TL;DR: We tried to move the community because of moderatorial concerns, but fumbled how we went about doing so.
First and Foremost:
We’d like to formally apologize for springing this on you all out of nowhere, and for taking so long to respond to the backlash. With retrospect, we understand that we should have notified you all beforehand to create an opportunity to give us feedback. We understand that a lot of respect and trust was lost, and we expect it’ll take a lot of work and a lot of time before we can earn it back, but we would be grateful if y’all gave us that chance.
What happened, and why?
The primary issue that incited this was because we don’t fully agree with the admin’s moderation policies. By and large they do a great job and align with us on mod actions, but there have been several cases where we strongly disagreed, and our choices were overruled.
For example, 2 months ago, Kolanaki reached out to us via email and said they were banned from 196 for “playing the victim” and asked us why we banned him, but we didn’t. Moss talked to them and realized that the ban was unjust after reviewing the comment he was banned for. If he had never contacted us, we wouldn’t have known about the ban, and they would have still thought we banned them.
There were a few similar events in a short time frame, leading to a few posts/comments in the community about the heavier modding policies. It’s possible some posts/comments were misunderstood by Ada, or she interpreted things differently than we would have, but it led to some bans that we felt were indeed heavy-handed, and would not violate our rules in even the most uncharitable of interpretations. We have found that this is an ongoing trend when it comes to moderation of our community from the Admins. We oppose this because it leads to many users who otherwise mean well ending up alienated and removed for reasons that are frankly completely unfair. This is, in our opinion, counter to what we set out to build in our community.
It was made clear to us that it was their instance, and that we didn’t have a say in who would be banned and what would be removed. This is, of course, perfectly valid. It’s their instance, therefore it’s up to them to decide what goes, but we no longer wanted to be the ones seen as accountable for moderation actions we have no control over. For this reason, we wanted to transfer out of lemmy.blahaj.zone. As much as we wanted to stay in the LGBTQ instance, we couldn’t come to an agreement with Ada, so we talked to her about transferring out and got her blessing.
How we messed up
The most major failing on our part is, of course, that we didn’t announce the migration beforehand. Besides that, we also didn’t explain why we made the choices we made and only gave very vague answers. We avoided sharing the justification for our actions because we didn’t want to cause drama and/or exacerbate the situation, but this lack of substantiating our actions only caused the situation to worsen.
Going forward (if we may), we won’t make the same mistakes again. From now on, we will attempt to be as transparent as possible.
FAQ
Why we chose lemmy.world
Many people have been asking about why we moved to lemmy.world. It already hosts the majority of large communities and besides this uncomfortable level of centralization, it has also been somewhat controversial as of late. Despite that, we still chose lemmy.world due to the following reasons:
- Moss’s communication with the admins, and their agreement to let us moderate the community as we see fit. Ruud, after looking over our rules, agreed to abstain from taking admin action to curate or otherwise moderate our community, unless absolutely necessary.
- The instance is large enough to support traffic without performance issues (other instances like lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.dbzer0.com would have been fine too), and the instance has a certain degree of guaranteed longevity.
- Moss was given a list that was kindly made by the lemmy.world people as a part of our transfer detailing those who are banned on Blahaj.zone, but not on Lemmy.world, making moderation discrepancies much easier to clean up post-transfer.
- Our agreement with Ruud predated the now-rescinded policy changes
- It was, to the best of our knowledge, the most federated-with instance. We have come to understand that this is not necessarily the case.
Why not have another team take over the original 196?
This is a similar situation with what happened over on Reddit. 196 mods didn’t agree with admins and were eventually replaced (difference here is that we were not forced out, but chose to leave). As Lemmy was a large gathering spot for people fleeing Reddit, we felt it was better to try to keep the community together and move together. Having another team take over splits the community. The more fragmentation there is, the less longevity and volume of community each skew will have.
What about the possibility of more trolls, neoliberals, bad actors, sealions, and transphobes on Lemmy.world?
Another huge issue was that the mods and the community were not on the same page regarding lemmy.world, their admins, and their policies. We understand the concern about trolls/bad-actors/transphobes, but we feel well-equipped to handle these issues. In addition, we’ve been in contact with the lemmy.world admins for a while now, and they’ve assured us that they’d allow us to moderate our community however we saw fit. All this being said, we still failed to communicate that to the community before taking action, which has undermined any assurances that we have given after the fact. We cannot apologize enough for that.
