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.
This kind of thing needs to happen way more often.
Moderators don't "own" the communities they host. They're just taking responsibility for the space. I actually really wish that their effort was rewarded with more of recognition and less of headache, but the answer to that is certainly not to say that they are the "boss" of the users in that community, and the users need to do what they say.
It's especially hilarious for 196 because they weren't actually taking on the moderation responsibility. Ada was. So they just wanted to show up and be the boss without doing anything in particular to help anybody. I hope the new community finds blahaj-native moderators and they find some fulfillment in keeping the space healthy and organized.
Mods surely act like it, that's reddit modding culture at its core.
Back in my day when the forums were the backbone of online discussion modding was a janitorial job. Spammers, off topic, bad faith behavior got modded.
Reddit style modding is censorship of content and tone so that community is discussing topic with facts and tone that mod approves.
With that said most of fedi subs are modded properly but step into any higher traffic sub lime news and politics and then you are facing censorship.
Agreed!
Edit: Oh, I got so irritated that UM had replied that I didn't even see he hadn't replied to me, and got annoyed that I thought he was messaging me from a new account after me telling him I was blocking him.
Whatever. I'm blocking this new account, also. I suspect that the placement of his reply right where I will see it, on the topic of free speech, accidentally from a new account which I haven't blocked, is not accidental. But I'll let the moderators decide if that constitutes harassment or not.
Yeah. On Usenet, when spam first started becoming an issue, there were people who were arguing against deleting it, because they didn't want to step into the territory of having someone standing over the community removing messages. They would rather have the spam than have someone doing that to other people's content.
On the modern internet, that's not the answer, as anyone who has tried to use an unmoderated forum will tell you. But obviously also, the answer is also not for the moderators to be the boss of the users, who have to obey them.
Maybe moderators should be referred to as caretakers in the fediverse.. seems to fit the role much better.
Half caretakers half bouncers
Board of Trustees
This is a really good way to look at it.
The problem is that, as encoded, moderators do "lease" the space from admins. There isn't a system built into Lemmy where qualified users can demote moderators. Hell, the Lemmy devs implemented Reddit's ranking based on time seniority.
The only difference between Reddit and Lemmy is that Lemmy admins aren't held to the policy of relative non interference that Reddit holds itself to.
I think the key phrase is "the consent of the governed."
It makes perfect sense to let someone step up who wants to take charge of removing spam, keeping the article titles consistent, that kind of thing. It involves them "taking control" of the community to some extent, even overriding some individual people on some issues sometimes, but that's fine. For as long as what they're implementing is actually what the free people inhabiting the community are mostly in favor of, it's fine.
Once the mods decide that they're now the boss of the community, and the software system gives them controls they can use to override the consensus of the community because all those free people are now in "their" place, it's a problem. Honestly, even the solution of everyone just wandering over to some new place instead is a little bit imperfect. To me it would be better if the people in the community had some more direct control over what's going on with the moderation. But certainly, that's a vital check on the ability of moderators to start running the place like a little kingdom.
I agree with the idea you provided, but that isn't how moderation is implemented into the codebase.
Yeah. Slashdot had a wonderful system which randomly assigned the then-version of moderation duties in very small allotments, periodically, to users who had been around for a while and had popular content. So most of the moderation was done democratically by the users, but in a way that was highly resistant to people trying to game the system to abuse moderation powers.
The system was so different that it's hard to compare or say how well it would work now, but I thought it was a really good idea.
As I recall, a lot of that was in up votes and down votes, with Slashdot only giving out a limited amount per person per day and capping the max at +/- 5.
I don't think it would work for a Reddit clone. There would also need to be a way to provide a way to validate users who should vote on a sub, since you wouldn't want someone to make a million accounts to drown out the rest of the users in a sub.
Slashdot had way more users and issues with attempted abuse than Lemmy does currently. It's easy to forget, but it was a pretty big platform, they had to get their tech way in advance of the cup-and-string "functional I guess" moderation that Lemmy currently offers. I think that was the exact thinking behind limiting it to people who were creating content, and having the selection process be a little opaque, and having a lot of randomness and a small amount of power at a time.
