TL;DR: We tried to move the community because of moderatorial concerns, but fumbled how we went about doing so.
First and Foremost:
We’d like to formally apologize for springing this on you all out of nowhere, and for taking so long to respond to the backlash. With retrospect, we understand that we should have notified you all beforehand to create an opportunity to give us feedback. We understand that a lot of respect and trust was lost, and we expect it’ll take a lot of work and a lot of time before we can earn it back, but we would be grateful if y’all gave us that chance.
What happened, and why?
The primary issue that incited this was because we don’t fully agree with the admin’s moderation policies. By and large they do a great job and align with us on mod actions, but there have been several cases where we strongly disagreed, and our choices were overruled.
For example, 2 months ago, Kolanaki reached out to us via email and said they were banned from 196 for “playing the victim” and asked us why we banned him, but we didn’t. Moss talked to them and realized that the ban was unjust after reviewing the comment he was banned for. If he had never contacted us, we wouldn’t have known about the ban, and they would have still thought we banned them.
There were a few similar events in a short time frame, leading to a few posts/comments in the community about the heavier modding policies. It’s possible some posts/comments were misunderstood by Ada, or she interpreted things differently than we would have, but it led to some bans that we felt were indeed heavy-handed, and would not violate our rules in even the most uncharitable of interpretations. We have found that this is an ongoing trend when it comes to moderation of our community from the Admins. We oppose this because it leads to many users who otherwise mean well ending up alienated and removed for reasons that are frankly completely unfair. This is, in our opinion, counter to what we set out to build in our community.
It was made clear to us that it was their instance, and that we didn’t have a say in who would be banned and what would be removed. This is, of course, perfectly valid. It’s their instance, therefore it’s up to them to decide what goes, but we no longer wanted to be the ones seen as accountable for moderation actions we have no control over. For this reason, we wanted to transfer out of lemmy.blahaj.zone. As much as we wanted to stay in the LGBTQ instance, we couldn’t come to an agreement with Ada, so we talked to her about transferring out and got her blessing.
How we messed up
The most major failing on our part is, of course, that we didn’t announce the migration beforehand. Besides that, we also didn’t explain why we made the choices we made and only gave very vague answers. We avoided sharing the justification for our actions because we didn’t want to cause drama and/or exacerbate the situation, but this lack of substantiating our actions only caused the situation to worsen.
Going forward (if we may), we won’t make the same mistakes again. From now on, we will attempt to be as transparent as possible.
FAQ
Why we chose lemmy.world
Many people have been asking about why we moved to lemmy.world. It already hosts the majority of large communities and besides this uncomfortable level of centralization, it has also been somewhat controversial as of late. Despite that, we still chose lemmy.world due to the following reasons:
- Moss’s communication with the admins, and their agreement to let us moderate the community as we see fit. Ruud, after looking over our rules, agreed to abstain from taking admin action to curate or otherwise moderate our community, unless absolutely necessary.
- The instance is large enough to support traffic without performance issues (other instances like lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.dbzer0.com would have been fine too), and the instance has a certain degree of guaranteed longevity.
- Moss was given a list that was kindly made by the lemmy.world people as a part of our transfer detailing those who are banned on Blahaj.zone, but not on Lemmy.world, making moderation discrepancies much easier to clean up post-transfer.
- Our agreement with Ruud predated the now-rescinded policy changes
- It was, to the best of our knowledge, the most federated-with instance. We have come to understand that this is not necessarily the case.
Why not have another team take over the original 196?
This is a similar situation with what happened over on Reddit. 196 mods didn’t agree with admins and were eventually replaced (difference here is that we were not forced out, but chose to leave). As Lemmy was a large gathering spot for people fleeing Reddit, we felt it was better to try to keep the community together and move together. Having another team take over splits the community. The more fragmentation there is, the less longevity and volume of community each skew will have.
What about the possibility of more trolls, neoliberals, bad actors, sealions, and transphobes on Lemmy.world?
Another huge issue was that the mods and the community were not on the same page regarding lemmy.world, their admins, and their policies. We understand the concern about trolls/bad-actors/transphobes, but we feel well-equipped to handle these issues. In addition, we’ve been in contact with the lemmy.world admins for a while now, and they’ve assured us that they’d allow us to moderate our community however we saw fit. All this being said, we still failed to communicate that to the community before taking action, which has undermined any assurances that we have given after the fact. We cannot apologize enough for that.
What about the people who are using instances that are defederated from lemmy.world (e.g. Beehaw)
This is an unfortunate issue that we were not aware of at the time of transfer. We’re not sure what the solution is, but want to make our community as accessible as possible. Community solutions are welcome.