What about the people who are using instances that are defederated from lemmy.world (e.g. Beehaw)
This is an unfortunate issue that we were not aware of at the time of transfer. We’re not sure what the solution is, but want to make our community as accessible as possible. Community solutions are welcome.
Did you migrate because of X? (addressing speculation)
- We didn’t migrate due to anything related to neopronouns
- We didn’t migrate due to us supposedly not wanting to use blahaj.zone lemmy accounts
- We didn’t migrate due to us having friends who were banned from lemmy.blahaj.zone
- We didn’t migrate due to us wanting to make the space less queer/leftist/etc
- We didn’t migrate due to us getting secretly ousted by the Blahaj admin team
What now?
Well, we’re not sure. We could go back on our decision and stay on blahaj.zone, continue on lemmy.world, do both, or try something else. Truth be told, we don’t know what to do. For now, we will leave the comments open to civil community discourse, and choose our course of action from there.
Sincerely, Qaz, Rmbp, Greembow, A_Very_big_Fan, Peachy, and Moss.
I think what brother’s me most here is the entitlement and contempt displayed for your own community. You were told repeatedly that nobody wanted this, and yet you doubled down saying “We know what’s best”. You acted like the community belongs to the moderation team, and they can do with it as they please.
It took a mass exodus for you to finally seriously consider other viewpoints. I don’t think that’s an acceptable way for any moderation team to treat their own community.
That’s not something that can simply be fixed by an apology. It’s something that would require some significant introspection.
That’s not something that can simply be fixed by an apology. It’s something that would require some significant introspection.
The whole team should resign
Really? All of them? Personally, I’d be happy enough taking no more than two heads for this. Whatever the case, I think the main priority should be adding new mods whose attitudes are more in line with the comm.
Anyway, I’m sure there’s stuff that’s happened in private that I’m unaware of, but it seems like qaz has been pretty level-headed about the whole thing, Rmbp, despite approving of the move and thus being generally out of touch with the community claims (believably, IMO) to have had no knowledge of, let alone input over the process prior to the call being made, greembow hasn’t posted anything in a year, and Peachy has wisely kept pretty quiet about it, with a grand total of two (one if we’re not counting duplicates) pretty neutral comments in threads about the mod team’s decision.
Yes, all this and the fact that the move was months in the making but had almost zero* communication with the broader community really just paints a picture of a thoroughly dysfunctional mod team acting in a bubble, but from what little I understand I’d argue this particular fiasco was done mostly on the initiative of the “head honcho of 196” and A_Very_Big_Fan, who made the announcements and were the ones to double down on it in the face of community pushback.
* a month or so ago when PJ really got his knickers in a twist about not being allowed to misgender neopronoun users by LBZ’s site rules one of the mods mentioned they were considering a move to dotworld and got pushback then too
Your comment makes sense. To be honest as they stated that everyone one was involved in the redaction of the last communication it seemed just easier to ask for a complete uphold of the team.
Really? All of them?
According to the mod team, they were all in on this decision.
So all of them makes sense to me.
According to the mod team, this post is from all of them. Nevertheless, Rmbp is in this reply section disputing this, saying that he didn’t write a word of it.
Dunno about you, but it looks to me like a small number of mods have a habit of calling all the shots and then sharing the blame when it backfires.
Its possible.
But here’s the thing - there is no way to know for sure. Clearly, none of them resigned on hearing about it, so at some level they are onboard.
Also, at no point in any of these months-long internal discussions did any of these folks say “Hey, this isn’t right, people need to be informed of what we are thinking and why”, or “I can’t agree to this, I’m going to post about it and resign”.
So I still think all of them should resign. Going along with a terrible decision is not, IMO, any better.
after seeing they added this part, they wont
Why not have another team take over the original 196?
Yeah, that’s not gonna fly. No-one is suggesting we should split the community (though their actions may have already caused that as a side effect).
We are saying they are done as mods and are welcome to earn back trust as regular members of the community instead. In my opinion, they are never going to earn back trust as mods.
Of course that’s just my views on it. I guess we will see what everyone else thinks.
Having another team take over splits the community.
I think its a bit too late for that excuse 💀
Tbh I’m happy with the new onehundredninetysix com, I’d prefer if these mods and anyone that supports their decisions move to .world
I’m not sure if they deleted it or I just can’t find it, but there was a post on the LW destination that said the mods talked about the near-universal, overwhelmingly negative response, and were split 2-2 on what to do: either cancel the plans, or keep going anyway. They only made this post after considering the aforementioned near-universal, overwhelmingly response a tiebreaker.
