I can help with the grow

Tesseract is so good 👌

Damn - every single thing I hear about it is so cool. And in fact I did think about whether you would want to host some kind of AskUSA/CasualUSA there (and then to offer my help modding it - like you, not wanting to be the head but to donate a bit of time if it would help), but figured (1) if you had wanted to then you would have initiated such by now, with all of the people talking about such, and (2) then I saw your statement that "While we're not quite ready to throw open the doors (we're still configured as a regional instance)...", and wanted to respect that.

Speaking of regional there is also an !askmidwest@midwest.social, which despite seeming to be mostly dead (the last post was 4 months ago and the one before that was 8 months ago), is likewise not quite the same as a truly, fully national community. Not that any of this is bad ofc - there are communities across the Fediverse for specific regions, states, provinces, even cities, and likewise for specific show series (hehe Star Trek:-P), individual games, etc. as well as entire genres and sub-genres of such. Though there does seem a need for a truly, fully USA-wide community as well, if only to help attract good content creator-type people (e.g. comic artists) from Reddit or the failing X over to here, who may be part of a region that is not yet served.

So Discuss.Online can help there - like dubvee.org it even lacks the name "Lemmy" that can conjure up thoughts of the tankie origins of the software (a saga that many Redditors are familiar with - I at first strongly hesitated to join it myself, though then went with Kbin back when that was a thing:-D), and is a fully general instance, not only for the USA but it is based here. And to help promote the instance it also helps to have such a community here:-).

To confirm: no you don't want to be a mod in a community that allows for more serious discussions (like whether jury nullifications are ethical), or just no you don't want to be the owner / sole mod? If the latter, note that @admiralpatrick@lemmy.world has also volunteered to help:-D, so in this case would you be okay to be the "top mod" and then him listed after you?

Thank you for volunteering!

1. congratulations, you are now a mod:-) You won't be able to view mod reports though (until ~0.20 of the Lemmy software, as Nutomic put it onto the roadmap for that version) unless you create an account on this instance. If you want to do that - I highly recommend it - you'll need to make a comment or post, then click the 3 ellipses and add yourself as a mod, or reply to me here with the new account and I'm happy to do it. We should also figure out how to communicate - I mentioned here that we could create a Matrix (I just created an account on element.io) room somewhere? (but haven't done so yet)

2. the 2 admins of Discuss.Online have since clarified on this post, especially this comment that the more extreme types of stuff that Blaze was asking for - like whether it is allowed to say that UE healthcare CEOs should be killed (morally speaking) - are explicitly not allowed on this instance. I get that there's a need to talk about and vent this kind of emotional processing, but that cannot happen here, entirely separately from whether it should be allowed anywhere or my own desire to avoid too much stress in my life:-). So if you likewise were wanting that, we could look into migrating the community elsewhere? But I think it would be problematic no matter where it is located, and I think there's a LOT of value to having an AskUSA that doesn't delve into such controversial topic material? So with the help of you and the 2 other mods, I wouldn't mind staying in that case, b/c we've have sufficient support to handle anything that came our way, so long as we continued to uphold the rules of Discuss.Online to keep things friendly (if no longer necessarily always remaining light-hearted). BTW I initially thought about creating an AskUSA on midwest.social, but completely aside from the controversy surrounding the main admin there (which regardless of your thoughts on the subject, would lower the traffic as some people have apparently decided to boycott that instance), the name of it being "midwest" makes it more regional, as opposed to Discuss.Online's being much more open to so many more people (including outside the USA, but more relevantly here also including everyone from any particular region inside of it). Although then it will have to avoid such topics as whether or not it is okay for people to laud the CEO's murder. But do feel free to let me know any thoughts you may have, if you want to create another community or for us all to help mod this one, or whatever?

I could be very wrong here, but I get the feeling that you are kinda chaffing about the restrictions that Germany is imposing upon LW, and wishing to go outside of those bounds, but aren't quite realizing the enormous extent that the EU protects people's privacy.

Here in the USA, we have far fewer rights, and we know it. First, be aware that when bad-faith people use bad-faith words to that effect, they are lying (in bad-faith:-D): it's "for your protection tho", and "for your convenience" (bull shit!). And as we continue the slide into fascism, I fully expect people to end up in literal and actual and irl jail as a result of what they said. "Freedom of speech" is just mere words - probably within a minute of me hitting send on this, these very words as well as yours will get sucked into a government-funded datacenter that records and analyzes just about literally all words on the internet, hoping to stop "terrorism" or whatever (which it probably does help, but what will happen when the new administration finds out that this capability already exists - to what ends will they put this "weapon" that lies solely within their hands to use, as they see fit, "for our protection" and all that?).

"Freedom of speech" is what a toddler cites as their defense after they've run up and punched you in the face. Never mind how one has little to nothing to do with the other - it's words that they've heard spoken elsewhere, by people acting as bullies, and it halfway worked for those other people (or at least it took YEARS for e.g. the Alex Jones situation to go through the courts), so perhaps worth trying out for themselves as well?

I agree with lazyguru and to expand upon their words: what you seem to be wanting - ACTUAL freedom of speech - is something that I feel like exists far more in various EU nations (granted, perhaps a bit less in Germany now, or if not now then like the USA, expected to change more towards that direction in the near future as a result of the election results?) than the USA. We talk about it here, like a LOT, but the actual reality of making it work has happened elsewhere. Also, things change over time and at the dawn of the internet, the web really was a different place, where places like 4chan (sorry to keep using that extremist example, fwiw here I don't mean to imply that what you want is a toxic hellscape, but rather I'm trying to highlight its focus on being a purely "free speech" platform) were allowed to exist - but this is a different world now, and especially it will become a much more different one still in the near future.

So saying things like your hypothetical scenario presented in https://feddit.org/comment/3562325, that is pushing things to quite an extreme degree imho. Akin to hosting links to pirated or CSAM content even if not hosting such content directly, i.e. still something that could get DO in actual legal trouble, even if nobody were to go to jail for such (although realitistically, someone very well could, if they say it first and then they were to go out and do it?). I presume that you are wanting the more purist hypothetical form of argumentation, divorced from practical reality - but such does not exist, least of all in the United States (possibly, probably even, it might in the EU?).

And in any case - not that it matters b/c the DO admins have declared that such as your hypothetical example is not tolerable on this instance - I don't want to be anywhere near that kind of discussion, above and beyond issues of legality or morality. Tbh I am already uncomfortably weirded out and have had to halt / take a break from reading all the variety of posts seemingly everywhere on Lemmy as it is now - like I get that people are upset and they need a place to talk and even vent, but my own preferences are valid as well, and it's a bit much for me to handle, you know? Though I would not mind helping to mod (I'll give up the top mod spot if someone volunteers to receive it from me) a community that has a more "fun" focus:-).