Post text:
edit: As I’m seeing a lot of worry about the impact this will/could have on the community, please be assured we have the same mod team, and will be holding the community to the same standards. the same things that were always allowed will continue to be allowed and the same things that got things removed before will continue to get things removed before. Lemmy.world admins have agreed to allow us to run our community on our terms. It is my pleasure to announce that effective immediately, we are transferring our community to Lemmy.world! This has been a few months in the making, so my entire mod team is already on board. FAQ: Why? That’s a complicated question with a long answer! The primary difference is moderatorial and ideologial differences between my team and Ada’s excellent team of admins. We are on good terms with Ada and her team, and have gotten her consent to do this. In addition to this, we have had ongoing issues with federation and moderation that has caused a subpar experience for many people on other instances. How does this work? Currently, as there is not an easy way to transfer an entire community (trust me, we checked), we are locking the community as mod-only, and moving our focus to the 196 on lemmy.world. For you guys, functionally nothing has changed. What about the posts? Well, we tried to transfer them, but there was no real way to do so without absolutely destroying lemmy.world’s federation. For this reason, we are simply archiving this community as mod-only. Everything is staying up, you just won’t be able to post new content. Comments are still enabled, so we will continue to check our modlogs for some time after the transfer has settled. As for the posts on lemmy.world’s 196, we’re leaving those up too. From this point onwards, all posts made to that community are beholden to the rules you are all used to, but anything pre-existing is getting grandfathered in.
IF YOU GUYS HAVE ANY OTHER QUESTIONS, PLEASE PUT THEM IN THE COMMENTS OF THIS POST, AND I’LL DO MY BEST TO ANSWER THEM. Once again, here’s the link to our new apartment of awesome. (universal: !196@lemmy.world)
This seems like it belongs more to fedilore, rather than here. Should I be allowing these posts? Rfc I guess
leave it up please this is very relevant to the PTB model
I think so because it’s a power tripping mod taking their ball and going home with it rather than let someone else play ball too.
It’s lore too but this is moderation bs.
I think it fits. Mods could move to another instance, create a new community, post about it, etc. without fucking with the existing one.
Locking the posts on their way out seems like a spite move against all the people not wanting to transfer (a lot, based on the comments). They could jusy as easily hand the community over to new mods instead of killing it. Seems like it’s be better for the community and the fediverse in general and align better with what the community wants.
After they leave, Ada could easily grant a request to open it back up under a different set of mods… you know, if someone were to want that sort of thing.:-D
Seems like the way to go, especially with how Ada wound up thrown under the bus for the decision to move.
Locking posts with links to the other community is pretty standard practice. See !carnivore and !television or !carnivore@lemmy.world and !television@lemmy.world
Isn’t locked, and seems like if it was in the past it was done to solve a moderation problem.
Looks like this was consolidated into a similar smaller community in a way that the userbase isn’t complaining about.
These seem like totally unrelated, dissimilar situations and don’t do anything to indicate what happened in the OP is standard practice.
!carnivore@lemmy.world was locked because it was a community allowing harassment
!television@lemmy.world didn’t cause any uproar as the moderation was similar between LW and Lemm.ee, and the communities were very similar as well.
In this case there are more than 250 comments on that post, the vast majority of them being negative. Not sure the situations are similar.
might be a bit borderline but probably fine, although it seems more like flouncing off than power tripping. would need more of a writeup to be drama/lore
someone on hexbear has posted blahaj admin ada’s message to the 196 mod team, relevant quote:
full text here https://lemm.ee/post/52977833/17597222
CLM
That throws the whole thing into a little bit of a new light. Moving to the community where it’ll be actively moderated makes quite a bit of sense to me, even if that means lemmy.world.
Then again, supposedly working moderation for moderators on remote instances is just around the corner with the next release. I don’t know if that is accurate, but this might have been a problem that was solvable if they were willing to wait a couple of months.
moderation is working, generally. it’s the lack of full report federation that is the primary issue currently.
So as long as you don’t need to see any of the reports, you can moderate. Got it. That’s exactly what I would describe as working, “generally.”
On the other hand, that won’t come out until 0.19.20 reportedly, at the earliest, while iirc it’s been a year since Lemmy.World upgraded to 0.19.3, and were planning on doing an upgrade in January/February. So it could be another full year after the Fediverse gets it but before it appears on Lemmy.World? 😜
More to the point though, how do moderators of one of the most active and perhaps controversial communities across all of Lemmy not bother to check in for two days most of the time? The way this post words things, Ada is the one being abused here, even as they are being thrown under the bus for not doing all of the moderation work to their satisfaction. If I were Ada, I’d be somewhat happy to see them go (though sad for the actual users who get caught up in all this drama).
Yeah, I thought it was planned for 0.20.