I think that really encapsulates the problem.
The primary issue that incited this was because we don’t fully agree with the admin’s moderation policies.
Clearly the community does though.
Which means the community is perfectly happy to continue on blahaj, its you, as the mod team, that aren’t aligning with the community.
As someone who enjoys 196 (but only really participates by voting), I would just say that since you aren’t aligning with the community, this isn’t a community you should be moderating.
Make the [email protected] mods the mods of [email protected] and move on.
But the community at large doesn’t know what the moderators knew, so simply stating that the community agreed with the moderation of the admin team, when the community was largely to completely unaware of the differences between the admin- and the mod-team seems unjustified. Or did you know that the admins banned certain users for content that the mod team was fine with?
The issue, to me, seems to be that the community thought the admin- and mod-teams were on the same page, so the mod-team claiming that there have been differences with the admin-team, which prompted this move seemed extremely sussy. I’m not saying that the mod-team handled the situation great, or to be more precise, their move seems to be absolutely terrible, but the community doesn’t know all the facts that lead to that decision.
Irrelevant.
Also…
but the community doesn’t know all the facts that lead to that decision.
And the decision was to go to .world, where recently the admin team decided trolls are to be engaged with, where misogyny, transphobia, etc happens pretty regularly and doesnt “cross the line”, with their reasoning being that the admin team was too heavy handed.
If that doesnt scream “Completely out of sync with the community” to you, I don’t know what would.
No matter how you look at it - the mod team is far, far removed from being on the same page as the community. That makes them the wrong mods for the community.
where recently the admin team decided trolls are to be engaged with, where misogyny, transphobia, etc happens pretty regularly and doesnt “cross the line”
They adressed this in the OP, stating that the .world admin team was contacted prior and was allowing them to keep all their rules. So while .world as an instance may be as bad as you describe it here, the mod-team was planning on upholding the same rules that were upheld by the mod-team on blahaj.
Again, I’m not saying that their decision to move without consulting the community was good, far from it. But firing off straw-man arguments isn’t helping your case.
They adressed this in the OP, stating that the .world admin team was contacted prior and was allowing them to keep all their rules.
“Trust me bro” is worth less than nothing when they dont respect the community enough to communicate.
Nothing about what I said is a straw-man, there are defined differences in admin level moderation which the mod team specifically stated.
So cut the bs about logical fallacies when none are present.
Nothing about what I said is a straw-man, there are defined differences in admin level moderation which the mod team specifically stated.
Yes, there are defined differences. On blahaj, the admins are removing posts and comments that, by the mod-team’s estimation, did not violate 196’ rules. On .world, the admins promised not to.
Yes, there are defined differences. On blahaj, the admins are removing posts and comments that, by the mod-team’s estimation, did not violate 196’ rules. On .world, the admins promised not to.
Yes. Because .world is more tolerant of the things I mentioned.
The mods want more lax admins who let stuff slide. The instance that said “you have to engage with trolls” is the instance they tried to move to.
This ain’t rocket surgery.
i’m from beehaw and i support our decision to defederate from lemmy.world, and honestly, i agree with ada’s moderating decisions. i don’t come to 196 to deal with people “just asking questions” or getting transphobic trolls coming in and CERTAINLY not cis people whining about how they don’t get their good boy ally points
especially if the post about you leaving 196 reports to languish unattended to is accurate (it’s from another user on this post who i can’t see while on beehaw, i’m guessing they’re from a defederated instance. they quoted ada, but i couldn’t find her comment as a source, so i don’t know if it’s real)if that’s real, we barely know what your moderation style is, and i’ve been giving you false credit for ada’s good moderationplease see the comments for ada’s clarification about the moderation workload (tldr is that the mods are not native to blahaj.zone, so reports might be addressed on other instances but not blahaj.zone, frequently leaving ada to deal with them, aggravating their differences in moderation styles)
so we have reason to doubt where your moderating priorities are, you disagree with noted Good Judgement Admin ada, and you unilaterally decided both to move and where to move the community without consulting anyone first
from my vantage, you couldn’t even protect us on world if you wanted to, andit really doesn’t seem like you want to, eitheri think the actual respectful thing to do at this point is to just step down. y’all have disrupted this community enough. there are mods who are interested in, and understand the values of, this community. values that you don’t seem to share
let them take over and have things return to normal. make a /c/196 on world if you want, it sounds like there won’t be a lot of content to moderate anyways
Ada’s comment can be found here
And ya, if it’s true that Ada was the one dealing with the the reports, I’m not really sure what the mod team was even doing (other than making unpopular decisions without community input)
I feel I need to clarify that. I am not saying that the 196 team didn’t moderate. What I’m saying is that because most of their moderators are based on remote instances, due to the way lemmy reports and moderation work, some of the reports fell through the “federation cracks” and didn’t get actioned remotely. And because mostly they appeared to be issues about the community rules rather than instance rules breaking, I would leave them alone. But as a result, they would regularly sit in my reports queue for a day or more, because they don’t go away until someone explicitly actions the report or closes it.
