FediLore + Fedidrama

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Rules

  1. Any drama must be posted as an observer, you cannot post drama that you are involved with.
  2. When posting screenshots of drama, you must obscure the identity of all the participants.

Chronicle the life and tale of the fediverse (+ matrix)

Largely a sublemmy about capturing drama, from fediverse spanning drama to just lemmy drama.

Includes lore like how a instance got it's name, how an instance got defederated, how an admin got doxxed, fedihistory etc

(New) This sub's intentions is to an archive/newspaper, as in preferably don't get into fights with each other or the ppl featured in the drama

Tags: fediverse news, lemmy news, lemmyverse

Partners:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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This was originally posted as a comment response in !asklemmy@lemmy.world.

Back in December, the instance hosting 196 (lemmy.blahaj.zone) announced that, as part of its mission as a trans-friendly space, harassment based on gender or neopronouns would remain** prohibited—even if the user in question was suspected of being a troll. Users were asked to disengage, block, and report suspected trolling behavior rather than bring harassment into a community already vulnerable to that kind of bullying.

There was a small backlash to the policy from some users. This led to a number of “toe the line” posts that weren’t outright gender-based harassment but strongly signaled an intent to misgender or harass in the future. Blahaj admins promptly removed all offending comments during this wave of dissent.

Important to note: The majority of the Blahaj and 196 users supported the policy, upvoting and praising the admins for creating a safe space for trans individuals.

By January, the backlash had mostly subsided, and the trolls causing issues had moved on. While the 196 moderators, including @moss and their team, did agree with the specific neopronouns policy, they remained unhappy with the broader policy of respect for trans identities. They cited “personal differences” and expressed discontent with instances where Blahaj admins directly removed comments which harassed or openly expressed intent to harass trans identities, feeling that it overstepped their role.*

Yesterday, @moss and the 196 moderation team enacted a major decision without consulting the community. They locked !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone and instructed users to move to !196@lemmy.world.

This move was extremely unpopular. Many users strongly dislike lemmy.world for various reasons (a complicated topic better unpacked elsewhere). The announcement post was met with widespread backlash, and @moss eventually locked it. In response, a few users created a new community on Blahaj: !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone. The new community quickly grew in size and activity, with most users opting to stay on Blahaj rather than migrate to lemmy.world.

It’s clear @moss and the 196 moderators underestimated the community’s attachment to its home on Blahaj. By attempting to uproot the group without input, they alienated much of the community. As a result, most users have moved to the new Blahaj-hosted community, which has already become the more active space.

TL;DR:
@Moss and the 196 mod team tried to move the community to lemmy.world without consulting anyone. The decision was extremely unpopular, leading to backlash and the creation of a new Blahaj-hosted community that most users now prefer.

*This paragraph has been edited after receiving correction or clarification from @A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world. You can find that discussion here.

**”Remain” being the key word here. Blahaj has openly held the same trans-focused policies as always, and the admin Ada was simply reasserting her position here.

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Drag is worried this post may break rule 1 about being involved in drama. But drag was not involved in this issue before drag decided to investigate it and to conduct an experiment to determine the actual situation. Drag would like to publish the results of this "investigative journalism", and doesn't believe this is covered by the intention of rule 1, but drag may be wrong.

Introduction

The issue of censoring discussion about Luigi Mangione and the CEO shooter has been controversial across the whole internet, not just the Fediverse. Reddit banned its Luigi Mangione community. Many people on lemmy.world have raised concerns that Dutch law would prevent people from praising the CEO shooter, as this is "inciting violence". Lemmy.world is run according to Dutch law.

Over several days, drag found a LOT of contradictory information about Dutch law and incitement to violence. Some of the articles quoted from the Dutch Criminal code were non-applicable, non-obvious in their application, or entirely unclear when drag read them dragself.

After a day or so of reading the DCC and discussing it with other Lemmy users, Article 131 emerged as the best candidate for applicability to the Mangione situation.

  1. Any person who in public, either verbally or in writing or through images, incites another or others to commit any criminal offence or act of violence against the authorities, shall be liable to a term of imprisonment not exceeding five years or a fine of the fourth category.
  2. If the criminal offence incited is a terrorist offence or is a serious offence for the preparation or facilitation of a terrorist offence, the term of imprisonment prescribed for the offence defined in subsection (1) shall be increased by one third.

What is very difficult about this article is that "against the authorities" is ambiguous in whether it applies to the first part, inciting, or just to actually doing violence, the second part of that sentence. Drag analysed the original Dutch and as far as drag can tell, it's no clearer in the native language. Drag chose to hypothesise that article 131 applies to inciting crime against anyone, and tested this hypothesis.

Methods

Given the fears of some people that the broader interpretation applied, drag created a community, !opruiing@lemmy.world, to document violations of the more broad interpretation of the law on lemmy.world. Drag made four posts: about inciting shoplifting, about inciting assassination of government officials, about inciting eating hot dogs in North Korea (this is reportedly illegal), and about inciting shooting CEOs. This is a variety of levels of seriousness and a variety of levels of applicability to Dutch law.

