>> IMO countries would be totally reasonable to demand that the moderation decisions for the citizens of their countries be made by people in-country, following their local laws, inside their jurisdiction.

> Moderation decisions are not and should not be determined solely by what's legal.

For sure. Following the laws of the country you want to operate in is just the bare minimum. Additional considerations can be taken, of course.

>> Ultimately, whether or not we like it, most countries have some restrictions on speech. Countries want somebody in their jurisdiction to represent the company

> The former is an excellent reason to refuse the latter.

This is where we are, the next step in this back-and-forth is that entities without any local representation get blocked.

If you are offering some free service just out of the kindness of your heart, and a country decides they don’t want to let their people take you up on it, I wouldn’t stress too much about it, right? I mean, it is a shame for them if your free service is really useful, but there are people all around the world without access to it…

Lots of countries seem to be scrutinizing large social media companies more aggressively than small volunteer projects. These sort of companies definitely can afford local representatives. They are businesses, if they aren’t making enough money in the country to justify the representatives, they can make the business decision to pull out.

nobody asked Matrix to comply with this (as far as I know). like Mastodon/ActivityPub, it's a bit of a lost cause to try to block a decentralised protocol in practice.

Nepal seems to have no shortage of people willing to take money to act as a local representative. I've seen quite a few such offers recently.

> If they're meant to be "held accountable" as leverage to ensure the company's compliance ("delete this politically inconvenient content worldwide or your local employees will never see their families again"),

Yeah, of course, similarly if US decides that they need people on the ground so they could execute them in a CIA blacksite in case they commit crimes.

But obviously that's way too much, same for Nepal, not sure why you're immediately jumping to kidnapping, rather than "So a person can be put in front of a court".

> If I want to run a Mastodon instance (which is blocked by this), do I need to hire an employee/representative for every country in the world?

If you want to operate a service at scale, which you gain profits from, in another country than where you live, it's fairly common to have some sort of representative in that country, one way or another. Usually it's ignored when the scale is small, but once you reach the size of Facebook, I think it's expected that you get some representative in the countries where you operate, yeah.

> I'd rather just keep the maximum leverage most countries have as being to block the site if they don't like it.

Exactly what we saw happen right here :) Ignore the laws, get blocked, then the companies can decide if they wanna start operating again by following local laws, or exit the country.