Did you migrate because of X? (addressing speculation)
- We didn’t migrate due to anything related to neopronouns
- We didn’t migrate due to us supposedly not wanting to use blahaj.zone lemmy accounts
- We didn’t migrate due to us having friends who were banned from lemmy.blahaj.zone
- We didn’t migrate due to us wanting to make the space less queer/leftist/etc
- We didn’t migrate due to us getting secretly ousted by the Blahaj admin team
What now?
Well, we’re not sure. We could go back on our decision and stay on blahaj.zone, continue on lemmy.world, do both, or try something else. Truth be told, we don’t know what to do. For now, we will leave the comments open to civil community discourse, and choose our course of action from there.
Sincerely, Qaz, Rmbp, Greembow, A_Very_big_Fan, Peachy, and Moss.
I understand two of you were mostly behind the move. Perhaps those two should step down and new mods be brought in. Kind of hard to trust you after all this.
Trust? For an internet forum? About shitposting? Where everyone’s anonymous?
WTF is wrong with people
Rmbp
Is this supposed to be me? Sorry, but I don’t write a single word of this.__.
Not that I disagree, but I have not written or read anything before posting this. But nevertheless I thank you for the Update :D
The Feddit.de Instance and therefore my feddit.de Account is broken beyond repair. If anyone can just kick him out, this would be really nice since I can’t even log in anymore.
What happend to feddit.de?
The whole Feddit.de instance died under mysterious circumstances.
The owner of the instance left for a work trip to Southeast Asia and never came back—at least, he never came back online. Then the instance started having technical troubles, which we couldn’t fix without the owner. After continued degeneration, we moved all communities to feddit.org. I can’t even log into my Feddit.de account anymore because it’s so broken.
Even the domain Feddit.de is broken.
I only saw one other person mention the post that’s supposedly a good example of your disagreements with adas moderation but that makes it even more clear you need to resign and leave ada was right for removing that comment it’s the typical “oh woe is me I just asked innocent questions and the angry trans people try to paint me as the bad guy” trans people don’t get annoyed if you ask them a genuinely innocent question about their experience but they will get annoyed if you ask them “just innocent questions” where it’s very clear what your real views are and what you’re really doing adas just reading between the lines and that’s a good thing that’s how you avoid the sealioning that .world would’ve brought along and you say oh they reversed that decision and you would be allowed to ban sealions and you can mod how you like and .world won’t interfere but it makes it very clear you wouldn’t ban them anyway you agree with the .world admins anyway just leave you clearly don’t represent the community in the slightest and have completely different views of how this community should be run hand over the moderation to the onehundredninetysix mod team and go do whatever you want on .world
I refuse to believe that six individuals can be so enormously out of touch with the community they (used to) mod… what’s the real story?
The primary issue that incited this was because we don’t fully agree with the admin’s moderation policies.
Clearly the community does though.
Which means the community is perfectly happy to continue on blahaj, its you, as the mod team, that aren’t aligning with the community.
As someone who enjoys 196 (but only really participates by voting), I would just say that since you aren’t aligning with the community, this isn’t a community you should be moderating.
Make the !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone mods the mods of !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone and move on.
But the community at large doesn’t know what the moderators knew, so simply stating that the community agreed with the moderation of the admin team, when the community was largely to completely unaware of the differences between the admin- and the mod-team seems unjustified. Or did you know that the admins banned certain users for content that the mod team was fine with?
The issue, to me, seems to be that the community thought the admin- and mod-teams were on the same page, so the mod-team claiming that there have been differences with the admin-team, which prompted this move seemed extremely sussy. I’m not saying that the mod-team handled the situation great, or to be more precise, their move seems to be absolutely terrible, but the community doesn’t know all the facts that lead to that decision.
Irrelevant.
Also…
but the community doesn’t know all the facts that lead to that decision.
And the decision was to go to .world, where recently the admin team decided trolls are to be engaged with, where misogyny, transphobia, etc happens pretty regularly and doesnt “cross the line”, with their reasoning being that the admin team was too heavy handed.
If that doesnt scream “Completely out of sync with the community” to you, I don’t know what would.
No matter how you look at it - the mod team is far, far removed from being on the same page as the community. That makes them the wrong mods for the community.
where recently the admin team decided trolls are to be engaged with, where misogyny, transphobia, etc happens pretty regularly and doesnt “cross the line”
They adressed this in the OP, stating that the .world admin team was contacted prior and was allowing them to keep all their rules. So while .world as an instance may be as bad as you describe it here, the mod-team was planning on upholding the same rules that were upheld by the mod-team on blahaj.
