with references to policies that don't exist any more (such as invite codes).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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

Moderation / Censorship on Dreamwidth?

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