Lukewarm take: mods had valid grievances, but were dumb as fuck to unilaterally make a major decision without even consulting the community beforehand, which is definitely worse imo.
It reminds me of so many subreddits where overactive mods decide they know what’s best for their subreddit and impose rules that would never pass a basic yes/no poll, demonstrating they don’t actually care about the community. Mods are supposed to be janitors (not an insult, just statement of fact), but too often act with the presumed arrogance of “leaders”.
Edit to add: this is what the mods should have done:
- Make a stickied thread with examples of users being banned or comments being removed unjustly
- Ask users if the above justifies moving to a new host, and if so ask which one
It’s that simple
…impose rules that would never pass a basic yes/no poll…
I generally agree with your comment, but I wanted to point out that the tyranny of the majority can still be a major issue. For example, there are often times when a majority of people believe the opposite of what a small number of experts agree is the best course of action. You can see this in laws that suppress trans rights receiving wider public support, even when they go against medical best practices.
So? The solution isn’t some oligarchy making dictatorial or unilateral decisions on behalf of the majority. The solution is the minority are free to move to their preferred platform and build a new community…
This is a poor take on how to deal with the tyranny of the majority, in my opinion. I wasn’t saying it necessarily applied here, and was only bringing it up as a caution against absolute democracy. Here’s a longer form example:
Say you have a software project that operates as an absolute democracy. Each and every new software feature that the developers work on is decided by a vote of all users and contributors to the project. For vote after vote, the feature “implement screen-reader support” is passed over for shinier and more exciting new features, after all the vast majority of voters don’t use a screen-reader.
Wouldn’t you say that it is fair if eventually the developers told the community “Nope, we’re going to implement screen-reader support as the next feature”? Or do you believe the blind users should have to fork the project and implement screen-reader support for themselves? After all, they’ve been “free” to do that the whole time.
It reminds me of so many subreddits where overactive mods decide they know what’s best for their subreddit and impose rules that would never pass a basic yes/no poll
I’ve been a moderator of a subreddit and had to deal with people complaining about rules that were, in fact, voted in by a poll stickied for a month.
You’re always going to have someone that doesn’t like a rule, but I’d much rather bitch about a rule that the community voted on that have to deal with the mercurial whims of the mod team.
100% agreed. It just reeks of mods thinking they own and know what’s best for the community, further exacerbated by comments like this one. They think they are the community, or at least are the reason it thrives.
Mods are supposed to be janitors (not an insult, just statement of fact), but too often act with the presumed arrogance of “leaders”.
Yes exactly. I have no stake in the 169 thing, but this applies universally. We don’t need you to remove comments that “don’t contribute to the discussion”. We don’t need to hear whether you think someone is “participating in bad faith” (the fuck does that even mean!?). We need you to remove spam and rule-breaking content, and ban repeat offenders. That’s literally it. We can put up with some bullshit because after all mods are unpaid volunteers who don’t owe anything to anyone, but at some point enough is enough.
so… did we move or what?
there was a new 196 created, however it states it will be deleted if the original is opened back up. the mods did open up the original 196, but people seem to want the mods replaced so the replacement 196 has not been deleted yet
great, when I visited the new 196, I followed the rule, and they hated the song I posted, it must be them and not my musical taste, so I better post it here too because this thread baited me to visit the community page, so I gotta follow the rules.
Wanting the mods to step down is honestly just so nasty and non-appreciative of what they’ve done. I don’t get why there has been a backlash at all.
One bad act will undo years of good will, we see this constantly irl. Why do you think the mods deserve any benefit of the doubt from people when they unilaterally chose to make a bad decision with no input from the community? If the community can’t trust them to act in their best interests, they’re absolutely well within their rights to demand they step down or move to the replacement community. Because of they’re going to do this once, what are the odds they actually learn the correct lesson and don’t do this kind of shit again?
I think the mods here should be replaced. Let someone else who wants to do better take over here. Someone who has investment in blahaj.zone and cares about the community. Not someone who only has an alt here that they never log into.
This belongs on !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world lmfao, it’s a perfect summary 😂
I guessed I missed that! But why, though?
196 mods were using lemmy.world accounts, not blahaj.zone accounts so due to issues with federation sometimes reports would not be dealt with for days, ada the instance admin would take care of some of these reports, however the 196 mods disagreed with some of the decisions she made. they decided to move the community to lemmy.world, by locking the original community and linking the new one, for various reasons people were upset. some people were defederated by default, some didnt want to go on lemmy.world servers or had their instanced blocked, and some many didnt like how the mods handled the situation in general during the whole ordeal.
Wow! Seems like there was an easier solution 😆. Thanks for the recap!
Differences in moderation practices. See the pinned thread for a full explanation, because despite Erotador’s confidence in speaking for us, the federation issues had nothing to do with our differences.
im basing what i said off of this quote from ada linked here https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/12466657
“I have asked 196 for years now to have an active blahaj.zone mod so that someone can deal with the blahaj.zone reports that constantly come through and build up, but still, the best we got were mods with alt accounts that get checked every couple of days, leaving me to deal with the build up of reports on 196. Sometimes they would hang around there for days while I waited for a 196 mod to log in and look at them. And because you don’t like the way I deal with them, you drag me over the coals for my moderation style, despite no one from 196 stepping up to deal with those reports on a regular basis.”
i assumed this was a federation issue due to yall not using blahaj.zone accounts.
I understand, but it has nothing to do with our differences with Ada.
Also, we do use LBZ accounts :p One of our most active mods actually has their main (and possibly only) account there. Plus, Qaz has an alt there and many other instances just to deal with the federation issues. Moss’s main account (head moderator) is also on LBZ. I would too if I weren’t still waiting on my application to be read…
I don’t think the problem stems from not using LBZ, because IIRC Qaz found loads of reports that could only be seen from SDF. I don’t understand why, but what I do know is that federation can make a mess of things sometimes, and this is one of those things.
I don’t understand why…
The lead devs of Lemmy seem hostile to significantly improving the moderation tools for both moderators and admins.
Yeppp… This is something I keep hearing, and I used to be hopeful that the FOSS nature of Lemmy would negate this issue, but alas…here we are two years later :/
There are absolutely viable forks/rewrites of the Lemmy backend. Sublinks was the one I was keeping an eye on, but progress seems to have slowed down significantly on that. It’s supposed to be a drop-in replacement for Lemmy that continues working with current apps.
!piefed_meta@piefed.social is definitely more promising
I would too if I weren’t still waiting on my application to be read…
Why haven’t you posted to !main@lemmy.blahaj.zone to get that solved?
I’ve already addressed this. We have LBZ mods, and it’s not the issue.
You’re really testing my patience. If you’re so desperate to unearth a flaw in our mod practices, make the next attempt count because I’m just about done engaging with you.
Oh nooo did you not like the consequences of making a unilateral and extremely unpopular descision? Better start silencing the dissenters quick!
