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)
Such as?
blahaj.zone admins have a tendency to moderate rather heavy-handedly. Mod choices are rarely, if ever, checked by my team, and bans are often given for things that are not in violation of our rules. This is because Ada runs lemmy.blahaj.zone as a very curated community, often removing and banning for matters that are, in my opinion, based on opinion rather than objectivity. I have little against that, and think that, as the owner, she has every right to choose how to run her community. That being said, I don’t think its the right community for us.
To be clear, the only moderation I do is for content or users that are breaking our instance guidelines, not 196 rules. If it didn’t break instance guidelines, I didn’t touch it, and if it did, it was bigger than 196. In neither case was running it past 196 mods an appropriate step
I understand this Ada, as I said both in my comments and my DMs with you. I hope there’s no ill will, and that we can remain on good terms.
No ill will! I just don’t want people thinking I was defacto moderating 196
not at all!!!
That still doesn’t really tell me anything. What kinds of differences of opinions? What kinds of things have resulted in admin action that the mods would be more lenient on?
If you want specific examples,
here’s a random onehere’s another one.When it comes to moderating, we want to cultivate an environment where queer people feel welcome, but the point where we differ from Ada is not being allowed to respectfully disagree. As far as we’re concerned, that person didn’t break any of our rules.
Don’t get me wrong, we’re not gonna start tolerating MAGA shit or anything, we just don’t want people to be afraid of getting ejected from the community over a relatively mild take or for committing wrongthink.
My concern at this point hinges on what constitutes “respect” and what things are tolerable to disagree about. Particularly with the backdrop of a society that sees disagreeing with my gender as respectful disagreement.
That really becomes a question of how far is too far, while everyone is subjected to potentially harmful takes because they’re not overtly hateful. That’s the thing that burned a lot of us out on Reddit.
If the premise of the disagreement is that your gender is invalid, then I don’t consider that respectful regardless of how polite they’re being.
Lemmy as a whole is pretty far left-leaning so I don’t expect it to be an issue… but if we do start getting more of that stuff, the punishment will be the same as it has been (a ban).
My money’s on they don’t want Ada going over their heads and mandating that neopronouns will be respected. That’s the only high profile drama that I’ve seen on Blahaj in many months. They can call it differences on the back end all they want, but I have to see this as a move away from pro-trans moderation policies, since they’re leaving the instance that’s explictly pro-trans.
I’m sorry, but as someone who has been very explicitly transgender over 4 years now (and has a team that is 40% trans), i take offense to this. While the neopronouns debate was something that my team probably would have handled slightly differently, it is not what I am referring to AT ALL.
I’m glad to hear that my presumptions are false. Please tell us what you’re referring to so that we dont have to speculate.
the lack of response to this is telling
Since it would seem that the 196 team is trying to keep their relationship amiable with the blahaj admin team, I am assuming they are looking to avoid airing their dirty laundry, as it were.
that is exactly what is going on. I’d like to keep what happened behind closed doors behind closed doors. while, for example, publicizing my DMs would most likely give more substance to my arguments, it would burn bridges that I am unwilling and undesiring to burn.
A_Very_Big_Fan doesn’t seem to have an issue with it.
https://lemmy.world/comment/14551980
I don’t know. That ban seems justified to me. I don’t think that was a mild take.
We’ve been talking about moving out of LBZ way before that happened.
Also, I’ll say it as many times as I have to, we didn’t ban Drag over neopronouns, and we don’t disagree with Ada’s rule about them. We banned Drag for encouraging suicide and violence several times.
Weirdly defensive.
I dont remember that decision on y’alls part as particularly controversial, rather the drama - from some non-blahaj members - surrounding Ada’s announcement following it.
We’re talking about moderation policies here after all, not any one user.
Also, it was in PugJesus’s post about his departure that you first mentioned that the 196 mods had already been discussing moving to .world. A comment that you’ve subsequently deleted. Seems odd to bring it up at that time if it wasn’t in some way related.
I’m just trying to set the record straight, because after that incident a lot of people seem to have gotten the impression that we disagreed with Ada’s decision, or that we banned Drag over neopronouns. But we don’t disagree, and we do respect neopronouns.
And about my comment, I only brought it up because Pug’s post was getting a lot of positive reception, so I thought if people were unhappy with BLZ then it’d be a good idea to tell them we’ve been working on transferring out of there. But Ada got upset over it, and tbh I’m still not sure exactly why, so I removed the comment.
this has been an ongoing issue behind the scenes for a long time
That’s actually a good reason and sad if true. I wish I’d made my account in Blahaj Zone but I guess a bullet was dodged.
If all existing instances have really been exhausted as options (which I do doubt), what about making your own instance?
I mentioned it in another comment, but the main difficulty we had with that was long-term funding