this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Reddit Migration

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I just suddenly found my user over there banned. Not for getting in a fight or breaking any rules, but just for criticizing and asking questions regarding its recent vague Terms of Service. In fact, no reason, warning, or reply was given beforehand, and the admin who did it suddenly scaled to banned, with no reply or anything sent to email.

It seems to be because of some criticism I made regarding https://legal.lemmy.world/, where rather than answer it they deleted my entire user history and implied that the criticism was:

reason: disagreeing with the Terms of Service - don't worry your content is gone

Note that I never explicitly disagreed with the Terms of Service, but I guess they must consider any criticism of it disagreement.

It hardly matters when they've made sure to make it my word versus theirs by eliminating my entire user history. This should be a big hint about how they will treat you, your comment history, and your ongoing discussions, even those unrelated to the ban, and it shows just how shit they will be at transparency when it happens (be sure to use the Internet Wayback Machine on them).

A lot of my criticisms had to do with permabans and how they would carry them out, so I guess I have my answer - in the worst way imaginable it without recourse, control, or even the possibility of getting it lifted.

What they say under 6.2, it's all deception, "what may happen" when the reality is they won't mind completely banning you on the spot. They won't give you a warning and tell you not to repeat it. There won't be any sort process. They will just ban you and remove your comment history on the spot. They will throw your entire history of content down the drain, and laugh while making a snarky comment. It's even worse than reddit, then, but that was always a risk, specially given who's heading Lemmy's development and given the apparent lack of concrete details regarding its leadership.

I suppose I'll try kbin.social now. ~~On the off-chance that somebody has of knows of where there could be a cache of the comment I made where they claim I was "disagreeing with the Terms of Service", I would appreciate it.~~ Oh, never mind, found it - that was easy: https://web.archive.org/web/20231020022523/https://kbin.social/u/@InternetTubes@lemmy.world

Here's the link to the modlog removal, because there seem to be a lot of connection problems now and the latest one is missing a lot of admin actions, including those that purged and banned my account:

Then: https://web.archive.org/web/20231019235547/https://lemmy.world/modlog

Now: https://web.archive.org/web/20231021224842/https://lemmy.world/modlog

NOTE: Apparently it is still there, it just has to be searched for through a more precise filter. It isn't clear how or why it gets removed. However, it is now clear who performed the ban, and it is the person I suspected: https://web.archive.org/web/20231104183117/https://sh.itjust.works/comment/5112860 Plus it seems the two most active admins are very close: https://web.archive.org/web/20231105083850/https://kbin.social/m/trees@lemmy.world/t/567901/Sipping-mist-from-a-bag-to-get-high-feels-so#entry-comment-3163448

I've submitted a ticket, whose link leads to a service hosted on mastodon.world: https://imgur.com/a/aisRzL9

The result? Closed without a reply: https://imgur.com/a/6PK1elq

NOTE: I was finally able to contact Ruud, contact as in get him to join the same Matrix PM chat as me and direct him to this post, but that was basically it. Complete silence and not even a courtesy "I will look into it", so within their bubble of narcissism. I'm going to guess he's already quite aware and ok with the "sweep under the rug" approach. In contrast, they were quite quick to ban me from the Matrix chat after joining and waving hello, yet not so quick to provide a reason except that of a circlejerked "yeah just ignore, because look at all the other dirt on the carpet".

Lemmy.world seems to be corrupt at the core, at it will likely continue to fool a lot of people for years to come.

As of today, two months later, no apology from lemmy.world, my kbin.social account still remains banned. Even though they've removed the admin responsible there's no apology and you wouldn't know about it or even begin to guess why if you didn't look under the covers ( https://i.imgur.com/En7roiG.png ), because the other admins are complicit in sweeping it under for the appearance of acting legitimately that they wouldn't ever dare an apology from the hole they've dug themselves into.

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[–] CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works 9 points 11 months ago (5 children)

The admins are straight up people that could be from lemmygrad, like how the fuck are they worse than Lemmyml...

Come to Shitjustworks, we are great. TheDude is cool.

[–] RheingoldRiver@kbin.social 6 points 11 months ago

holy shit, I've been reading this url as "sh, it just works" for MONTHS and was super ??? about what it meant. I only just now realized it's "shit just works" and......oh. that makes a lot of sense.

[–] Onii-Chan@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

So many filthy tankies infesting the other instances. You're almost guaranteed to spot one even outside of .ml now, which is where I'd hoped they'd remain to save the rest of us from having to deal with their authoritarian bullshit.