I think lemmy.world is the slowest to upgrade of all the instances. I’m not sure which party in the moderation will need to upgrade in order to make the thing work, but you might well be right that it won’t work for lemmy.world users until lemmy.world upgrades, which would mean maybe waiting six months to a year or so before things are actually working. Yet another reason not to mess around with lemmy.world, maybe.
And I completely agree with your assessment. It sounds to me, reading between the lines, like they were shamelessly abusing Ada’s volunteerism until it reached its breaking point, and then at that point instead of owning up to the real reasons why they need to move, they’re framing it as “moderatorial and ideologial differences” and “We are on good terms with Ada and her team, and have gotten her consent to do this.” and similar responsibility-avoidant bollocks.
Maybe I’m absolutely wrong about that, it’s hard to tell looking in from the outside from a single message. But that’s my initial read on the situation if I had to take a guess about it.
A couple of corrections here:
One is that while cross-instance moderation report federation won’t come until perhaps 0.19.20, that will not affect the new community, since both the community itself and the mods will be on Lemmy.World. It affected the situation previously but after the move won’t be an issue anymore.
Crucially, the issue likewise would have been moot if the mods had simply created blahaj alts - which they did - and bothered to log in for those once in a while and check the reports, which it seems they did not. These mods were always choosing to remain more affiliated with Lemmy.World than with blahaj, despite dumping the community into Ada’s lap. And now it’s simply come full circle with the mods moving it closer to themselves rather than log in once a day elsewhere.
Speaking of, the second issue is that from Ada’s own words, they (people keep saying “she” but I don’t see those pronouns listed in their account so I’m sticking with “they” here, I hope it’s not too confusing: I’ll use whatever Ada wants us to use) never reached the breaking point. It was the mods who allowed the reports to contaminate the modlog - which notably has no filters so this was a legit and actual hardship upon the instance administrator - and leave them there for days.
Even so, Ada wasn’t the one who told either the community or the mods to leave. Rather it was the mods who even after all of that, reached the breaking point where they refused to accept Ada’s call on how to run their own instance in the manner in which they best see fit.
Free hosting and admin services and even additional modding help is all not sufficient for those mods, nor does it seem that support of a good fraction of the community is necessary either (sort those comments by Top to easily see what I mean). Then are going to do it their own way. Or at least they’ll FAAFO, then be shocked - shocked I say! beshooketh! - when they see the community reopened under new modship after they’re gone.
Tbf I cannot imagine what hell a mod would have to endure at the helm of that community. Well, I hope they are okay with whatever comes, truly I wish that for them, bc I’d want the same for myself.:-)
Ha, yeah. Thanks for the clarification. And yes, I wouldn’t want to moderate 196, personally. Maybe that’s why they were happy to let Ada do it.
0.20, not 0.19.20
Oh… that makes way more sense, thanks!:-)
0.20 is 3-6 months out according to Nutomic.
Additionally, here’s a quite detailed post on why it has taken LW so long to update this past year. I would hope not every patch would have this much delay.
https://lemmy.world/post/23471887
Wow that looks like a lot of work to balance everything!:-)
Thanks
Ah. Well, forget what I said about a couple of months then… somehow I was still working on a timeline where it was estimated to be this month, but I think that was from quite a while ago, so it makes sense if it’s not accurate anymore.
The month timeline might be when Lemmy.World planned to update. But even then, they usually pick one that is a few steps behind. So perhaps in a month they’ll get 0.19.17?
Let’s hope so, but I guess 0.19.4 would already be a huge update
I’d rather less moderation than bad moderation.
I think the power tripping element here is that this seemingly happened in an instant without any (recent?) warning or communication to the users and it has to do with one of the biggest communities on lemmy
Though this isnt the typical senario where a mod abuses their power over an individual, so hmm
(I searched some fediverse drama communities, but didnt cover this issue.)
What is RFC? I don’t see it in the sidebar, I did a search and only found your previous post. If this is a new term, can you add it there to aid those of us with poor memories?:-D
Request for comments
Request for change, it’s more of open source/programming thing than this comm thing.
No. Request for Comments. RFCs are nearly finished proposals. They’re ways of projects to make announcements with a little bit of flexibility.
Ah, so they are. The ones I’ve read have always been pretty prescriptive so I just assumed the c meant change.
On the one hand it does seem a bit out of place, on the other hand if the mod team is doing this against most community members wishes it is kind of a power trip in a way?
Personally I think it fits, which is why I posted.
I didn’t mean to sidestep the rules and will ofc take down the post if that’s what you want.
I agree the lore site is better
The mandate of power tripping bastards, seems to be if the complaint is true, then there are actionable next steps. Censure from the community, elevating to admin, etc
Blahaj admin taking over and unlocking the community seems like an actionable next step
Yeah thats a good point, I suppose I subconsciously took them at their word they had coordinated with the admin teams of both the source and destination instances already.
Ada says that it wasn’t done behind their back in the strictest, technical sense. However, it was basically the next thing to it, as their communication throws Ada under the bus, who only found out the details after they were publicly announced.