Results

The community was locked and made modless by the admins and none of the linked posts were removed.

Analysis

Despite worry from users on lemmy.world that the platform must remove article 131 violations (opruiing) in order to continue to operate, the admins did not seem to share this worry. Calls for violence against CEOs and politicians were made visible to the lemmy.world admins and were not removed.

The admins don't care about opruiing. It's not an issue they care to moderate. In fact, they categorised identification of opruiing as "trolling", or in other words divisive and contrary to lemmy.world's aims.

Discussion

There has been concern that praise of Mangione and the CEO shooter would not be allowed on lemmy.world. This experiment revealed those fears are unnecessary. Users can call for the assassination of CEOs on lemmy.world as much as they like.


Drag hopes this experiment will clear up the drama over whether Luigi praise is allowed on lemmy.world by providing useful information. And again, though most of this post is in a first person perspective, drag was making an active choice not to participate in the drama by adopting a neutral stance on the morality of Luigi praise until the experiment was over. So drag hopes very much that this post follows the intended spirit of the rules.

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A few days ago, I asked if we could talk about things that happen outside the fediverse. I got a lot of different answers ranging from "yes" to "no" to "it depends". Hunting someone down somewhere and saying "ah ha I found Zezima on X" isn't the kind of thing I meant. This is.

That moment when an admin outright makes it absolutely clear if you read the room (those who remember past messages will be able to do that) that they're going around trying to get back at people and further complicate things for them, the instance in question being in spiteful response to a promotion. The incentive to weigh in is thus pre-existing, plus I am fediversally relevant because I have been accused of being them (not that I'm the only one), so I get the contagion.

It's a bit much.

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Suppose you have a fediverse admin, perhaps one of the several who are oppressive, and they are roaming around somewhere like Twitter or Reddit. One day they spot someone on there they don't like, maybe someone they know from the fediverse or maybe not, and they give the person a hard time. Are we allowed to talk about those activities, especially considering the barrier is already crossed the other way?

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Forgive the vent, but it used to be that the instances were all simply opinionated in different ways. You could talk to anyone from any instance without anyone getting upset so as long as you were respectful. Being in an instance used to be enviable enough to jest about.

Early on, it went from that to "my opinion should not be pushed back against". For a while, you could not go into ML territory, for example, and challenge their status quo. Recently it has reached another new level, where people will obliterate you simply for being neutral, and this was after they began to break their own rules. Individual cities in my home country are beginning to consider banning the fediverse, and that's only because the country itself stopped short of doing it. I thought the fediverse was supposed to make things easier to enjoy. How can we trust we can look up to it in this social environment?

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Synopsis

(trying to be neutral here)

Hazycora[^1] was informally hired to work on Loops web UI. Then Daniel[^2] posted about his idea to launch a video ads network for Loops (which he latter admitted was a joke), and Hazycora commented that such posts hurt people's trust in him.

This was followed by an avalanche of mutual accusations, which I shall not dwell, as a result Hazycora no longer works for Loops.

Consequences

  • Accounts using "hazy.gay" email domain were banned on loops.video with a fake dubstep-posting Kamala Harris account as an excuse. This also breaks guest browsing on loops.gay.
  • Hazycora's username on loops.video was forcibly changed from single-letter "h" to "hazellll".
  • Disassemblies of the Loops client were published on GitHub.
  • Hazycora says she has got more than $500 in donations in the past two days; Daniel says his following count is growing, and hers are going down; both claims need verification.

Footnotes

[^1]: Admin of besties.house and git.gay. Created loops.gay, the first web client for Loops. [^2]: Daniel Supernault (aka "dansup"). Creator of Pixelfed (federated Instagram clone), Loops (federated TikTok clone), FediDB, fediverse.info, pubkit.net and yet unreleased Sup messenger.

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!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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The original post by @spujb@lemmy.cafe was a woman wearing a shirt that says "Italians do it better". Someone asked what they do, and drag explained the joke as best as drag understood the intention, though drag disagrees that Luigi killed that CEO. It's not a call for violence, it's an explanation of a joke. Other people interpreted the joke the same way.

Less than an hour later, Flying Squid banned drag for that explanation, and for saying Luigi is not guilty. According to Flying Squid, referencing the CEO shooter case and saying Luigi didn't do it is a call for violence. Expressing support for Luigi Mangione is a bannable offense on LemmyShitpost.

EDIT: The Picard Maneuver responded to drag's appeal and reversed the ban. Drag will be deleting this post as it is no longer relevant to the current state of affairs on Lemmy Shitpost.

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It might be to avoid impersonation.

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Most of the misinformation communities are easy to spot, but !collapse@lemm.ee falls into a slightly different category, and it presents itself in an unusual way. It seems like one of the main mods flavors his postings with a consistent sprinkling of posts that say that Europe not buying fossil fuels from Russia is a catastrophe for Europe, and they must reverse course as soon as possible and stop trying to depend on renewable energy, since it doesn't work.

