Hi all, I'm one of the mods that apparently caused lemmy.world to melt down for two weeks. It's a lovely sunny Sunday arvo, and I'd much rather go catch the last rays of sun in my garden than write about mod drama. Alas, I must have sinned in a past life.
Today the lemmy.world admins made a follow up post about the incident where the admin Rooki interfered with moderation of this community in a way which was determined to be against lemmy.world TOS and factually incorrect. Throughout this incident there has been no communication with me, nor to my knowledge any of of the other moderators of this community. Rooki quitely undid his actions and edited his post to admit fault however there was no public acknowledgement of this from him. In fact I wasn't even told I was reinstated as a mod which is quite funny.
The lemmy.world admins' response appears more focused on managing their own reputations and justifying similar actions in the future than providing a good environment for vegans, and other similarly maligned groups. Their statements about wanting to handle misinformation and overreach better in the future ring a bit hollow when they won't take actions to address the anti-vegan circlejerks under their update posts which abound with misinformation and disinformation.
The legalese written basically allows for the same thing to happen, and that if it does the admin decision is to stand while moderators have to quietly resolve the conflict at the admins' leisure. Presumably with a similarly weak public apology and barely visible record correction after the fact.
This community already has a fairly high moderation burden, with many users coming here in bad faith and getting outraged when they are told to take it elsewhere.
I have spoken with /u/[email protected] and /u/[email protected] and we are of the opinion that given the lack of assurance that admins with an axe to grind wont interfere in the future this is no longer a space we are interested in moderating and can't in good faith recommend as a place to host a vegan community. Instead we would recommend that users come to [email protected] (note, not federated with .world, make a local account), additionally [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] are well moderated and run.
Mods are just glorified internet janitors though, so if any current mods or users want to take over the responsibility of primary management from /u/[email protected] they are welcome to do so and should get in touch. Otherwise I think the consensus is to close this community for now.
Finally I'd just like to express gratitude for the great effort put in by the users here. In particular /u/[email protected] you are a bloody champion for trying to get a better outcome here, we all appreciate it immensely.
I find these issues so tiring. Lemmy is a project run by volunteers, usually with specific goals in mind.
While I think that more democratic means of administering instances would be good I also can't really see how to implement them and if someone is volunteering to run a server then criticising the precise way they do it, especially when moderator actions are public, seem a bit rich.
Different servers have different goal, some are trying to be public squares like this one, where more voices are welcome than not even to the detriment of some people. Others are trying to be safe cozy spaces, or friend clubs or whatever and someone just not liking your vibe is a fine reason to pre-emptively close the door in your face.
When someone does so they're not even restricting your ability to see things, and usually not even making an account on their instance. You can literally run a bot to mirror everything over to your own version of a community if you don't like the way they administer theirs. All they are doing is restricting your ability to send messages to their userbase under that particular account. Blahaj is going for a certain vibe, it's not a vibe I want so I'm not their and I don't really use their communities but it's very clearly communicated to the userbase and behaviour like this is done specifically so users that feel vulnerable have a place to be gay with like zero confrontation about the particular way they want to be.
So who cares?