As an admin, I see all reports that cross the instance, and I have to ignore lots of them so that the community mods can deal with them and close them down, because if I close the report, the community mod might not ever see it.
My frustration with 196 is that having their reports hang around for a couple of days was a semi regular thing, which made admining more difficult, because there were always active reports in my notifications that I couldn’t close. I asked for them to put on blahaj based mods, or spin up blahaj alts, which they did, and that improved things, but because they were alts and the majority of the mods were still remote, the problem never entirely went away
tl;dr - This wasn’t a case of 196 mods not moderating. This was an issue with a lack of dedicated blahaj presence creating more workload for me.
Edit - As an aside, this issue also put a bigger spotlight on our moderation differences, because if a remote mod closed a remote report but left the post itself in place, the report on blahaj.zone would stay open, and I would have no idea if a community mod had looked at it. Which is to say, reports for content that didn’t break 196 rules, but did break blahahj.zone instance rules were more likely to come to my attention, because the report would hang around on blahaj.zone for longer. And those removals are the ones that highlighted the difference in moderation values and expectations.
Thank you for clarifying.
Oh no blaze you got banned ;(
it’s good to have that additional context. it’s interesting to see how federation affects moderation and the issues that can present and how it aggravated the differences in moderation approaches
that said, even rescinding my argument about whether they were moderating, we’re still left with obvious ideological differences that would be bad to disastrous for the community in a place as active and ideologically unaligned as lemmy.world, nevermind the clear contempt that the mod team has shown for the community’s own preferences and safety
as an aside, thank you for the moderation work you do on this instance. while my interpretation that the c/196 mods were doing nothing was incorrect, it seems plain to me that your moderation style was still a good influence on the community (albeit at the cost of extra workload for you). it’s always good to see you around and i appreciate your presence and effort
It feels like a bug that remote mods closing the report doesn’t close the same report on the community’s home instance, but maybe I’m missing something.
It’s definitely not ideal. There should also be a way of making a report for the mods or for the admins
thank you for providing the link to the source
it’s really incredible how the more i learn about the situation, the more the current mod team just seems like a complete mess
I still don’t understand how you thought this unilateral decision, including squatting on the 196@LBZ name, would be received well in the community. I question the soundness of your judgment.
Hold a vote of no confidence. Let the community you tried to screw over decide if the moderators should stay or resign.
why not open the original blahaj zone 196, and let ada appoint new mods? if yall want to move and have your heart set on that, thats fine, but its clear that there are many people who would lose access to their favorite community if the original 196 remains locked. having multiple instances of the same community is by no means a bad thing, it simply gives more reach for our communities, and more options for every user.
the whole point of the fediverse is that us users can make experiences we like for eachother. its very clear that many people like the way things are, yall dont have to, but we do. its a community because of everybody who participates, lets try and build communities where our queer and trans friends can feel safe and at home. nothing is lost if we have two communities, only gained. let the nature of the fediverse and federation decide how things play out, not a small group of moderators making unilateral decisions for everybody.
There are considering unlocking it: https://lemmy.world/comment/14570102
Thanks for the info. When I got online today, I was very confused at what had gone down; I appreciate people such as yourself who have made it easier to follow current events in this tiny corner of the internet
having multiple instances of the same community is by no means a bad thing
also theres already different 196s through the internet like on reddit, tumblr, here, etc all with their own differences and I think thats pretty cool :3
Re: let Ada appoint new mods
Because the problem was the admins, not the mods. Ada was banning users without telling the mods. Read the post linked that got a ban.
But the community doesn’t have a problem with the admin, the mods have a problem.