[–] CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, i mean hexbear is a thing sadly, i just block them all. They are a plague.

[–] KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 4 points 11 months ago

sopuli admin tends to be pretty chill too

[–] DarkThoughts@kbin.social 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

If Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml both suck ass, then that pretty much means that 90%+ of all communities are straight up gone. Which means at this stage one might just go back to fucking Reddit. Because what's the point of having shitty admins and no communities?

[–] CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You can just go to smaller instances that don't monopolize lenmy...

[–] DarkThoughts@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

There's already a lack of communities int he fediverse, and you want me to sit there in some, if they even exist, that get maybe a thread within 2-6 weeks? What's the point in that?

[–] Ignacio@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If all people thought like you do, then the fediverse wouldn't exist at all. No mastodon, no peertube, no pixelfed, nothing. Because it seems easier to complain instead of to collaborate in its growth.

[–] phillaholic@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago

That’s like inviting me to six different parties at the same time, then telling me I’m the problem when I suggest there aren’t enough people here to have a party.

[–] DarkThoughts@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I didn't contribute to Reddit either, at least not in form of submissions, but I think my Reputation points make it obvious enough that I am in fact still contributing through user interaction. Just because you not liking what I have to say does not change that. With that in mind, if all people thought like me, there would at least be a lot more going on in the Fediverse as I'm definitely way more active than the majority of users in the fediverse.

And I'm looking for content, not to provide it myself. Especially not for subs & communities who refuse to do their moderation properly, or even straight up ban those who tried to help through reporting offending content. I'm sick and tired of playing the unpaid worker for abusive overlords on a power trip. There has been way too much faith lost for me to care.

[–] CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I mean then go to reddit if you don't want to contribute and just to complain...

[–] DarkThoughts@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago

Wonderful reply. /s

[–] InternetTubes@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

They don't suck ass, only the power hungry abusers with power over your account do. It's certainly an indication that perhaps how these social networks are designed should be reconsidered instead of just trying to create carbon copies of flawed systems.

~~Incidentally though, even though lemmy.world has banned my account here now, I can still comment on their threads and participate in them, it's just that it will really only be visible to kbin users. Not sure if that implies I'm also essentially invulnerable from their community's moderation, at least in regards to kbin,social users, it probably should be something that should be looked at.~~ It stopped working, so I guess it was a sync issue, and would explain why I was still able to access my user history through here to back it up onto the Internet Wayback Machine.

[–] btaf45@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You can post to their communities from any instance. They have no way to enforce "ban evasion" so it is ridiculous they are even using that term.

[–] InternetTubes@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm not sure how it works, because there was a comment on a thread regarding youtube ads that I noticed I couldn't view after trying to reply to a notification of a kbin.social user comment on it, and I couldn't get to my comment no matter how hard I tried. Now I can, for some reason, but there's no comment to reply to!? But it does seem that lemmy.world can at least limit the visibility of my comments to the local kbin.social instance.

But in regards to new users, I just tried to create a user in the lemmy.world instance, and they added a textbox so you had to agree to do so. So I just went and created it in another instance that didn't force me to agree with the Terms of Service.

To be fair, it's not a bad idea, they can just finish implementing it by trying to require users agree to it before they can participate in the instance's community without visibility penalties, so my general view of it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6BYzLIqKB8

[–] Ignacio@kbin.social 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I had suspicions about lemmy.world since it started to become a big player inside of lemmy. Now those suspicions became real. That, and the fact that an instance with the domain .world is more US than world. Thanks for the info.

[–] InternetTubes@kbin.social 6 points 11 months ago

Yeah, this pretty much wasn't an accident, they just also banned this user, one I had created long before the ban, because of:

reason: Ban evasion

While having no problem doing that, what they haven't done is replied directly or addressed the ticket I sent them, so any benefit of the doubt is pretty much extinguished on my side.

It's clear to me they want to sweep it under the rugs on the hope that controlling the narratives on the most popular lemmy instance works out for them. This was probably what they intended by purging my account all along, thankfully they didn't seem to keep in mind the nuances of the fediverse which has still allowed me to keep evidence and my user account history despite their worst instincts.

[–] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I mean, that's why I'm hosting my own instance, then I own my own content.

[–] InternetTubes@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago

Maybe I'll have to try it out, thanks for the idea.

[–] AlexSup21@iusearchlinux.fyi 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm thinking of hosting an instance as well. Do you have any tips?

