I thought FUD was a cryptobro term.
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
Posting Guidelines
All posts should follow this basic structure:
- Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
- What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
- Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
- Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
- Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.
Rules
- Post only about bans or other sanctions that you have received from a mod or admin.
- Don’t use private communications to prove your point. We can’t verify them and they can be faked easily.
- Don’t deobfuscate mod names from the modlog with admin powers.
- Don’t harass mods or brigade comms. Don’t word your posts in a way that would trigger such harassment and brigades.
- Do not downvote posts if you think they deserved it. Use the comment votes (see below) for that.
- You can post about power trippin’ in any social media, not just lemmy. Feel free to post about reddit or a forum etc.
- If you are the accused PTB, while you are welcome to respond, please do so within the relevant post.
Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.
Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.
YTPB matrix channel: For real-time discussions about bastards or to appeal mod actions in YPTB itself.
Some acronyms you might see.
- PTB - Power-Tripping Bastard: The commenter agrees with you this was a PTB mod.
- YDI - You Deserved It: The commenter thinks you deserved that mod action.
- YDM new - You Deserved More: The commenter thinks you got off too lightly.
- BPR - Bait-Provoked Reaction: That mod probably overreacted in charged situation, or due to being baited.
- CLM - Clueless Mod: The mod probably just doesn't understand how their software works.
Relevant comms
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I don't like it, but I'm not there to moderate communities. What I care about is my instance rules being adhered to. This is why I point out that anyone is free to start their own community and moderate it as they see fit.
There is no universal way to moderate a community, you are going to piss someone off no matter how you do it. If I got personally involved, then all communities would be my communities - that's really not good, nor feasible.
I can't help it, I keep getting drawn back in. I was curious about what your TOS actually are, and as it happens the content you say you are helpless to moderate actually does violate your site's terms of service. Under "Content Restrictions", it forbids "False information."
From your number 2 community, top of the front page, not even far down:
Again: This is why people don't like your conduct here. Having a political viewpoint is fine. I'm fine with conservative people. When someone starts objectively lying to prop up their views, people will start to view them as malicious and someone who's taking a "oh ho I can't get involved" attitude to giving them a platform as also malicious. When it's not just objectively untrue, but also engineered to produce dangerous or deadly results in the real world, that's where people will simply not want it around. Pretty firmly.
Sorry if it seems like I'm just trying to argue with you. Again, you seem like you at least deserve the benefit of the doubt and complete explanation, since nothing you're saying seems crazy or obviously malicious, like you think this is good instance-admin philosophy. I'm taking time to present the alternative view. If you were hosting a conservative community, but also making it clear that open and deliberate propaganda was not welcome, then I think you'd be fine. But, of course, such a community would be a nightmare to try to define and police in practice, and if the effort was at all successful, then all the "conservatives" of the modern US variety wouldn't want to be there. Which is exactly the problem.
I am not helpless to moderate, I don't want to moderate communities. Are you suggesting that I should be an authoritarian admin? I offer an instance where people, such as yourself, can start their own communities and run them as they like.
Both of those are links to external articles. These links are posted on content aggregator platforms for the purpose of debate. Some people will agree with them, others, like you, will argue against them. That is fine, and not a violation of any rules.
Yeah, but you set the rules. You explained, just now, that you just don't feel like it's proper to tell people how to moderate. That's fine. I would suggest that you stop blaming "the rules" for this decision. That's why I got confused, I thought you were doing the lemmy.world thing of treating "the rules" as something you were required somehow to obey. If you just don't want to police this stuff off your instance, then fine, I get that. Just own up to it being your decision (as you've now done, so now I get it). You make the rules. You've decided how to make them.
Maybe an analogy would help.
If you go to a city, and it's a authoritarian police state, that's bad. That's lemmy.ml. The admins just tell people what viewpoints they can and can't have, ban people at the drop of a hat, it's just a stupid endeavor. Don't do that.
If you go to a city, and it's totally lawless and the police don't do shit, that's also bad. You can get shot, there are muggings and assaults constantly, your car will get broken into. Most people on Lemmy, I think, would prefer not to go to that neighborhood. Put a pin in that.
If you go to a city, and the police are just kind of weird, you get hassled for jaywalking or asked for ID for random reasons, but then other things clearly seem criminal and the police don't care, that's bad. That's lemmy.world. The moderation isn't exactly "authoritarian" but it isn't competent either. Major crimes get handled, it's not unsafe, but things aren't real well-organized.
If you go to a city, and it's just normal, you can walk around and go to shops, but if you break in someone's car the police come and arrest you, that's good. IDK, maybe I am going to trigger some Lemmy people by implying that the police are ever a beneficial presence, but that's how I see it. That's how I think most good instances aspire to be. I would define that as lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, that sort of place. You can start a conservative community, you can be a conservative person or moderator. It is fine. You have freedom. But also, part of that freedom is being protected against certain conduct. It happens that, for some reason, the people with modern-US-conservative views cannot manage over the long term to avoid doing that type of conduct, and so eventually they inevitably tend to get banned and have to find new places.
I'm saying that your instance sounds like it's too much along the lines of the second city. It's just that no one wants to deal with that shit. Again, it has nothing to do with the viewpoint, at least on reasonable instances. It's just that after the 200th post of something that is just made-up nonsense in service of racism or the murder of democracy, or the 200th time someone attacks you for made-up reasons and then is hostile and randomly evasive about any type of fact-based discussion about it, people start to recognize the signs. The people with that behavior have outstayed their welcome. And, for whatever reason, modern US conservatives seem to self-select themselves into this weird little bubble where they just like to tell each other outlandish lies, agree with each other, misrepresent themselves to "win" discussions, and attack anyone who tries to talk with them. Actually, that all applies also to a lot of the far-left Lemmy instances also, which is why I don't fuck with them either.
I actually don't like that conservative views get objected to constantly, and any conservative community just gets laughed at and dunked on. It's not balanced. I have some conservative views. Not many but a few. One example is that I think, in general in the modern day in the US, the police are fine. Not always (and there are other parts of the system that need a ton of work) but most of the time. I regularly get downvoted to oblivion from time to time when that comes up. That's fine, it doesn't bother me. No one that I can remember has ever censored me for it. I do actually get moderated sometimes when I am a cockhead, but as far as I can remember that's never actually overlapped with me saying any conservative view.
The issue is not viewpoint. The issue is conduct. Posting laughably incorrect racist propaganda and promoting it, for some reason, seems to overlap with a way of interacting with other users that eventually gets people banned. For some reason. You may not intending to welcome that conduct by welcoming the laughable racist propaganda, but (a) it's weird that you want to go to bat to make a safe place for people to make communities of that stuff and then expect any other people to want to interact with that place (b) I think you should realize that it's going to come along with some conduct which you definitely don't want either.
I am not blaming the rules, I am saying they aren't breaking them.
As an admin, I don't want to be an authoritarian. That is a choice that I am making purposefully. I could choose to ban whatever I dislike, but this whole Lemmy thing can't work if every admin just inserts their political viewpoint into everything.
It is not up to me to decide what makes a good conservative, or democrat, or socialist, or car enthusiast, or whatever else. If someone wants to create a community where only content that praises Cthulhu is allowed, then that is their prerogative. All I care about is that they stick to my instance rules.
Everyone is equally welcome here. If you think that this particular Conservative community is biased or too heavily moderated, then you can always start your own - in fact I encourage you to. You could run a conservative community on HC and moderate it however you want. What I will not do is ban other people for you.
I feel like it's just repeating at this point. I tried.