For me, it’s neither strength nor weakness. I’m a boring old fart, I’m not here for politics.

I’m not a moderator. If I was, I would delete any posts with hate speech or inciting violence if they are against the law in the jurisdiction of this instance. Doesn’t matter what US law allows people to say. Doesn’t matter what I personally think of this specific case (US healthcare is a disgrace to put it mildly, I’m disappointed the guy got caught, and a few other thoughts that you may agree with, but could get me a criminal conviction if I post them, and could get the site owners in trouble for allowing the post - and some posters here don’t seem to get that) I’m done with this post now.

You make some valid points. My take is that it is up to the users to comply with their local laws (EU citizens have been convicted in court for social media posts that broke local laws but not necessarily the site rules), and the TOS are not there to address that. It’s up to the instance owners to comply with the laws applicable to them, and for that they need to guide and educate the moderators, not the users (some of whom are going to ignore the rules anyway). So perhaps mods need detailed rules on what is and is not allowed on the site, but sharing that level of detail with the users is just sparking pointless discussions.

The assumption most people make is that they and their actions are covered under the laws of their locality.

Yes, which means that the site owners have to deal with the laws of their locality, and may be held accountable under their laws for allowing the content on their instance.

Maybe unlikely to happen, but given the potential consequences, I can’t blame a small group of volunteers not wanting to take the risk.

More importantly: nobody has a right to assume LW is a democracy. Their instance, their rules.

You are not going to get a sound legal advice on jury nullification in a jurisdiction that does not recognise the concept of a jury. Calling that murky is missing the point. We do have rules on hate speech, incitement to violence etc. so freedom of speech is not an absolute right

As stated in my reply, I am not a legal expert, and certainly not familiar with the concept of jury nullification. But in the civil law system used in the Netherlands, what is and is not a crime, along with sentencing guidelines, is codified in written law. Case law or jury opinions are not part of the system. Saying person x should be shot, no jury would convict you is not ok. The first half of the sentence constitutes an offence, the second half is meaningless under Dutch law. Advocating for changes to the law or sentencing rules is generally ok, but saying ‘it should be legal to shoot people like x ‘ may still get you into trouble - that is one for the lawyers.

Advocating to commit a crime probably is a violation of dutch law. Jury nullification does not exist

I read your post with some interest, and was going to respond with a European view on free speech. Until I got to your last line, ‘you Europeans are clueless’. No point arguing with you then. Take your freedoms to another instance and enjoy the echo chamber.

Because mastodon is the Linux of social media. One day it will be ready for the average user…

Not just open source. It needs to have a sustainable community of developers. I’m not interested in a project that dies when the one maintainer has other priorities (been there with another lemmy app) Open source just means anyone can fork it and carry on, but if nobody does, it still dies.