And instead of leaving, they thought they could take the whole community with them without asking
this is a quote from ada
“I have asked 196 for years now to have an active blahaj.zone mod so that someone can deal with the blahaj.zone reports that constantly come through and build up, but still, the best we got were mods with alt accounts that get checked every couple of days, leaving me to deal with the build up of reports on 196. Sometimes they would hang around there for days while I waited for a 196 mod to log in and look at them. And because you don’t like the way I deal with them, you drag me over the coals for my moderation style, despite no one from 196 stepping up to deal with those reports on a regular basis.”
the issue is not ada banning users without telling mods, it was mods not doing their job and ada stepping in to take action when no one else would.
i read the post that was used as an example of adas supposed overreach, but that commenter was basically saying that cis people cant be allys because trans people arent nice enough to them, reeks of transphobia to me.
Ada was banning users without telling the mods.
I was banning users from the whole instance, not specifically from 196. Instance bans doesn’t get pre-approved by community mods. Which is how every admin on every lemmy instance works, including lemmy.world.
Also just for the record. I think Kolanki deserved it for being an ass and playing the victim. You absolutely need to earn allyship, you can’t just self-proclaim to be an Ally when you don’t actually support queer people in any way.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Yes I would’ve banned him if I were in Ada’s position too.
no need to ping me. I disagree.
I would probably also consider this whole fiasco and pushback against Kolanki’s very justified ban an act of bigot apologia, something else that is utterly unacceptable.
likewise.
that’s ridiculous
I only saw one other person mention the post that’s supposedly a good example of your disagreements with adas moderation but that makes it even more clear you need to resign and leave ada was right for removing that comment it’s the typical “oh woe is me I just asked innocent questions and the angry trans people try to paint me as the bad guy” trans people don’t get annoyed if you ask them a genuinely innocent question about their experience but they will get annoyed if you ask them “just innocent questions” where it’s very clear what your real views are and what you’re really doing adas just reading between the lines and that’s a good thing that’s how you avoid the sealioning that .world would’ve brought along and you say oh they reversed that decision and you would be allowed to ban sealions and you can mod how you like and .world won’t interfere but it makes it very clear you wouldn’t ban them anyway you agree with the .world admins anyway just leave you clearly don’t represent the community in the slightest and have completely different views of how this community should be run hand over the moderation to the onehundredninetysix mod team and go do whatever you want on .world
I was thinking the same. If this is their best example of Ada going over the mod team’s heads, how could this possibly justify an instance move?
Agreed especially on the comment as a showcase of „mod differences“.
I think this just rather corroborates Ada‘s statement of how there were multiple reports the mods did not follow up on and how Ada had to eventually always do it.
So even with a good faith reading I do not see how this is a problematic ban and not just a common recurring topic which this instance has always protected us from, which is the whole reason I am on this instance.
While I understand that the „modding differences“ were the reason you aimed to migrate, I as a user do not remotely see the benefits of a move when it was Ada that stepped up to do moderation. Especially if as Ada mentioned our community had reported these instances, a move would just signify a deterioration of our experience.
I have to reiterate that I have always appreciated Ada‘s decisions. The stepping up and sheltering many of us on the Reddit exodus and providing me with one of the few places nowadays I can go to and expect a civil, homely and communal experience.
Yeah they didn’t show previous comments (the actually relevant context), just the one where the user bargains.
Yeah, the lack of context on that is rather telling, I think, and a sign that the mods don’t understand what it’s like to be persistently deligitimised or why that could be the final straw. Go Ada, you’re a great and caring admin.
If you don’t want to mod under Ada that’s fine. Nothing is stopping you from making a spinoff community. But this is me calling for your team to step down. Hand over moderatorship. You don’t own 196 and you never did.
i don’t really accept the apology. 196 is not the mod team and you clearly do not have the capacity to maintain a community. please leave and do not come back to LBZ. i enjoying having my funny little people on my phone here and you have not been very funny so kindly stop the car because you are an underage driver. let someone who does not hit curbs or go up a one way street take the wheel thanks also please let the door hit you on the way out
Still No
dbzer0 or shitjustworks would have been way better than world. There’s just way too many assholes on world, and even if you ban everyone who is overtly malicious there’s still going to be a ton of normal users who are bringing a completely different vibe/political direction than the blahaj users (I say, as a feddit.org user).
Surely it doesn’t make any difference unless you’re on an instance that’s defederated from .world? I’ve only just moved off .world but I could already post and comment here?
Only if you think that the instance’s userbase doesn’t matter for any given community.