[–] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think nowadays it's pretty easy if you go the ansible way because that seems the most official one. I'm doing the docker way manually and then I need to fix the Dockerfile every time.

[–] abff08f4813c@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago

Would love to hear more about the ansible way.

[–] jeremy_sylvis@midwest.social 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

My experience with lemmy.world has this as par for the course. They've... got some interesting moderators.

[–] InternetTubes@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Their team is more than one person, so I'm trying to see if I can get a reply from their email in case I can get a more reasonable answer. I have little hope of it, they seem to be a pretty small team (relatively speaking) and I get the impression it was the same person who wrote the Terms of Service.

Funnily enough, another user who was actually being rude in the same thread got banned a few hours earlier but had his comment history as well as the taunts he made in the thread left untouched, showing much more willingness on their part to maintain and even drop down to that level of discourse. I'm not even sure why they are bothering with a Terms of Service if they are just winging it and don't even care about maintaining appearance.

[–] IzzyData@kbin.social 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

At this point Lemmy feels like a failed experiment. I really wanted to like it, but when the admins of the biggest instance are this terrible I don't know how it can recover.

Also 90% of the engagement and content is around non-original memes. There is nothing on Lemmy that isn't somewhere else which means there is no reason to join Lemmy as of yet.

[–] CylustheVirus@beehaw.org 3 points 11 months ago

Nah, just join a different instance. You see a lot of the same stuff. As for content I don't see that. Risa is hilarious for example.

[–] ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not a Star Trek fan I take it?

[–] IzzyData@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] cozz33@kbin.social 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Lemmy is ran by tankies, not surprised.

[–] ntzm@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wut, what does lemmy.world have to do with the developers of Lemmy?

[–] InternetTubes@kbin.social 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Lemmy's developers run lemmy.ml, and incidentally, I just looked at their modlog and found this:

Banned @InternetTubes
reason: disagreeing with the Terms of Service - don't worry your content is gone

at the same time it appeared on lemmy.world's modlog. ~~At the very least, it seems to hint its the same admin and that they went through the effort to attempt to ban it on both instances.~~

[–] ech@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That would be because it's the same mod action. The modlog is visible from every instance. I'm on lemm.ee and I see the same thing.

[–] InternetTubes@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I don't think this is exactly right, but I was overthinking it. I just saw that the user InternetTubes at lemmy.world got banned on both instances but InternetTubes at kbin.social has only been banned from lemmy.world, and just thought it hinted that an admin manually banned me across both instances the first time and forgot about this user the second time. Yet what's probably happening is that when a user is banned on the instance hosting the account, it gets automatically propagated across instances.

[–] amio@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, they seem to be dialing up the internet dictatorship. Shame, because it's always been one of the only instances with any "general" (non niche and non-geographical) activity to speak of.

[–] InternetTubes@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I don't think the admin who's to blame is acting like a dictator, they are acting more like a narcissist with a fragile ego who deceive themselves when they do something wrong. A total spez, if you will, whom people should have no doubts about calling out when they put themselves in position of power.

The problem is, they had no problem deleting months and history of comments and because they aren't willing to recognize what they did wrong or the circumstances that led up to it, it is likely they won't have a problem going full-on psychotic in the future as well, and that is a very toxic foundation upon which the most popular lemmy instance founded upon. Reddit is proof that it won't stop the growth or persistence of the platform, but you will get things like the whole Reddit API debacle. People and developers might better spend their time contributing to other instances.

[–] Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There are plenty of other instances out there with different policies and different approaches to moderation. I live in the US, but I use lemmy.ca. Their writeups said that it is not restricted to Canadians. My experiences here have all been positive. Very nice people.

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago

It is very much appreciated!

[–] snownyte@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I fucking knew and had a sense that lemmy.world would be contaminated with the redditard disease. Hopped ship when I started noticing the similar content, the similar behavior and realized "hm, this is becoming more and more like Reddit".

[–] sour@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

what does don't worry your content is gone mean

[–] InternetTubes@kbin.social 2 points 10 months ago

They purged my entire comment history before the ban, probably because they didn't like the last paragraph of my criticism here: https://web.archive.org/web/20231020022523/https://kbin.social/u/@InternetTubes@lemmy.world

So it's basically an attempt to mock me because I brought up the concern in a thread where they said they were open to concerns. Fortunately I was still able to archive it because federated also means those purges aren't propagated the same way through different instances.