Again, I’m not saying that their decision to move without consulting the community was good, far from it. But firing off straw-man arguments isn’t helping your case.
They adressed this in the OP, stating that the .world admin team was contacted prior and was allowing them to keep all their rules.
“Trust me bro” is worth less than nothing when they dont respect the community enough to communicate.
Nothing about what I said is a straw-man, there are defined differences in admin level moderation which the mod team specifically stated.
So cut the bs about logical fallacies when none are present.
Nothing about what I said is a straw-man, there are defined differences in admin level moderation which the mod team specifically stated.
Yes, there are defined differences. On blahaj, the admins are removing posts and comments that, by the mod-team’s estimation, did not violate 196’ rules. On .world, the admins promised not to.
Yes, there are defined differences. On blahaj, the admins are removing posts and comments that, by the mod-team’s estimation, did not violate 196’ rules. On .world, the admins promised not to.
Yes. Because .world is more tolerant of the things I mentioned.
The mods want more lax admins who let stuff slide. The instance that said “you have to engage with trolls” is the instance they tried to move to.
This ain’t rocket surgery.
my honest opinion on the whole matter, and this is as someone who really doesn’t care either way. You should give up on the community here. I don’t mean that in a mean way, I mean you chose to do a decision that was drastically unfavorable to the majority of the current community on this instance it seems.
Regardless of intentions, your long past the turning point of being able to backtrack on your choice and re-enter the community just reading the comments here tells you that honestly your best bet is probably to just continue with your plan at this point, even if you did decide to unlock the community here it’s clear that you’ve lost all trust in the majority of the users that are still participating on this post, so they’ll just stay in the new community instead of returning.
In the words of Kenny Rogers, You have to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away and know when to run.
This is a clear “know when to run” instance. There is no favorable outcome for you on this community you won’t gain that trust back and there are far too many people still pissed about this issue, you are better off continuing the plan on LW and just let the people who didn’t agree with it stay on the new community they made (or unlock the old community but you have already been pretty solid on that one)
Thats just my input as a lurking third party.
edit: looks like my feed was outdated, I just got the unlocked post, I still stand firm on my opinion on it though.
edit 2: shouldn’t have second guessed myself, guess I had the name right the first time lmao
I’m not very involved in the community either, but I would say though that community trust isn’t a binary thing, and all people, even leaders, are allowed to make mistakes. From a pure political perspective, I don’t think there will be enough of a hostile response form the users to start any significant fragmentation of the community, which is the main concern when leaders lose trust from the community.
That’s not a Johnny Cash song. “The gambler” by Kenny Rogers
I had Kenny Rogers originally, but when i second guessed myself and google searched it both names came up, they both sang it it seems. I used Johnny Cash cause figured the name might be easier to recognize XD I went ahead and changed it back again.
I still don’t understand how you thought this unilateral decision, including squatting on the 196@LBZ name, would be received well in the community. I question the soundness of your judgment.
Hold a vote of no confidence. Let the community you tried to screw over decide if the moderators should stay or resign.
I think yall (the mod team) still misunderstand what you did wrong. You’re just repeating yourself. The problem is not that you failed to announce the migration, it is that you thought it was your choice to make, and that it even was an actionable decision. The fediverse, with each instance having it’s own communities, userbase and set of alliances & blockades, does not afford for unilateral deportation of a community.
Furthermore as moderators of a community you’ll always have to deal with instance admins. The fact you can’t cope with Ada’s safe space policy is a bad look. Quoting one debatable decision as “proof” is not helping. Your perception that you are somehow immune to ever disagreeing lemmy.world’s admins is strange.
Yeah this just about sums up my view of the situation.
I think what brother’s me most here is the entitlement and contempt displayed for your own community. You were told repeatedly that nobody wanted this, and yet you doubled down saying “We know what’s best”. You acted like the community belongs to the moderation team, and they can do with it as they please.
It took a mass exodus for you to finally seriously consider other viewpoints. I don’t think that’s an acceptable way for any moderation team to treat their own community.
That’s not something that can simply be fixed by an apology. It’s something that would require some significant introspection.
That’s not something that can simply be fixed by an apology. It’s something that would require some significant introspection.
The whole team should resign
after seeing they added this part, they wont
Why not have another team take over the original 196?
Having another team take over splits the community.
I think its a bit too late for that excuse 💀
Reposting this since you said you were going to answer questions in the !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com post but this one is still unanswered:
If the move had nothing to do with pronouns and you’ll continue to enforce rules about neopronouns, how do you feel about one of the LW community team mods making statements like this about them? Do you feel confident that they will always let you enforce neopronoun rules if they decide that it’s hurting LW?