I'm not talking about votes, there was something up beyond that. I honestly don't even remember the details, but everyone had a certain number of votes per day, and then certain users would get randomly selected to get something like 3 moderation actions very occasionally. I don't even remember the details, but I'm pretty sure it was a step above just being able to vote which everyone could do.
https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml
The first round of moderation seems tied to up votes and down votes, you just needed to provide a reason why instead of just clicking a button.
The second round of moderation was tied to how people voted in the first round.
So, most of the public facing moderation activities were really focused on up voting and down voting, with some of the down voting triggering other mod action.
Metamoderation! That's what it was. Right, so I guess in modern terminology "M1" was voting, "M2" was a user report, and then admins did what we would today call "moderation." So it was a little different from how I remembered. I just remembered the voting and moderation generally worked quite well. Of course that might just be the different culture of the internet at the time. It also only worked well up until some of the admins went on some total bender of a power trip and more or less torpedoed the entire site, from which it never recovered.
If you want to map how Slashdot works as a model to Lemmy, Slashdot would be its own instance defederated from the rest of Lemmy with heavy restrictions on posting and the use of individual communities being more of a filter for content.
The site and the content of its site were designed to be seen by everyone as a uniform audience. Communities and instances on Lemmy are fundamentally not designed that way. Even then, Slashdot made sure that older accounts were the ones to enforce rules via up voting and down voting, preventing an Eternal September. Lemmy is not designed to do that.
Dude, why do you keep injecting into a conversation on the differences between Lemmy and Slashdot, repeated insistences that Slashdot does NOT work the same as Lemmy? Yes. I know. That's why we're talking about the different approaches. Or, that's why I'm talking about it, at least.
I feel like some people on Lemmy are sort of addicted to being smarter than the other person, so they need to explain things to them. (I mean, I definitely am.) But yes, in case it wasn't clear, I'm aware that Slashdot was different from Lemmy. Thanks.
You brought up Slashdot for comparison purposes.
As much as I agree that there is a very large degree of similarity between Lemmy and Reddit, there is though: community members can appeal to an admin, and there is also the "owner" level even above that, if not the same. You really wouldn't even want to go above that, bc if someone pays for a machine then to some degree it really truly is "theirs", unless you go down a few levels and do what the 196 members did: just flat walk out and go elsewhere:-).
Also, PieFed has some really interesting ideas for democratization of moderation where instead of the purely binary "remove" vs. "allow", power is placed into the hands of individual community members to tweak the settings to get the kind of experience that they want. e.g. posts below a voting threshold can be automatically collapsed, or even hidden altogether, thus allowing the entirety of a community to make that decision for someone, if they want, or the user can not use that feature and preserve the ability to read the content - again, unlike a mod decision that must either preserve the content in its entirety or else remove it altogether, without capability to provide such nuances. Additionally, there are other factors such as labels that can be placed onto user accounts ("new user <2 weeks old", "has >10x more downvotes than upvotes", "posts but never comments or votes so looks like an unregistered bot account", etc.), plus you can define your own emoji labels to help remind you not to engage or something.
I don't know if or when we'll ever see such on Lemmy, which was written by authoritarians for their own purposes, and we are merely allowed to use their software. If we want differently though, we'll need to create it. As K/Mbin, PieFed, and Sublinks are doing!:-)
Yeah. It would be nice if features you discussed were able to be implemented on Lemmy. However, as you described it and I've been told outright by the devs, adding flexibility to how modding works is not in the plans.
Yup. Fortunately most of what I've said is already in PieFed. Notably, PieFed is lacking in some of the foundationals - like when a post is deleted the notification for it remains, and these kinds of things can be quite frustrating, plus the search feature is not good. However, while I would not recommend it to a brand new member of the Fediverse, I am using it as a daily driver myself, who knows how to fall back to Lemmy to compensate for its shortcomings. So there is hope for the Threadiverse, regardless of Lemmy on its own.:-)