Here are some examples from a most recent post. It's far from the only post that includes this general shape and character, but it's particularly on the nose. From https://lemm.ee/post/49292464:

That will leave Europe with expensive LNG from Qatar and the US, as well as some pipeline gas from Norway and through Turkiye, which is Russian gas in a roundabout, third-party way. As always: higher complexity comes at a higher price — a direct consequence of the EU’s economic war on its largest energy supplier.

With the predictable unpredictability of wind and solar, however, and with a massive reliance on natural gas fired power plants to balance electricity demand, Europe has just saw the fastest drop in natural gas storage in years. Yes, the weather was cold in the past couple of weeks, but it wasn’t nearly as cold as it could get in the dead of winter. Wind on the other hand stopped blowing, which not only resulted in lower electricity generation from wind turbines, but also in thicker clouds and more persistent fog… Leading to a much diminished solar power generation. Welcome to the good old Dunkelflaute (or the dark doldrums) so common this time of year, and by the way sometimes throughout the entire winter... Who could have thought that “renewables” produce much less electricity during wintertime…?

Whenever a large solar farm returns production it sends a shock wave through the grid, damaging sensitive equipment nearby. Similarly, when a cloud suddenly blocks the Sun a micro-blackout could occur (lasting a few milliseconds) till back up capacity comes online. These fluctuations in the supply of electricity has forced many companies with sensitive manufacturing equipment to install surge protectors and uninterruptible power supply units costing tens or hundreds of thousands of Euros (depending on size) or outright buying a natural gas powered generation unit to produce their own stable electricity supply.

In the meantime, and just for the record, the IMF has just named Russia the 4th largest economy of the world, surpassing Japan and Germany; after the World Bank classified it as a high income country. Despite all protestations, sanctions actually helped Russia rein in its worst oligarchs and encouraged investments to replace lost imports. Contrary to what Europe’s ruling elite had in mind, their policy has lead to a huge economic boom in Russia, driven by internal consumption and powered by an abundant supply of fossil fuels.

I asked the mod about what was up with this, on an earlier post, and they didn't seem to have much of a response other than an appeal to authority. (https://lemm.ee/post/49069993)

Obviously, I could be right or wrong, and no one's obligated to answer my questions about anything, but at that point I was looking at it as "You may be unintentionally posting misinformation" and warning the person, and their response didn't line up for me with someone who is innocently posting informative content because they believe it to be true.

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Edit 1: Post in Question and first message added

Edit 2: The Moderators of !ukraine@sopuli.xyz did the right thing by adding no charities to rule 5, my respect has been restored.

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Cross-posted from "Announcement regarding the instance..." by @kapx132@lemmy.autism.place in !autismplace@lemmy.autism.place


It is with great sadness that i write this. however The Admin team has parted ways. I have closed registrations, and disabled the option to create new communities. The server will be ran until the payments dry up (about ~1-2 months). We have tried to build a community for autistic people online. It ended up not working for which we apologize. Please do not go after the other team members. Some disappeared, some went their ways, but whatever the reason i wish them the best. If you have any questions, leave them here and i will try to answer them.

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Elia Ayoub's profile (on spore.social) was hidden by mastodon.social moderators just the day his post about the ICC arrest warrants on Netanyahu got into "Explore" page.

To check yourself, visit https://mastodon.social/ and type @ayoub@spore.social into search.

UPD (2024-11-26): mastodon.social has stopped hiding this profile.

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/fediverselore@lemmy.ca
 
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22298719

Image credit in original post :)

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After being harassed in multiple discord channels by powermod FlyingSquid the news mod blackbeard has shuttered his account and moved to bluesky.

https://ibb.co/cY44MgF

https://lemmy.world/u/Blackbeard

"The recklessness with which people downvote polite disagreements reminds me of all the worst parts of Reddit, and it proves to me that this isn't the social media savior I'd hoped it would be, and is instead just another echo chamber. I hope eventually lemmy.world (and the fediverse more broadly) can grow out of that, but some of the behavior I've seen on the inside from both mods and admins doesn't really inspire much confidence for that kind of evolution in the short term. "

FlyingSquid is the same mod who has the power to siteban people from lemmy.world

Why does lemmy.world keep having issues with their powermods and admins? Why do powermods get the ability to siteban their enemies from the largest instance?

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Suppose you've come across someone running the place and there are examples of a case that can be made that they've broken rules. What next?

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Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)

The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.

Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.

However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their "drama communities" as well.

Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them

After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear (a) , followed by more resignations (a)

In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.

There's also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts "as a bit" using wording that they were not aware is misgendering ("fella") which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the "bit doing" during this heated period.

This "struggle session" is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back , and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.

EDIT: Even lemmygrad is wondering what the hell is going on

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The removed comment 1000006092

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Moderator of ye powertripping bastards allows Lemmy.World moderators to lie and slander all over the place but does not appreciate those Moderators being called out on their lies.

After removing this post calling out Lemmy.World for banning users criticizing Kamala Harris, DB0 moderator also banned me from their instance.

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And this is the Hexbear reply thread. Please be very wary of the extremism and bigotry and know that they are largely defederated

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I think they've been watching too much porn.

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