They’re not a LW admin, so they have no influence or control over us there. On top of that, we addressed this in the first question, reasons #1 and #4.
I guess I’m not sure what a “Community Team” member does, then, if they have no control or input on how LW policies are carried out in communities. I can’t find an explanation anywhere here so maybe someone can point me in the right direction.
They’re a mod of /c/lemmyworld, not an admin. And, again, this was addressed in the first question of the FAQ, reasons #1 and #4.
I understand they’re not an admin. In the page I linked you can see they’ve been put in the “Community Team” section. Are you saying that “Community Team” is a convoluted title that the LW admins have chosen to say “person who mods /c/lemmyworld”? Or do they have some other role that I can’t find outlined anywhere? (Which could be on my end, the site I linked doesn’t play well with mobile)
Ohh, dang my bad, I wasn’t sure what you were getting at. I only knew him as the guy that posted the thing that everyone hated but turned out to not be an admin.
I’m…not sure what that means lol. But our agreement with Ruud was that we could moderate our community however we saw fit, so I think it’s a moot point anyways. I have no reason to believe he would go back on his word.
And I’m sorry if I sounded frustrated. I am, honestly, but I didn’t need to direct that at you.
Yeah, I’m not sure what it means either, which means I’m not sure how many red flags the earlier thread I linked should be setting off. A random mod on LW being respectability politics about neopronouns is meh, someone higher up the chain than that and it’s brake pumping time IMO.
Also like, presumably everyone else on LW thought they were allowed to moderate their communities how they saw fit before that announcement, you know? My understanding is the LW admins shelved the policy for retooling, not retirement, so personally it’s not something I would want to chance. I don’t think anyone is purposefully lying to you guys, but I also don’t think they’d make an exception just for 196 to do whatever it wants with any future instance rule changes.
Well spotted
i don’t really accept the apology. 196 is not the mod team and you clearly do not have the capacity to maintain a community. please leave and do not come back to LBZ. i enjoying having my funny little people on my phone here and you have not been very funny so kindly stop the car because you are an underage driver. let someone who does not hit curbs or go up a one way street take the wheel thanks also please let the door hit you on the way out
In an unrelated note, I still don’t know what 196 means and at this point I’m afraid to ask.
From what I understand, back on Reddit it was a subreddit that had only 1 rule: If you found your way to that subreddit somehow, you had to post something before you left. A lot of people titled their post “rule” or included the word “rule” for that reason.
As for why 196, i believe that was the dorm room number of the founder of that subreddit. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong.
This is correct, but the original was 195. They closed it I think either because it got bigger than they intended or because they were graduating or something, so the successor community 196 was made.
My vote is for what I put in the original thread that was ignored multiple times.
Unlock the community, leave it as is, the problems you are mentioning as major factors in the decision simply do not matter that much to the community.
If the mod team chooses to leave and moderate somewhere else because they are sick of people assuming moderation actions done by instance admins are because of them, then they can step aside and mod a 196 community wherever they wish.
However it will be hard or impossible to undo the damage that has been done, with this comment from moss in particular being especially awful. A sentiment like that can’t just be walked back, it speaks to a moderator having little or no respect for the community and not understanding their place in it. The mods contributions are respected & appreciated, but the community is not being respected in turn.
I cannot stress enough how untrustworthy any of you moderators are now, because how do any of us know that in a few days or weeks or months you won’t just randomly close the community and decide you’re moving elsewhere. In short, I really don’t care if you continue to move over, or stay on .world, or do anything else, I don’t want any part of your community anymore. And I don’t see how anyone else would either, but that’s entirely their business
Quite a big point missing here
Apparently none of the 196 moderators were actively checking the modlog?
Meaning instance moderator could just see a modlog appearing, and no-one dealing with it.
Moss, I know you can do better than painting the picture one-sided. It’s probably pretty stressful now, and I very much understand it.
We all check the modlog regularly. I do it ~5 days a week, on top of reading literally every post and the majority of the comments while I’m at it. The problem is federation, because it prevents us from seeing a complete log of the reports from any given instance.
And you know what? Fun fact!! LBZ was one of the first instances I ever signed up for. So perhaps if LBZ was the right instance to check reports from, it would have been super helpful for both parties if they accepted my application. I’m still waiting two years later.
I’m sorry if I sound frustrated. It’s because I am. Not at you, I just don’t know where else to say my peace. Thanks for listening.
This is also what in confused about. If the mods didn’t know about admin mod actions, surely that meant they weren’t reading the mod log? I don’t know the first thing about being a mod but this seems like there’s a pretty clear solution.