I thought the point of federation was that it doesn’t matter?
The point of federation is that the means of management is distributed and localized, and anyone (capable of running an instance) can make their own and interact with the other instances.
Locally, administration matters.
For example, I had a .world account. I moved to db0 because .world made it clear their admins were amateur lawyers, db0’s administration style and rules align with me (among other things, but irrelevant here), so I moved.
I could have seen a lot of the same content on .world, but not all (federation with specific instances is optional after all), but the .world admins behavior mattered to me. db0’s approach matters to me, as Ada’s does to the many on lbz.
For me, it was a great decision to leave .world, and I’m quite happy where I am. That, to me, is the point of the fediverse. I can change instances to get away from their administration, and still get all the content.
Hope this made sense and wasn’t just a garbled mess of early morning ADHD.
Yeah I understand the reasons to move due to administration that’s kind of why I moved as well (I disagree with stuff like not degenerating threads etc), I just don’t understand the arguments about the .world user base in general since you don’t get away from them just by moving instance (and I can’t say I ever had any issues with the users anyway)
If you’re not on .world, defederating .world remains a possibility. Also, have you never browsed your instance’s local tab?
Honestly no I’ve never browsed local lol, sometimes I browse all but usually just subscribed
LBZ has more strict rules about behavior, while Lemmy.world is much more lax (in some cases, in others they take a hard right turn, but mostly irrelevant for this part).
By going to .world, the mods are saying that is the admin level ruleset/moderation they support, specifically because the mod team said they consider Ada to be “heavy handed”.
.world tends to have a lot more of the problematic userbase, in part due to its size.
On LBZ, the users would have the benefit of both moderation by the community mods, as well as the rules of LBZ and its admin team (I’m sure there are folks who help Ada in some way, sorry but I dont know who they are).
On .world, those additional rules/protections are gone, and a recent announcement (which has since been crossed out with a “new announcement clarifying” message) basically said you have to engage with trolls, and its OK for users to be awful. As you can imagine, this didn’t go over well, and yet they are still moving forward just with text edits based on what they’ve said so far.
This is a huge change in rules for the community at large, as well as an increased risk - from appearing in the local feed in addition to all or subscribed - in .world users who are problematic getting involved in discussions on 196. With the change in instance level rules, in combination with the mod team wanting more lax rules about behavior, means more exposure to those problematic folks.
The actions and attitude presented by the mod team are inexcusable. We have already taken our toys and left. It’s time to step down.
lol 🍿 honestly hope the instance just goes back to being a trans instance, hurry up and leave
This is a similar situation with what happened over on Reddit. 196 mods didn’t agree with admins and were eventually replaced (difference here is that we were not forced out, but chose to leave). As Lemmy was a large gathering spot for people fleeing Reddit, we felt it was better to try to keep the community together and move together. Having another team take over splits the community. The more fragmentation there is, the less longevity and volume of community each skew will have.
Translation: “We were scared the majority wouldn’t follow us to Lemmy world unless we pseudo forced them to, and we can’t imagine life without our fiefdom.”
Especially considering the community already fractured with onehindrednintysix being formed
Reposting this since you said you were going to answer questions in the [email protected] post but this one is still unanswered:
If the move had nothing to do with pronouns and you’ll continue to enforce rules about neopronouns, how do you feel about one of the LW community team mods making statements like this about them? Do you feel confident that they will always let you enforce neopronoun rules if they decide that it’s hurting LW?
Well spotted
They’re not a LW admin, so they have no influence or control over us there. On top of that, we addressed this in the first question, reasons #1 and #4.
I guess I’m not sure what a “Community Team” member does, then, if they have no control or input on how LW policies are carried out in communities. I can’t find an explanation anywhere here so maybe someone can point me in the right direction.
They’re a mod of /c/lemmyworld, not an admin. And, again, this was addressed in the first question of the FAQ, reasons #1 and #4.
I understand they’re not an admin. In the page I linked you can see they’ve been put in the “Community Team” section. Are you saying that “Community Team” is a convoluted title that the LW admins have chosen to say “person who mods /c/lemmyworld”? Or do they have some other role that I can’t find outlined anywhere? (Which could be on my end, the site I linked doesn’t play well with mobile)
Ohh, dang my bad, I wasn’t sure what you were getting at. I only knew him as the guy that posted the thing that everyone hated but turned out to not be an admin.
I’m…not sure what that means lol. But our agreement with Ruud was that we could moderate our community however we saw fit, so I think it’s a moot point anyways. I have no reason to believe he would go back on his word.
And I’m sorry if I sounded frustrated. I am, honestly, but I didn’t need to direct that at you.
Yeah, I’m not sure what it means either, which means I’m not sure how many red flags the earlier thread I linked should be setting off. A random mod on LW being respectability politics about neopronouns is meh, someone higher up the chain than that and it’s brake pumping time IMO.
Also like, presumably everyone else on LW thought they were allowed to moderate their communities how they saw fit before that announcement, you know? My understanding is the LW admins shelved the policy for retooling, not retirement, so personally it’s not something I would want to chance. I don’t think anyone is purposefully lying to you guys, but I also don’t think they’d make an exception just for 196 to do whatever it wants with any future instance rule changes.
That mod has admin rights. Look at [email protected] for evidence. They took over the community and locked it down, and removed the mods.
Regular users / mods can ask instance admins to do everything you just described on their behalf. And he’s not in the admin list.
it’s not a good look for you to not know how lemmy.world is ran while simultaneously saying you can’t stay on lemmy.blahaj.zone and are moving to lemmy.world because of how it’s ran. it demonstrates a lack of understanding for the impact of the move, and the potential risks to the community of people you want to force the move on.
you didn’t do your research and it shows. lemmy.world, of the instances mentioned in your post, is possibly the worst instance to move to, especially considering who is drawn to 196 specifically of any lemmy shitpost community. you this whole debacle has put on display a shocking lack of understanding from a mod team of how community building, the lemmy ecosystem, and the fediverse at large work. we don’t need you to be experts on this to talk with us, but we need you to own your shortcomings, which has consistently not happened throughout this journey.
I’m not familiar with the dynamics between LW staff because I’m not a member of LW staff. I don’t know who Ada’s staff are, either. It’s not something I’ve ever had to know to adequately do my job. But I’m also not the owner of 196 and I’m not the one calling the shots. I’m just answering questions and concerns where I can. Moss is the one who knows most about these things.
However, from what Moss shared with us of her correspondence with the LW admins, I have no reason to believe that they would go back on their word when they said we’re allowed to moderate 196 as we always have.
Owning our shortcomings was the very reason we wrote this post. I thought we were pretty thorough, but if there’s something we missed that you’d like us to address, feel free to voice that here.
Quite a big point missing here
Apparently none of the 196 moderators were actively checking the modlog?
Meaning instance moderator could just see a modlog appearing, and no-one dealing with it.
Moss, I know you can do better than painting the picture one-sided. It’s probably pretty stressful now, and I very much understand it.
We all check the modlog regularly. I do it ~5 days a week, on top of reading literally every post and the majority of the comments while I’m at it. The problem is federation, because it prevents us from seeing a complete log of the reports from any given instance.
And you know what? Fun fact!! LBZ was one of the first instances I ever signed up for. So perhaps if LBZ was the right instance to check reports from, it would have been super helpful for both parties if they accepted my application. I’m still waiting two years later.
I’m sorry if I sound frustrated. It’s because I am. Not at you, I just don’t know where else to say my peace. Thanks for listening.
The problem is federation, because it prevents us from seeing a complete log of the reports from any given instance.
You don’t see any reports from a non-local account.
So perhaps if LBZ was the right instance to check reports from, it would have been super helpful for both parties if they accepted my application. I’m still waiting two years later.
You never bothered to ask for support on [email protected] ? Admins could have solved that in a few hours.
So you are telling us that even now you don’t have a functional Blahaj account?
This is also what in confused about. If the mods didn’t know about admin mod actions, surely that meant they weren’t reading the mod log? I don’t know the first thing about being a mod but this seems like there’s a pretty clear solution.
Reports don’t federate, you need a local account to see them.
Seems like this mod never bothered setting one up.
:confused-cat:
Sorry, I should have given more context. I meant that the mods’ behaviour confuses me a lot.
Oh, it is confusing indeed
Apparently none of the 196 moderators were actively checking the modlog
I actively checked for reports, but despite that, there have been 4 times since joining where Ada has sent a message in the 196 matrix chat because of outstanding reports. A large part of this was because resolving reports doesn’t federate. You can see a report, resolve it, send someone a DM for followup questions, and it will still show up as unresolved on blahaj.zone in the meantime. I log in with my blahaj account to ensure it’s marked as resolved there too, but not always immediately.
